The plane was full before all the United employees showed up? Yeah they should have gotten there sooner, but in previous situations when I knew the plane would wait on me I've been the last to board...
Do uniformed airline employees get tickets? I've seen them board without producing tickets. They don't have to wait in line either. United might just have decided that it's easier to trust the discretion of its employees than to figure out ahead of time who's going where, when, especially since that could change constantly based on numerous factors.
>Surely they know how many of their own employees will be flying ahead of time?
They don't always. Crews call in sick, flights get cancelled, weather changes schedules, incoming flight being late delays connecting flight, etc. One aircraft type gets swapped for another (not all crews are qualified on all aircraft).
Last minute crew moves will always exist.
It's also not 100% clear that these employees were essential crew, or that they couldn't have taken a different flight. There's usually a range of employees flying, not all classed as "must ride", and often some that shouldn't be classified as "must ride".
Of course, how you choose to open up seats is up to you.
they're not allowed to take off unless every passenger with a checked bag is on board. That's the law. Often they end up removing the bags and taking off without them.
Not like united employees going on vacation or to a meeting. But a flight crew going to where they need to be. It's part and parcel of an airline service. If they can't get to where they need to be a flight will have to be delayed or canceled.
It comes down to the balance I guess. We can kick four people off and offer them each shitty compensation (usually a first class ticket for the next flight and worthless $200 vouchers for the same shitty airline that expire in less than 6 months) or cancel the flight this crew is for and lose an entire plane load worth of income.
I understand the economics, but it's still bullshit. Those customers want to get home and they're boarded. I think everyone should do what this guy did in this situation. He paid for a flight. He didn't read through the 10 pages of bullshit EULA (no one does) and then they assaulted him to remove him from a flight. The whole plane looked angry. Now United has a PR nightmare .. that will last 3 days before everyone forgets. People keep flying United and nothing really happens.
You have to understand why they overbook - jetfuel is extremely expensive and produces a massive amount of carbon pollution - most of the airlines barely operate at margin as it is. Cargo is cheaper to fly than passengers and many of them are converting more and more towards cargo for that reason. You don't want to be flying around in jets which aren't at capacity, it's an enormous waste of money and fuel - your tickets would cost significantly more and they'd have to run more flights resulting in more pollution.
Their estimates are pretty good even - your odds of being overbooked - even on United, one of the worst offenders here - are about 1/1000. From what I've heard, you can sort of bargain with them from what I've heard, free food and drink, hotel accommodations, a partial refund even are commonly obtainable if you get delayed - though that kind of thing may depend on the airline. According to https://lifehacker.com/if-your-flight-is-overbooked-dont-vol... you can actually get 2-4x the ticket price if you deny getting bumped. I'd take that kind of cash in many situations.
This was severely mishandled - the big mistake here was boarding the passengers before knowing the final count with the employees. It caused them not be able to bargain with individual customers to find someone who was willing to give up their seat for some perks or cash.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that more because air traffic is up rather than their margins having gone up?
Maybe oil prices of the day play a role too... but I wouldn't count on that to be true for long.
Even in this report though, you'll note that the fares are down 63% since 1995 - the competition is pretty fierce here. The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin.
The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin.
You would if you were a grocer. Deregulated airlines have low margins; that's a fact of life. They pay fuel bills, they pay interest, the executives steal what they can, and the unions take everything else. When they miscalculate and pay the unions so much they can't cover their bonds, they reorganize through bankruptcy.
None of this is new, and none of this justifies racist violence.
I did not suggest this justifies anything - in fact I said this was severely mishandled. I merely tried to explain the slight against overbooking some people seem to have - which is mostly unrelated entirely, but that's why I didn't respond to the top post, but to a post complaining about the practice of overbooking.
Though I don't see anything that makes me think this was a racist act, where'd you get that idea?
Sorry I thought you were talking about airline profits, and offering an opinion about them. I disagree with the opinion I thought you offered, because every deregulated airline in existence has similar or worse margins, nearly all the time. Somehow most of them have been able to avoid both brutalizing their passengers and United-level overbooking.
It's racist because a small middle-aged Chinese physician was forcibly removed. There's no way they would have removed a middle-aged white physician. Likewise, even the big tough airline security asshole who assaulted the physician would have hesitated to forcibly remove someone his own size or larger. This passenger was someone he could handle the way he would handle a child or a woman, without suffering the same legal repercussions that handling a child or woman in that fashion would entail.
Yes, I know there are reports of using a "random computer" to select this passenger. That's what's known in the airline industry as "lying" and in the media industry as "we like to copy and paste press releases".
> jetfuel is extremely expensive and produces a massive amount of carbon pollution
Which is not relevant to over booking,
>most of the airlines barely operate at margin as it is.
False, extremely false
>You don't want to be flying around in jets which aren't at capacity,
you do not want to be flying around jets that have UNSOLD seats, you do want to be flying around jets that have SOLD but unoccupied seats, it costs far less in jet fuel the fly an empty seat than a 150-250lbs human with all their luggage.
this is why the whole overbooking justification is bullshit.
They lose money when they have to fly a UNDER SOLD flight, meaning the seats are empty because no one bought a ticket. They DO NOT lose money when they sell a ticket and no one shows up.
The Rebooking fees, and various other fees more and compensate for the no-shows, and in some cases the fare is non-changeable non-refundable, so the person that does not show up has to buy a new ticket at full value.
There is no ethical, economical, or any other justification for Overselling flights than Greed.. Pure and simple
It should be considered fraud and should be illegal
If they need to make some ammount from tickets, lets say $10000. Then your ticket can cost either $35 or $32 if they overbook.
Parent is right you are wrong. It is economical to sell as many tickets as possible and ecological to try to fit in as many people as possible to a single flight. Overbooking is good and helps with both.
And if you have to force people off the plan with the police, the flight will have to be delayed or canceled.
This flight took nearly 4 hours to get to there because of the delay, and it only takes 5 hours to drive, the should have just put their employees in a car.
> But a flight crew going to where they need to be. It's part and parcel of an airline service.
