Castelveter is right. This legislation is a horrible idea,

Consider your plane has been sitting out on the tarmac somewhere for three hours. The plane's wheels-up time is only a half-hour away, but since the mandated three hours has elapsed, the crew is legally required to ask if anyone wishes to get off the plane.

One person raises their hand.

While the rest of the people on the plane just assume with the extra half hour, one person decides they want to exercise their rights and deplane. So thanks to that one person, the plane has to taxi all the way back to the gate (and likely wait for a gate since it's not an arriving flight), shut down its engines and wait for a jetway to be deployed. Consider even more time if that one person has checked baggage below - baggage crews will have to open and scour through the cargo hold searching for the one person's bags they have to unload.

The plane will most surely miss its wheels-up time, and have to start all over again at the back of the departure line, and possibly even have to file a new flight plan. Not to mention that it will have to be refueled to account for the fuel burned in the taxi back to the gate - almost always a 30 minute-plus process.

So after all this is complete, the plane departs the gate and starts all over at the end of the departure queue. Considering they waited more than three hours to depart on the first try, the delay the second time is likely to be the same, if not longer. So thanks to that one person, everyone else on the plane gets to be delayed for a few more hours. God forbid another three hours goes by and someone else wants to get off, or the crew exceeds their on-duty time limit - that planeful of people could be in for a long night.

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