Passenger rights advocates were dealt a heavy blow today when a federal panel approved a set of guidelines intended to help travelers stranded inside airplanes that seems to have no real teeth.

The 36-member “tarmac task force” was created last December after several incidents in which passengers were stranded in planes for up to 10 hours with little food, water, or information about when they would be allowed to disembark.

It was created in order to study airline policies and make recommendations on how they could improve their response times and contingency plans during delays.

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, an armistice treaty between the warring parties of World War I took effect, thus halting combat in “the war to end all wars.”

Though the war officially ended on June 28, 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, November 11 remained a day of great significance around the world, and in 1926 it was declared a national holiday in America known as Armistice Day.

The holiday was originally intended to commemorate those who had served in WWI, but after the enormous sacrifices of World War II and the Korean War it was broadened to include all U.S. veterans.

Economic policy may have been front and center, but transportation policy often seemed a mere addendum to the election battles.

Some industry officials and analysts think President-elect Obama’s policies will be more supportive of organized labor, less inclined to move forward with auctioning takeoff slots at airports, and may speed up the modernization the nation’s antiquated air traffic system.

Obama will also likely maintain limits on foreign ownership of U.S.-based airlines.

I spent last weekend in New Orleans at Harrah’s New Orleans Casino Hotel. I travel to New Orleans at least once a year.

I was there in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Back then, Harrah’s closed on August 28 when the whole city evacuated, and didn’t reopen until February of the next year.

It is really interesting to see how the city is coming back: the French Quarter is back, Bourbon Street is back, the waterfront is back.

The long-planned merger between Delta and Northwest airlines was officially approved Wednesday by U.S. Department of Justice officials, clearing the way for the two companies to team up to become the world’s largest airline.

The deal was under scrutiny for six months by anti-trust regulators at the DOJ who were investigating whether the merger would threaten consumers or give the company an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

They concluded that rather than hurt competition, the merger would actually “result in efficiencies such as cost savings in airport operations, information technology, supply chain economics, and fleet optimization that will benefit consumers.”

Some interesting stuff out there in the middle of America this week.

I was the only one speaking who wasn’t running for political office.

Everyone was zipping across Ohio, the battleground state, but the most interesting thing was that I sparked a little controversy in Wichita, Kansas.

You see, Wichita likes to call itself the “Air Capital of the World” because it has Boeing, Cessna, and a lot of the aircraft subcontracting manufacturers are there.