Some airlines have an alternative means of crew transport, used for such contingencies. For example Jet2 in the UK has a Piper Navajo to move misplaced crew around and TNT in Europe ( now ASL Airlines ) have a Learjet 45.
Even Ryanair, king of the bottom-line, occasionally uses its engineering Learjets to position crews. Much cheaper to send one small corporate jet than have a 189-passenger 737 stuck crewless and causing a cascading schedule disaster.
No, that's standard. Normal procedure is that they'd have a count of present passengers based on how many people have checked in. Before boarding the plane, they'd say "we need 4 seats, and we'll pay X amount (and possibly hotel) to have volunteers take the flight take the flight tomorrow". If they don't get the volunteers, then 4 people just won't be allowed to board, and the airline pays them, and puts them up until the next available flight.
The airline isn't going to delay another flight because they couldn't get a flight crew there in time; they find a way to get the flight crew there.
In this case, they screwed up procedure and boarded everyone first. Then they screwed up again and had someone assaulted by armed goons in front of a few hundred people.
Then they should have figured that out before boarding everyone. This is a colossal fuckup. The airline assaulted its own customers beating them till they had to be carried out on a stretcher. And yet people still defend them.
Obviously United was in the wrong here, but you might be going a little far. The main purpose of the stretcher might have been for restraining the man.
It's wise to avoid making such inflammatory statements until we know more.
Whether he was beaten to the point he couldn't walk or restrained on a stretcher doesn't substantially change the colossal fuckup that is this situation nor the fact that they assaulted at least one passenger.
I totally agree with you, but the parent said "The airline assaulted its own customers beating them till they had to be carried out on a stretcher" when
a) the police department assaulted the customer, not United staff (although they did call the PD in the first place)
b) "beating them till they had to be carried out on a stretcher" obviously implies he was beaten until he couldn't walk, which is an allegation that hasn't been substantiated at this point.
I totally agree that United colossally fucked up here, but the statement the parent made that I quoted earlier is patently false. I'm all for being righteously outraged, but can we please stick to factual statements while we're doing it?
The main purpose of the stretcher was most definitely because the man was severely injured. Go hang around people with a confused mental state for a while and you'll recognise the behaviour the man shows when het gets back on the plane. He isn't just being a stubborn ass there.
Very little that airlines do appears logical, looking from the outside in. Especially United. I've never had so much as a mediocre experience flying with them - it's always been notably terrible.
What exactly makes the experience terrible? Are you exaggerating? There is nothing to it, you buy your ticket, and sit in a seat. It's the same boring routine.
On United you can get bumped from Economy if there's a high status flyer who needs your seat. I think United takes the crown with being shitty to general passengers.
Tough day for them, but now tomorrow I'm sure customers will be a lot more compliant and willing to take arbitrary orders to save the airline money, and that will make everyone's job easier. #WorthIt
Sadly, you're probably right. One suspects there have been several memos from corporate directing gate agents to reduce voucher spending by any means necessary. It isn't shocking that the obvious solution to this gate agent was to beat up a random Chinese guy.
I don't see the claim that "United had no role in this officer's actions" in anything I wrote.
To be more explicitly, my parent comment is referring to once the airline escalates the situation to police, overriding it is out of their hands as airlines cannot control the police.
The notion that this day would be significantly different for United's PR team assumes a level of self-awareness on their part that might or might not actually exist.
Someone on a different message board put this situation very well: By the letter of the law, United was correct - morally, they were not. Their 'contract of carriage' allows them to IDB (Involuntary Deny Boarding) to passengers due to overselling, and bump people off at-will. Depending on how delayed the passenger would be to their final destination, they would owe compensation (up to a max of $1350) for the trouble.
Unfortunately, the way this played out was pretty terrible. My hope would be that events like this could move United (and other airlines) to having more transparent overbooking policies and compensating people fairly, but that's not likely.
The problem is that what's legal and what's ethical have diverged into two wholly different things. "The law" is now often used to aid in unethical activity, not to prevent it.
The other problem is what society views as ethical or moral is now subjective to each on a variety of different factors in this post post-modern society. There was once puritanical values, however despised they are by certain factions, which unified the "ethos" of the nation on what is and is not ethical. The civil rights movement came along and augmented that ethos for the better.
Now we have groups who place abandoning a cat on the same level as abandoning a child, as an example. It's going to be very difficult on agreeing what is "ethical" when in the "me" society it translates to "what is ethical for me, right now, based on my current views of some form of science/philosophy/religion/spirituality/etc and what happened to me personally when I was growing up"
Airlines shouldn't be allowed to overbook. Causing people to miss their flights just because the company wanted to ensure 100% profitability per flight is unacceptable, and it shouldn't be legal (the overbooking, not the throwing off a plane for whatever other serious reason per se).
They'd have probably staying profitable if they couldn't overbook. Overbook it, sure, but offer escalating incentives to get people to voluntarily disembark. Physical removal is ridiculous and should be removed from the carrier's legal rights.
Putting profits ahead of anything else is what causes so much problems in the U.S. these days.
If only one company decided to overbook, then sure, I agree with you. But if it were a law, and every airline was forced not to overbook, then it simply means the ticket prices would be a little higher. And if because of those slightly higher ticket prices, the airline might have to retire a plane or two, then so be it, but no airline would go bankrupt because of it.
We have all sorts of laws that protect consumers and employees that "hurt" the absolute maximization of profit. This wouldn't be any different. When it's a law, it just means everyone plays at a higher standard and prices are a little higher than they would be without those protections.
Also, Canada is likely going to pass such a law soon:
If anything, there's a long history of repressive regimes that attempt to force an ethics on society through religion. The ancient Romans even tried to enforce Christianity on their own people, replacing the official state religion, after decades of trying to stamp it out.
The passenger was attacked by a random big dude in blue jeans. Sure there were uniforms looking on with approval, but this guy looked like a baggage handler not police?
Watch the video. The guy is big, but he's not acting like police, and he doesn't have any sort of uniform. The two useless cops are just looking on like useless cops do.
