This spring, the government begins severely penalizing domestic airlines when or if they take passengers hostage and hold them in an aircraft for more than three hours. But the airline empire is preemptively striking back by demanding waivers, ridiculing regulators, and, believe it or not, suggesting that travelers should really be grateful to be held hostage.

The airline war against what has become known as "passenger's rights" regulations is being waged both publicly and in the bowels of the regulatory process. But the gist of the airline counterattack is simple: If you try to discipline us for holding passengers on planes for more than three hours, we'll simply cancel squadrons of flights and no one will be able to travel anywhere.

Before we get to the realities of the latest battle over the rights of passengers, the responsibility of airlines, and the role of government regulators, here is a recap of 11 years of trapped flyers.

In a 1999 snowstorm, Northwest Airlines abandoned thousands of flyers in planes at Detroit Airport. There were Congressional hearings. In 2006, American Airlines pooched a storm in Dallas and stranded flyers on about a dozen aircraft it diverted to other cities. One hostage, Kate Hanni, spent three years fruitlessly advocating legislation. In August 2009, 47 passengers were trapped overnight in a tiny jet at Rochester Airport in Minnesota. The Department of Transportation fined three airlines about $3,700 a flyer. By the end of last year, the DOT crafted new regulations that would penalize airlines as much as $27,500 a passenger if it happened again. The rules go into effect on April 29.

Stunned by the Minnesota fine and gobsmacked by the DOT's decision to escalate the size of potential penalties and codify passenger's rights, the airlines have searched all winter for a response. The obvious problems: The constituency of flyers willing to be held for hours on an aircraft without food, water, and operating toilets is small. The optics of criticizing a commonsense position like "Don't treat customers like prisoners!" is hideous. And even in a nonsensical business like commercial aviation, long "tarmac holds" are self-evidently disastrous both for flight operations and for what passes as airline profits.

Still, airlines rarely miss an opportunity to cut of their noses to spite their fuselages, so the counterattack began at the beginning of March, spearheaded by low-fare JetBlue Airways and an archrival legacy carrier, Delta Air Lines. Both maintain large hubs at New York's perennially delay-prone John F. Kennedy International Airport, and both saw opportunity when the airport's operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, decided the close JFK's main runway for four months.

The March 1 runway closure led both JetBlue and Delta to petition the DOT for a JFK-specific waiver of the new regulations. JetBlue's request came first, and it was particularly bold. The nearly $400 million runway repairs at JFK were likely to cause exactly the kind of long tarmac delays the DOT was trying to stop, JetBlue explained, and the airline shouldn't be penalized for holding passengers hostage. Moreover, JetBlue claimed, passengers could rely on its voluntary policy, which compensates flyers if they experience an "onboard ground delay for more than five hours." Ironically, JetBlue adopted its rules in 2007 after thousands of travelers were held hostage on its planes during a Valentine's Day snow and ice storm. The incident severely dented JetBlue's then-pristine reputation, damaged its earnings, and led to the resignation of David Neeleman, the airline's founder and chief executive.

Within days of JetBlue's regulatory gambit, however, the carrier's current chief executive, Dave Barger, inadvertently revealed the duplicity. Speaking at an investor's conference in New York, Barger boasted that he was "very encouraged" by JetBlue's performance since the JFK runway was closed. The airline's on-time rating was above 82 percent during the first eight days of March, about 10 percent higher than JFK's usual on-time performance.