Kurt Ullman wrote:

You would think that your constitutional rights are being violated

Constitutional rights only impact on governmental actions,

No, I think constitutional rights apply to the private sector as well.

I have to wonder why pilots don't have agreements in their
contract that they can force their carrier or the airport
they land at to de-plane passengers at their request.

The contract language with the airline would have absolutely no
impact on the airport.

That may be true, but in this case the pilot was seeking authority with
Jetblue management for some sort of go-ahead to park the plane at a gate
(or even for air-stairs). Pilots could be granted that decision-making
status on their own in these situations under a better contract.

It's not clear what the airport was looking for or asking of Jetblue (or
any other non-local carrier) to allow the passengers to de-plane. Since
they ultimately did de-plane at 9:30 pm, this 7 hours of being stuck on
the plane was an unnecessary hardship for the crew and pax.

It seems what is missing in this whole puzzle is federal rules that
obligate an airport to off-load the pax of an "irregular" plane under
the request of the pilot. Whether or not there's an open gate is
irrelavent. There are always air-stairs. And you can always move an
empty plane out of the way to accomodate a full one that wants to
de-plane.

Given that most (if not all) airports are federally funded (sometimes to
a ridiculous extent given their passenger demographics and load) the fed
gov't and FAA has big stick it can swing here.

Bag handling isin't even a complication. You simply don't off-load any
checked bags under these conditions. You simply off-load the pax and
tell them that if they want to continue by some other means to their
destination, they can, but their bags will be off-loaded at their
originally-ticketed airport when conditions permit. Any pax that want
to hang around the airport and re-board the plane when it's ready to fly
to it's originally-ticketed destination can certainly do so.

This ought to be the way it works for domestic travel. I agree there
are other complications for internationally-arriving passengers but I
don't think that's the case here (does Jetblue fly internationally?) and
it's not necessary to impliment a simultaneous solution to both cases
(domestic and international). The domestic case has fewer complications
and can be addressed separately.