I watched the video. Sky marshals purposefully wear normal clothes, so they blend in with the rest of the passengers on the flight. Having them wear uniforms would kind of defeat the purpose.
The cops are likely waiting until the passenger is off the plane to take him into custody.
I suppose he could have identified himself and displayed a badge before the video started, but nothing about this guy said "police" to me. My experience with airport police says that taking the guy into custody was the last thing the actual police wanted to do. That suspicion is confirmed by the fact that after getting dragged off, the passenger reboarded the plane. Justifiably, real police don't consider themselves airline employees. They look down on both airline security and TSA.
Actually the real police might well have told United to increase the voucher amount like any civilized human organization would do. The gate agent then looked outside and picked out the biggest meanest baggage handler she saw. I really doubt the Sky Marshals want any part of this disaster.
I'd venture to guess likely not at first glance - the guy was trespassing at that point and refused to move. The only alternative from that limited perspective is use of force.
You can't just refuse to leave an aircraft when instructed to do so by the crew. The reason simply doesn't matter - the time to fight about that is off the aircraft.
It may be considered excessive force however - which likely opens up avenues for assault and similar charges. Heck if I know though, IANAL and now I'm well off into the speculation weeds.
> You can't just refuse to leave an aircraft when instructed to do so by the crew.
As I read the article, the police showed up, and he still refused to leave the aircraft. You can't just refuse when the cops tell you to leave. There are going to be physical consequences for that.
No. It's a federal crime to disobey instructions of the flight or the captain. If they ask you to leave the aircraft you're required to leave. If you refuse and need to be physically removed, tough.
Not that I'm saying this makes United's behavior acceptable - I have no idea how they managed to load the plane before realizing they needed extra seats - just that the law is, in this case, on their side.
I'm not trying to rationalize anyone's actions here, but if the captain told you to kill another passenger, that is not within his right of removal of choice for individual. i.e. The captain is only allowed to remove choice for an individual when the group is threatened, given they are in charge, by law, of making choices for group (perhaps for the reason of or related to in-flight matters).
That's actually not true (afaik). Certainly the command to kill another passenger is unlawful, and you won't carry it out.
But also just as certainly he can tell you to leave the aircraft for refusing.
There literally is absolutely no legal right for you to stay on that vessel after the captain requests you leave.
Plenty of incidents support this on a practical level - captains remove people rarely but not unheard of for silly and discriminatory reasons. They likely get disciplined after the fact by the company, but in the moment you have zero recourse as a passenger who was asked to leave. Your options are to grab your bag and walk off, or be removed and possibly go to jail. Either way you are pleading your case on the ground.
What exactly did I say that wasn't true? If a captain removes people for discrimination, then they are removing choice from individual based on making choice for group. People don't want to hear a racist's rationalizations, so as a group decision it might be a good one, especially given it is related to in-flight matters (or the prediction it will be related to in-flight matters). Again, I state that the captain is only allowed (legally) to remove choice for individual when the group (all people in plane) are denied things related to in-flight matters.
Laws are typically rational.
I will note my response was directed to the claim that if they ask you to do something, you must do so. I'm stating that I do not believe, in all cases, the captain has the rational right, by law, to remove choice from an individual if they are not threatening choice for group. That's not to say the captain can't and won't do a removal, but it is irrational to remove choice from individual if they are not threatening group. That also implies it might not pass the muster of law, and a passenger would not be "guilty" of breaking a law by resisting removal. And besides, four people had to go, so the choice to remove that one individual's right to choice was removed by randomness or judgement, both of which are irrational actions.
I think at this point we'd need a lawyer to actually tell us the law here. I agree with you in that there should be a rational reason to remove someone. I simply disagree that there must be legally speaking.
The captain (afaik) can remove you for wearing blue shoes, and you must leave. He will face zero legal consequences for that action, but of course is subject to company discipline. In the absurd case the captain somehow owns the airline itself, I think there would be zero recourse available to an arbitrarily removed passenger other than IDB compensation and a refund of the ticket.
I also think the level of force in this case can certainly be argued - but I don't think the United crew will face any legal liability even if the officers do. Had they used a bit more discretion I'm quite certain this guy would have no case whatsoever even if physically removed against his will. Knocking him out of course is excessive, and I believe that is a separate argument.
I didn't intend to call you wrong, that wasn't the greatest choice of words. I'm simply stating this has been my understanding of the legal implications for some time now, as explained to me by casual conversation with various lawyers over the years since it's a curious subject for me.
Was the person doing the assaulting federal law enforcement? Was he arrested? I don't think either of these are true. So, I don't think this is how any of this actually works.
It turns out that airline crew have infinite powers on their own planes (well...nearly). They can actually thrown someone off a plane on a whim. Source: I saw this happen last year.
Right, you can "throw" people off a plane. But if you do so in a manner that is totally illegal, you have still broken a law in doing so. That would be my point.
If they were not allowed to use force then they would in fact only have the right to "request" people leave the plane. Throwing off implies at least the option to use force.
Are you referring to something other than FAR 91.3(a)? Because that pertains to the pilot in command being the final authority over aircraft operations. Removing a docile passenger who is merely violating the contract of carriage is not what that regulation has in mind.
This sounds to be like strictly a contract of carriage violation by the passenger, it is a civil matter, not criminal. I think the airline can't physically coerce the passenger individually once they're in the plane. They can remove his luggage and just wait until that passenger, or some other passenger, complies. But physically removing someone not engaged in criminal activity itself becomes assault.
Depends on the lawyer, if you can get it before a judge and judge/jury. It's unlikely since United has very expensive lawyers I'm sure.
Remember, the law is different depending on your income and status. Large companies are like very rich people. They can and do often get away with murder.
I don't think that matters in this case. When (not if) this guy sues, United is going to pay a huge settlement (with a gag clause) to make this go away as quickly as possible. They do not want this going to court with weeks of media attention, even if their case is ironclad.
It would have to go before a judge. It could be a case of excessive force. Was there something else they could have done rather than end up with him getting knocked out and a bloody nose. As someone else mentioned it would be brought against the policeman in this case (or authority they work for).
