Why don't trapped airline passengers Twitter their distress?

Reading about the most recent in-plane hostage fiasco, in Minnesota last weekend aboard Continental Express Flight 2816 from Houston, bound for Minneapolis but instead diverted to Rochester to spend the night on the tarmac, I got to wondering why it was that nobody aboard the plane tweeted about the nightmare as it was happening.

Surely one of the 51 involuntarily imprisoned passengers had a Twitter account, wouldn't you think?

And you know there were plenty of people with BlackBerrys and iPhones.

A stream of real time tweets and photos of the hellish on-board conditions would've started an online TwitterNation buzz that got real loud real fast, such that the passengers would've been released into the relative comfort of the Rochester terminal in a Cory Doctorow second.

Speaking of which, I wonder what he would've done had he been aboard.

Cory?

Bueller?

Anyone?

If you ever fly and don't have a Twitter account, make sure you set one up the moment you finish reading this post.

Because if you don't, and one day you find yourself aboard a stinking, cramped, noisy plane like the unfortunate Continental passengers and countless others like them — according to today's New York Times editorial about the ordeal, "... passengers aboard 278 planes suffered tarmac delays of three hours or more in June alone" — you'll wish you had.

Hold on, let me get my calculator... that's an average of nine flights from hell every single day.

If that doesn't motivate you, well, I've done all I can.

FunFact: "When flight 2816 finally got to Minneapolis about 9:15 a.m., passengers stormed a Continental service desk and were offered a phone number: 1-800-WECARE2."

True.