Congressional lawmakers quietly removed language from an aviation bill that would have guaranteed airplane passengers the right to drinking water on flights, according to legislative text reviewed by us.

Lawmakers are also rejecting demands to set minimum seat dimensions, even as airplane seat sizes have shrunk several inches over the past four decades.

The decisions reflected in legislation governing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) follow airlines spending nearly $5 million lobbying Congress in the first four months of the year, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by us.

In July 2023, the House of Representatives advanced an initial version of bipartisan FAA legislation requiring airlines to provide drinking water to passengers on flights longer than an hour — a basic human need that airlines currently do not legally have to fulfill, even on hours-long flights.

However, the drinking water requirement was stripped from the final version of the legislation released this week by Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Rick Larsen, both Washington Democrats; Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican; and Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, who lead their chambers’ transportation oversight committees.

If their bill passes without changes, airline passengers will continue to have no legal right to drinking water on flights, The FAA bill, which provides funding and sets policy guidelines for the FAA for the next five years, may also make it more difficult for passengers to receive refunds for canceled or delayed flights and sidesteps setting minimum standards for seat dimensions — a topic that has irked passengers for decades.

While some airlines voluntarily offer water, many budget airlines do not, and instead charge passengers who ask for it.

“Airlines want to have the freedom to increase charges of any kind without limitation,” said Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, an airline passenger advocacy group. Hudson added that this lobbying approach has led to the lack of water-access standards.

“There are very few specific requirements that are imposed on airlines when it comes to customer service,” he said.

Representative Shontel Brown, an Ohio Democrat, introduced the drinking water provision into the House version of the FAA reauthorization deal last summer. In a statement after the legislation passed the House in July 2023, Brown said the amendment would ensure “that passengers remain healthy and hydrated on flights.”

Brown’s office did not return a request for comment from us about the policy’s exclusion from the final deal.

Negotiations over the FAA deal dragged on far past its original September 2023 finalization deadline, and lawmakers leading the negotiations announced a final deal on Monday. The legislation still must pass both chambers of Congress, but lawmakers said it has bipartisan support, making significant revisions unlikely.

Although consumer rights advocates have praised some aspects of the bill — like a provision prohibiting airlines from charging fees to seat parents together with their young children — it also handed key wins to the airline industry.

The final deal, for instance, was released just days after the Department of Transportation released a new rule that would force airlines to provide automatic refunds to passengers when their flights are canceled, bypassing the often arduous process currently in place to get refunds. News of the policy brought the Biden Administration praise and drew joyous headlines.

But as we reported, the FAA deal contained a provision that appeared to reject the automatic refund guarantee. A section tucked hundreds of pages into the legislation noted that consumers were owed a refund if their flight was canceled or significantly delayed — but that they had to provide the airline written or electronic notice to get one, essentially putting the onus back on the consumer.

The language was potentially a win for the airline industry, which strongly opposed the new automatic refund rules from the Transportation Department when they were announced. Trade groups for the airlines are already citing the language in the bill to argue that the automatic refund rule should be overturned.

The absence of any standard around drinking water is another win for the industry. Currently, airlines are only required to provide passengers with water when there is a tarmac delay of more than two hours, but not on a cross-country flight, contrary to recommendations by the Aerospace Medical Association, which suggests passengers “drink about 8 ounces of water each hour.”

The reauthorization bill was a key focus for airline lobbying efforts in Washington. Airlines for America — a trade association representing Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, and other top airlines in the country — paid five different lobbying firms to sway lawmakers on the reauthorization bill, and other topics, federal disclosures show.

So far this year, Airlines for America spent more than $1.4 million lobbying Congress, the Transportation Department, the FAA, and other regulators on the FAA Reauthorization bill, among other topics.

Dozens of individual airlines — including Delta, United, and JetBlue — also lobbied this year on the legislation and other matters.