United unfortunately is probably legally in the right here. However this is a major fuck up and it will take them a while to clear this black PR mark from their record.
Anyone searching for it will find "United" might find this "Airline drags doctor off the flight because they wanted to fly their employees instead" for years to come. Hopefully it was really worth getting those employees there...
Paradoxically, I'd argue that many knowledgeable people/frequent flyers will understand and excuse United's behaviour, but they haven't flown United for years, because they're so crap.
While clueless idiots are now making a huge shitstorm on social media, and then fly United next week because it's $3.50 cheaper.
So, not sure that will have any impact on United's actual numbers.
From my understanding, you're correct. Deny Boarding can be avoided by checking in early. These people had boarded and the plane was full before the mistake was realized.
EDIT: Still unsure as to the legality of this. IDB is well established, but the fact that everyone has boarded is a different matter. Reading the contract of carriage did not bring any more light to this point. And let's be clear, denying someone and removing someone are very different. At least one source says it does matter (unknown reputability) "This is important because involuntary denied boarding only applies when passengers have been fully checked in (including baggage) and are at the gate at a specified time, typically 30 minutes before scheduled departure." https://thepointsguy.com/2014/12/what-to-do-if-your-flight-i...
I believe your understanding is incorrect - someone can be denied boarding regardless of when they have checked into the flight. If there are 100 seats, they may sell 105 tickets and permit 105 people to check in - if they cannot find 5 volunteers they will have to IDB 5 passengers.
While the rules aren't printed very well (I just scanned United's Contract of Carriage, and the Federal Code), I believe it counts as an IDB even if you are physically on the airplane.
Reading through the rules, it would appear that you are correct, though it looks like checking in earlier should make it more unlikely "The priority of all other confirmed passengers may be determined based on a passenger’s fare class, itinerary, status of frequent flyer program membership, and the time in which the passenger presents him/herself for check-in without advanced seat assignment."
I'm not sure the United Conditions of Carriage are really relevant here anyway - if United were to decide to violate their own conditions of carriage, the worst penalty a court would likley invoke would be to consider the whole contract null and void, awarding that passenger a full refund, and maybe paying for a hotel (damages).
The point is that if you're late at the gate (after the 30 minute cut-off, say), then they are under no obligation to let you on the plane, and do not have to compensate you under IDB rules.
If the airline makes a mistake and realizes that mistake too late, they should take the hit themselves, not punish an innocent passenger for their own mistake.
Airlines should make a better effort to avoid overbooking. If they can get away with this kind of despicable behaviour, they'll never improve.
> they should take the hit themselves, not punish an innocent passenger for their own mistake.
If they don't get their crew to the other airport, the next day a full plane load of people (or more, due to knock-on effects) might have been denied a flight.
Nobody disputes that better planning would be better, or that they should not have let everyone on board.
However, mistakes happen. For operational reasons, now the flight had a smaller capacity. Could have been that the seatbelt for a seat didn't work, or weight & balance issues.
At that point, it strikes me as perfectly legit to seek volunteers, and then, well, disembark pax involuntarily (while giving them all the help and compensation that they're entitled to, and more).
That's hardly "intentionally screwing over paying passengers".
What they're entitled to, is a seat on the plane that they booked and paid for. And whatever the problems that this airline might run into if they don't do this, they're not taking into account the problems they're causing for others by doing this. The guy was a doctor who had to be in a hospital the next morning. What if a patient dies because of this?
Sure, mistakes happen. But the real mistake here is that the airline punishes passengers for the airline's mistakes. They should be taking responsibility for their own mistakes, rather than take them out on their customers.
Given this situation with an overbooked plane due to their own stupid lack of planning, they could and should have offered more money until someone did volunteer. That would have been cheaper than this travesty, and not a single person would have complained about it. Instead, they short-sightedly try to save some money by having the police (who also don't work for free) drag a perfectly legitimate customer out of the plane.
It's a distressing rejection of responsibility for their own actions.
> Their 'contract of carriage' allows them to IDB (Involuntary Deny Boarding) to passengers due to overselling, and bump people off at-will.
But my understanding from the article is that the problem here was not overselling; they decided to give priority to moving their employees around over providing the contracted service to ticketed passengers. It's hard to see how that's justifiable even by the letter of the law.
If there's equipment waiting in Louisville, and another entire plane isn't going anywhere without them, that's how its justifiable. IDB means you can (legally) be physically removed from a flight.
With that said, don't drag people off your flights. No matter what it costs you to get staff where they need to be when you make this mistake, it'll be cheaper than the negative publicity of a physical altercation removing a passenger (even if you need to retask a commuter aircraft just to relocate the crew, or ask another carrier to get them there).
> With that said, don't drag people off your flights. No matter what it costs you to get staff where they need to be when you make this mistake, it'll be cheaper than the negative publicity of a physical altercation removing a passenger (even if you need to retask a commuter aircraft just to relocate the crew, or ask another carrier to get them there).
Of course, that just gives a hecker's veto to anyone insubordinate enough to refuse to leave. What they probably should have done was select another passenger, and have police waiting for the recalcitrant passenger at the destination airport: that would satisfy the need to get personnel to their destination and ensure punishment for someone violating his contract and wouldn't cause a scene.
No, what they should have done is exactly what other airlines do when they are overbooked: keep raising the voucher amount until someone volunteers to get off. And if you can't find someone to get off at a price that seems appropriate (which is very unlikely: you're always going to find someone willing to take $1000), work out other arrangements.
The moment you've escalated to "we've selected people at random, and we are willing to eject people by violence or arrest them on the other end" you've already lost.
It doesn't even have to be bizarre. I've been on flights where the entire flight is going to Mardi Gras, spring break in Daytona, or a cruise; when everyone is expecting to be somewhere, the clearing price can quickly exceed what you'd expect.
> And if you can't find someone to get off at a price that seems appropriate (which is very unlikely: you're always going to find someone willing to take $1000), work out other arrangements.
I think that randomly selecting passengers is the 'other arrangements' their policy works out.
