Just about anyone who travels by air has a horror story to tell about flight delays or poor treatment of passengers, but it would be hard to top the tale of a recent Continental Airlines flight that got waylaid in Rochester, Minn.

What was scheduled to be a 2 1/2-hour trip from Houston to Minneapolis became a 12-hour ordeal that included a six-hour overnight stay on a packed 50-passenger jet with no food or drink, two crying babies and a lone overwhelmed toilet. It’s little wonder that the incident has triggered renewed interest in Congress for a “Passengers Bill of Rights.”

About everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong on this flight and, although many people are saying now how the situation could have been better handled, no one at the time seemed to care enough to figure it out. The flight left Houston at about 9:30 p.m. last Friday and was forced by severe weather to land in Rochester about midnight.

OK, weather happens, but instead of doing the reasonable thing and putting passengers on a bus to travel the remaining 85 miles to Minneapolis, airline officials decided to wait out the storms. At 5 a.m., the flight finally got clearance to take off, but by then, the crew had exceeded its legal limit of hours so another crew had to be flown in. It wasn’t until 6 a.m. that passengers were allowed to re-enter the terminal. All of that time, they sat sandwiched into a packed airplane without air conditioning.

Airline officials said they couldn’t unload passengers sooner because security personnel weren’t on duty in the terminal, but airport officials say passengers could have stayed in the secured area of the terminal or at least been handled when security officers arrived at 4:30 a.m. Continental Airlines also said it has a policy that limits the time passengers can spend on the tarmac to three hours, but this flight was being operated by a regional partner airline. Needless to say, the regional airline was informed — after the incident — that it is to abide by Continental policy.

Federal aviation laws give pilots and airlines the sole authority to decide whether to keep passengers on planes. That only makes sense; the pilot has to have the last word. But passengers also have rights. They shouldn’t be held captive in a hot, stinking airplane with no food or water when other reasonable options are available.

On Wednesday, two U.S. senators renewed their efforts to pass the Airline Passengers Bill of Rights. The bill would require airlines to provide passengers food, potable water, comfortable cabin temperatures and adequate restroom facilities when a plane is delayed on the ground. The bill also requires airlines to give passengers the option of safely deplaning after they have sat on the ground for three hours and directs the Department of Transportation to create a consumer complaint hotline that allows passengers to alert the agency about delays. A cell phone could become passengers’ most potent line of defense.

According to Federal Aviation Administration figures, a relatively small number of flights are delayed for three or more hours on the tarmac — only 1.8 per 10,000 flights that operated from October 2008 to June 2009. However, if you were one of the 200,000 domestic passengers stuck on one of those 3,000 flights, it may not seem like a minor problem.

Pilots and airlines clearly have to have the last word on these matters, but it wouldn’t hurt to have legislation that sets out at least some minimal standards for how much they should expect passengers to bear.