I agree that they should have increased vouchers past $800, but I disagree that it's guaranteed that there would be enough takers at e.g. $1,000 per, or even $2,000 per.
And I'm shocked at the downvotes: flight crew instructions have the force of Federal law; people who violate Federal law get arrested. The biggest mistake United made here was allowing there to be a disturbance in the first place, which caused a PR disaster. 'Man arrested on landing for refusing to leave plane' is a much better PR situation than 'man dragged bodily from plane.' Granted, 'United pays record-setting $100,000 in vouchers to convince four passengers to give up seats' is probably better PR still.
Honestly, I'm amazed that in a whole plane, no one jumped at $800. I was very, very, happy to take a $1,000 voucher for a flight to China that required me to take an extra flight (Dallas to Chicago then to Beijing as opposed to Dallas to Beijing) -- Then again, perhaps my day is less valuable than others'.
No, what they should have done is exactly what other airlines do when they are overbooked: keep raising the voucher amount until someone volunteers to get off.
Or do what European airlines are mandated to do by law:
Offer cash!
I, for one, am absolutely not interested in any vouchers that probably come with a shit ton of fine print, which makes them either unatractive, or impossible to redeem. Or probably both.
You are not trespassing when you are in an establishment, a venue, or even a plane having bought a valid ticket for said establishment, venue or plane.
Are you sure about that, if they inform you that they're revoking your ticket and telling you to leave? Passengers are required to obey the flight crew at all times.
"Rule 21: Refusal of Transport: UA shall have the right to refuse to transport or shall have the right to remove from the aircraft at any point, any Passenger for the following reasons:"
"H. Safety – Whenever refusal or removal of a Passenger may be necessary for the safety of such Passenger or other Passengers or members of the crew including, but not limited to: "
"2. Passengers who fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew, federal regulations, or security directives;"
Or, if not trespassing, would you like "breach of contract" or something? I'm sure they could find something; I'm neither very creative or experienced when it comes to making up criminal charges in order to punish people for interfering with my profit.
What is clear, though, is that he had a right to be on his seat before the whole sorry mess started. They probably could get him for "interfering with a flight crew" or some such crap after they asked him to leave.
While passengers usually do get the short end of the stick (and in the case of United it appears that the stick is always covered in shit, but I digress) I think the situation in Europe is a lot better.
When bumped, or even if you experience extended delays the airline must compensate you in cash. No useless vouchers, which are hard to redeem. There are a few exceptions, were that doesn't apply, namely if delays are beyond their control. Mechanical problems, however, don't count because it's their duty to properly maintain their gear.
Passenger rights within the EU are clearly spelled out and airlines can't subvert them by mealy mouthed "contracts of carriage"
I'd also wager that this wouldn't have escalated to this point virtually anywhere in Europe. Since the "smack him in the face and that'll teach him to comply" philosophy of policing seems much less aparent.
Still doesn't make the original flight "oversold". That's a very specific term in airline travel relating to ticketed seats sold for a flight, not a United staffing fuckup.
If a doctor gets physically assaulted by Chicago's Aviation Authority staff because you didn't leave four seats free on your flight, you most assuredly fucked up.
He's saying this IS a staffing fuckup, and the term "oversold" or "overbooked" is wrong here, as it relates to having too many tickets for a plane, not UA staff fucking up.
At the end of the day, the contract of carriage clauses are extremely broad and disadvantageous to the consumer. If the airline decides they want someone, or you, off the flight, there's actually very little recourse. Even the amount of time they can delay you without compensation during the day and with minimal compensation overnight is pretty absurd. That said, I'm not sure why they wouldn't just offer increasing compensation for those willing to bump to the next flight like usual. Four people will accept a few hundred to a thousand dollars to be bumped one flight.
Whoever decided to force the guy off the plane is an idiot. They could have simply raised the comp for volunteering slowly until someone took the money.
But that costs money immediately. Forcing someone off the plane and causing a huge HR mess only costs money long-term, and it doesn't come out of my budget, so why should I care?
That would be a regulator or Congress. The airline would set no cap, if they could get away with macing you to get you off the airplane, they would. "Next time, just get off the plane when we ask the first time."
When a family member, or associate of Congress gets hit with this experience, then maybe the fines get adjusted accordingly.
That's just IDB coverage, mandated by the FAA. They don't get a choice here. You will find the exact same penalties and limits for all airlines.
Voluntary compensation is entirely different - they are free to offer whatever they like to get someone off the flight. Involuntary unfortunately incentives keeping those limits low as a matter of airline policy though, of course. They can force someone off a plane for usually far less than $800 if they feel like taking a customer good will hit. This ORD-SDF flight certainly was nowhere near $1350 in IDB comp - likely less than $300 in mandatory IDB comp based on average ticket prices.
I've seen these offers go as high as $2,000 during significant service disruptions on major airlines. This is a corporate policy failure, as I'm sure the gate agent was only allowed to authorize up to $800 for that flight or something dumb.
They rolled the dice on saving a few hundred bucks against their reputation this time. I think it's safe to say they lost badly on that calculation.
I dream of a world where bump compensation is unlimited. The same people who now churn miles to fly everywhere for free would then start strategically chasing storms to get bumped from flights and make tens of thousands of dollars in compensation.
We have mileage runs and mattress runs already; why can't we have bump runs as well?
The cap really isn't being explained properly, it's actually almost assuredly not relevant to this guy's situation.
The actual penalty is 4x the cost of the segment. Note this is not what you paid for the ticket on your credit card divided by two (in the event of a direct round trip ticket). This guy was likely owed somewhere in the range of a few hundred bucks as a ORD-SDF segment is likely worth about $50-100 after fees are excluded.
The $1350 is simply the max, your ticket has to be worth at least $337.50 for that to matter - at which time it's against you of course.
Think you'd probably have to fire congress to make that limit and multiplier higher :)
>Compensation shall be 400% of the fare to the passenger's destination or first stopover, with a maximum of $1,350, if the carrier does not offer alternate transportation
Stopover is defined in the law as
>>Stopover means a deliberate interruption of a journey by the passenger, scheduled to exceed 4 hours, at a point between the place of departure and the final destination.
Thus the carrier is responsible for 4x the total cost of the ticket, from Pick to destination unless the connecting layover is more than 4 hours in length
as to the point on "after fees excluded" the law requires compensation based on the full fare
fare is defined as
>>Fare means the price paid for air transportation including all mandatory taxes and fees
SO while some fees may be included, if they are optional addons like baggage fees, upgrades, drinks, meals, etc. Any mandatory fees and taxation must be included
According to Reddit hearsay they offered increasing amounts up to $800 but no one budged. One passenger offered to leave for $1500 and the crew laughed. I'm assuming there's corporate policy that puts a maximum cap on compensation.
The laughter might be the most ridiculous part of this. If offered them to get off for 10k in actual money and would have found that perfectly reasonable given the situation they were in. The laughter shows that they somehow set themselves as above the market and the passengers at their mercy. They technically are, but see where it got United.
I also got laughed at when I tried to negotiate up an offer of $1,000 to switch flights.
Learn from my lesson though, try negotiating before you accept, not after. Not sure if it would have made a difference, but definitely less embarrassing.
Well if the contract and the law says they can involuntarily remove passengers from the plane, then it is necessarily legally permissable for United to assault/battery their passengers. Whether or not that is morally the right thing to do, or whether that is a wise business move in this case is a separate question (probably answer is no). Hypothetically they could legally shoot their customers if battery was not enough force if the contract stipulates so.
Illegal things don't become legal just because they're in a contract. Otherwise, people who can't pay credit card debt would be under the whip in work camps.
For some reason it looks a little bit off considering that he was already boarded and in his seat.
I can understand the reasoning if it is executed at gate or check-in. It happened to me, and while frustrating, you comply.
But if you have to take people off the aircraft, that looks like a last minute decision made by the airline to move staff.
The best approach would have been to up the reward/incentive.
No, they can re-route the baggage for you if you're going on another flight. If you're not flying they remove it (which can significantly delay takeoff causing a fine to the airline if their stats drop outside of standards).
I've flown on budget flights before that have a similar case where your checked lugagage is not necessarily on your flight to the destination but could be on a later one. Even much later. Very few guarantees before they actually start paying out for lost or delayed baggage.
They're also allowed to ship your baggage to you or hand deliver with a shipping courier.
1. You are correct that is what they CoC states, however its not like this is really a free market (ie. the customer didn't really have a choice but to accept those terms). United, and all commercial airlines, effectively have a monopoly license. So, it wasn't really a free and open market that produced those CoC terms.
2. As sign of the "bad faith" of United's contract, the reverse situation is not permitted. That is, a customer who chooses not to fly at the last minute doesn't get to reschedule - and in many cases will simply forfeit his money. So, on one end of this contract a government monopoly can kick you off a flight via force based on whim (breaking the implied contract that they were going to service you), but on the other end the customer either has no other competitor choice nor has any recourse once they've handed over their money.
There are some airlines that do not set out to oversell/overbook flights - JetBlue, for example. Even in a situation where a flight is only sold to capacity, there can be various reasons for people to be IDBed. Damaged seats, Equipment Changes (A321 -> A320 for example), etc.
At some point, every US carrier has has or will have to IDB people, and they all have a policy that gives them as much leeway as possible under federal regulations to do so.
Think the solution is to outlaw IDB for overbooking. This is similar to letting airlines sit a plane on the tarmac for hours with all the passengers stewing inside. Once they had to start paying penalties they quit doing that.
In this case, denying IDB would force the airlines to pay the passengers whatever it cost to get them to voluntary leave the plane. This constitutes a penalty for overbooking to the point where they have to refuse carriage, and also just compensation for those inconvenienced.
I think its a classic case of herd behaviour. If no one is standing up and stopping it why should I? Just needed one person to stand up and fight the stupidy. Then the entire flight would have gone into a resistance.
Booting people off a plane is pretty shitty behavior for an airline. It's bad customer service and they should dealt with it earlier than after boarding.
But if they have to do it, the passenger shouldn't be allowed to just refuse.
This guy did. And he had to get dragged off the plane. I don't really see an alternative other than just letting anyone willing to scream to stay and then boot off another customer with dignity.
This is shitty service by united escalated unreasonably by the passenger.
I think you're wrong. They should have upped their monetary incentive until someone left voluntarily. It was their business fuckup, not the passenger's, and they should pay for it.
Yeah, the mistake was United's. But the passenger also acted unreasonably. If you act like a two-year-old - even in a situation that, initially, totally isn't your fault - then you may get treated like a two-year-old. And if you act like a two-year-old after the cops start telling you to leave, they're typically going to make you leave - using whatever level of force is required to do so.
So, yes, the initial fault is United's. But there's blame enough to go around.
Once the cops show up and tell him to? Because the cops told him to, that's why.
Note well: I am not saying that the cops are always right. I am not saying that we should all be good little citizens and obey whatever the authority figures tell us to do. I am saying that, in the actual world we live in, disobeying police orders will often involve painful physical consequences, almost immediately. You can argue about whether that should be. Fine. I'm saying that it is that way, though, and you'd better plan on it being that way in your situation before you decide to ignore what the cops tell you to do.
> I am not saying that we should all be good little citizens and obey whatever the authority figures tell us to do. I am saying that, in the actual world we live in, disobeying police orders will often involve painful physical consequences, almost immediately.
> Because the cops told him to, that's why.
"I am not saying obey authority figures whenever they tell us to do something. Even though I said in the previous sentence, 'because the cops told him to, that's why'."
Your note completely and utterly contradicts your previous statement. There is no way to reconcile them.
OK, let's try this again. I'm not saying that you should obey the police because they're authority figures, even if they're wrong. I'm saying that you should obey the police because they're going to physically hurt you (at least) if you don't.
That is, when the authority figures are morally in the wrong, you can make a case that the moral thing to do is to disobey them. But just in terms of the actual way things work in this less than perfect world, you'd better think seriously about the price you're going to pay for doing so. You can say "they shouldn't use force". Fine. But in the real world, they're going to use force.
So, no, I'm not contradicting myself. I'm speaking in two different senses. There's the ideal world, and there's the practical way things actually work. In the real world, if you disobey an order from the cops, it's going to hurt you, no matter how morally right you are.
I completely disagree. It was United and the police who tried to solve this with force. As I saw the video, there is no violent act from him and he should have been left alone.
It's amazing how Americans can justify the most extreme violence for the most petty of reasons. This incident was absolutely meaningless _until_ this man had his face bloodied.
There were a thousand different options, besides force. Do that instead!
They could have gotten someone who looked more like a cop to do the beating, but that would be the only difference. Cops are often poorly trained, out of practice, and in bad health. It's easiest for them to fall back on beating you with whatever tools they have available until they are satisfied that you will comply (or that the question of compliance is no longer relevant.)
I'm glad he did act out, though. Ultimately, he's doing so on our behalf as passengers. When United freaks out about negative PR they're conditioned to be more wary about pushing customers around.
If I were in his position I'd quietly fume about it and United would get more comfortable about booting people who have boarded without repercussions. It's pretty rare that passengers' cases get brought to light so it's kind of refreshing.
If he had just left when the police arrived, as commenters above you are suggesting, then that would mean that the threat of violence was a successful solution to United's mistake, and we'd never have heard about it.
I agree. Someone who has committed no crime, and no breach of the contract of carriage, has the right if not the responsibility to resist police power. It's a misuse of power. United should not have requested police presence and the police should have refused to intervene.
This. Chicago to Louisville is a 300-mile drive. Someone would surely have been willing to get off the plane in exchange for $1k and either a rental car, or a hotel for the night. I still enjoy flying itself, but everything around it, from "security" rent-a-cops fondling you and stealing your toothepaste, to airline employees treating you like cattle, makes me dread having to fly somewhere.
Book the employees you forgot to reserve seats for on another airline. This wasn't a situation of one person leaving or an entire flight, down the line, being delayed for want of crew. It was between a paying passenger leaving or the airline having to pay more to ship their crew around.
I can't believe you're defending United's actions. In short, you're saying that the passenger asked for it. He maintained his dignity as a human being by not acquiescing to unethical actions taken against him. United may have the legal right to do this, but they are certainly unethical in doing so. I fully support this man's behavior.
It's hilarious to me people engage in blaming the victim over this.
At a particular moment it's $800 and voluntary.
At the very next moment passenger is subject to forced removal.
This makes no sense. And I also see nothing in the contract of carriage that permits it.
The airline can deny boarding, but this person is physically inside the airplane having used his boarding pass for the purpose for which it exists: to facilitate boarding the plane. He is boarded. He was not in any way denied boarding. Rescinding that status is not listed at all in the contract of service.
Second, this is deeply uncivilized. The airline invited violence for a civil, non-criminal dispute resulting from their own planning negligence, and their own unwillingness to provide monetary compensation that anyone on board thought was reasonable.
And the police have liability here as well for agreeing to become violently involved in what is ultimately a monetary dispute.
I'm not one to get outraged easily, but seriously this story is shameful.
They needed the seats, fine. They asked for people to volunteer and no one did? Did they even offer maybe a 1st class on a flight taking off a few hours later? I can't imagine that out of more than 100 people they wouldn't find at least 4 interested in waiting in the airport to travel 1st class.
They handled that like bozos and I can absolutely see how a passenger chosen "at random" would make a fuss.
> I can't imagine that out of more than 100 people they wouldn't find at least 4 interested in waiting in the airport to travel 1st class.
Apparently they did. The law is pretty clear on this. You can be refused a flight for this reason - United decided that they wanted the seat for their employee more than the passenger.
Once the passenger starts resisting, he/she should get removed by any means necessary, up to and including force. When people are acting unreasonably they should be prepared for unpleasant outcomes.
I don't think your average person will view this as being "fair". Specifically already being on the plane and effectively being evicted from your seat for no fault of your own I would call "unreasonable".
Public opinion I think will also be very "unreasonable" regarding United in these circumstances.
The point is that it doesn't matter if it's "fair" or "unreasonable" in your eyes.
It's lawful, and eventually you will be taken off the plane. The time to fight the battle is after you get off, not struggling against overwhelming odds and then getting charges piled on you.
If he had done as you suggest, nothing would have happened, nobody would've noticed and he might have got $1000 in compensation if he was lucky. Instead, United look like a bunch of incompetent thugs and many of the people involved in this debacle will be worrying for their jobs, as they should.
Laws/rules don't change if people don't make a fuss about them being wrong.
Right now he's looking at injuries and lack of a voucher/compensation, and possibly criminal charges.
This situation is akin to getting kicked out of a store that you were asked to leave.
Your rights and compensation are spelled out in the law dealing with situations like this. One person is not allowed to make these unilateral decisions because they feel as though the law is wrong in that time.
Laws and rules don't change if you act like an entitled drama queen that tries to bring race into the situation
You're invited to provide citations to the violated rules, regulations and laws.
I don't see United's contract of carriage rule 21 or rule 25 applicable. The passenger was granted boarding, not denied. FAR 91.3(a) doesn't apply, this has nothing to do with the operation of the aircraft. And federal regulation preempt state and local law, but you're welcome to try and convince me.
I see no contractual basis for involuntary removal after boarding is granted, other than being in breach of some other portion of the contract of carriage. The airline was basically in a position per their own contract, of auctioning off a seat on their own plane and they got pissy and called the police, which was improper, and then the police didn't bother to evaluate the appropriateness of removal.
Trespass doesn't apply, the passenger was authorized. Rescinding that state requires a basis in the contract, or FAA regulations or other law and so far the people engaging in victim blaming are providing a lot of jabber and no convincing explanations.
> You're invited to provide citations to the violated rules, regulations and laws.
From united contract of carriage:
UA shall have the right to refuse to transport or shall have the right to remove from the aircraft at any point, any Passenger for the following reasons...:
C) Force Majeure and Other Unforeseeable Conditions – Whenever such action is necessary or advisable by reason of weather or other conditions beyond UA’s control
H) Safety – Whenever refusal or removal of a Passenger may be necessary for the safety of such Passenger or other Passengers or members of the crew including, but not limited to: 3) Passengers who fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew.
He was definitely not complying with and interfering with the duties of the members of the flight crew.
Also, the distinction for boarding granting and non-granting is unclear to me. Is the fact that you receive a boarding pass indication that you're on the plane for good? Apparently not.
> people engaging in victim blaming
Assuming that the passenger was a victim. You should be blamed if you're at fault and unreasonable. If you're unhappy with the situation, deal with it later in the courts. Just like you can't talk your way out of a speeding ticket by "asserting your rights".
C) Does not in any possible way apply here because the outcome of oversold seats is completely predictable, as is the need to accommodate crew shifts. This isn't "chance occurance" at all even in the most vivid imagination of one of my house plants.
And in fact there's no oversold issue either, as it turns out. Exactly four paying passengers were removed for exactly four non-paying non-customer crew. That is not an oversold situation.
H) What safety issue applies here? This isn't a safety issue.
The contract has allowances in specific situations for passenger removal, not one of those allowances is applicable. You have to stretch way above and beyond the simple meaning of words in a dictionary to get where you're going.
> If you're unhappy with the situation, deal with it later in the courts. Just like you can't talk your way out of a speeding ticket by "asserting your rights".
That's asinine. Speeding tickets presuppose a civil or criminal offense from the outset. There is no civil, criminal or contractual offense at all on the part of the passenger/victim.
Maybe they should just keep offering money until someone accepts. Surely someone would accept $1200 and a replacement ticket. It would have cost much less than what this PR fiasco has cost.
The responsible action, is for the business to accept the overbooking as their fault, and arrange alternative traveling plans for their employees. Forcibly removing a customer due to overbooking should never happen, and a customer should be able to refuse. His actions while extreme to some, were reasonable IMHO.
Not if they cancel or reschedule which can be done up to about a day before in most cases without a fee. And there are very few people looking for a flight less than 24 hours before it departs so those seats would go unfilled most of the time.
Simple. They overbook on purpose. There is usually a percentage of people that miss a flight, so airlines overbook to account for this trying to get every seat filled.
most flights don't have every single person show up. there might be, say, 2 or 3 seats unfilled even if you sell every seat on the plane.
so instead, sell a couple of seats twice, and bet that not everyone will show up. if you're wrong and everyone shows up, you have to pay people extra to take another flight, but that apparently happens infrequently enough that overbooking makes money over the long term.
On any given flight, there will almost always be some people who cancel at the last minute, get delayed on their way to the airport, miss a connection, etc. From the airline's perspective, there's now an empty seat going to waste (unless there are passengers at the airport waiting for a standby seat). Therefore, airlines will often sell a few more tickets than they actually have seats for because, statistically, they expect some no-shows. But sometimes what's statistically probable doesn't actually happen.
It's hard for them because they make much more money overbooking since XX% of people don't show up for their flight. They make money on change fees/no-shows since they sold more tickets.
The airlines know that a small number of people will not make their flight. If they plan the overbooking correctly they can fill the plane with happy passengers, some of whom wouldn't have got a ticket, and make it right for the the people who missed their plane (let them on a different flight that wouldn't be full).
If they sold tickets up to the plane is full, no more: they would have to charge people for missing their flight since the seat left without them. While that might be legal (and moral?) it isn't something people like to happen to them, so the airlines sell just a little over so that they can tell the guy who missed his flight, "sorry, but you can use your ticket on the next flight so you are only out your time."
In short overbooking when it works right is a way to earn some goodwill from people who make a mistake.
A non-zero percentage of passengers usually fail to show up for any given flight. It is more profitable for the airline to sell (e.g.) 110% of the seats available and get near 100% utilization out of the flight, while occasionally having to pay for a hotel room and a cheap voucher, as opposed to not overbooking.
When a business is acting in an abhorent, immoral, or unethical manner profit and greed are nearly always the fundamental reasons.
do the customers who fail to show, still pay for their flight?
Depends on the ticket. For lower price tickets, generally speaking you don't get anything if you miss your flight. For Business and First class tickets you can generally re-book or get the ticket refunded if you miss your flight. There are also some insurance policies you can get which will refund at least most of your ticket if you miss your flight due to medical or family emergencies.
A certain percentage of passengers just don't show up for whatever reason. This percentage is fairly predictable, so if the airline sells more seats than there are on the airplane, the extra tickets are pure profit. Because they are good at their statistics, usually, it isn't a problem, but every once in a while more people show up with tickets than there are seats.
There are other reasons that this can happen. An aircraft change (due to maintenance issues, for example) might result in fewer seats being available. In this case, the airline needed to relocate some employees and seats weren't available. For the record, I believe they handled it very badly.
TBH this seems to be a more legacy airlines thing.
I've never seen EasyJet or Ryanair overbook flights (and they operate at WAY higher load factors that legacy airlines - Ryanair is up to 97% load factor on average).
Edit: looks like Ryanair actually doesn't overbook. "Ryanair is the only airline in Europe that does not overbook its flights; therefore Ryanair has eliminated the possibility of passengers being denied boarding due to overbooking."
Exactly. At this point they're trying not to cancel another plane load of people, so that's a lot of money. They should have kept going up, "We'll offer $4,000 .. anyone? .. really?" ..
At some point the compensation isn't worth the profit margin of the other flight. They can just cancel it and let the flight crew go home.
>But if they have to do it, the passenger shouldn't be allowed to just refuse.
why not?
if the passenger in this situation was allowed to just refuse, Delta would have had to get its employees to another location via some other method, or delay/cancel whatever it was they were supposed to do when they go there.
The current claim is that the passenger was a doctor and had appointments he had to make the next day. So I can't say that this was unreasonably escalated at all.
Actually, scratch that - the profession does not matter. Flying is an expensive form of travel and most people travelling do have a schedule to meet. Military can get very severely punished, businesspeople can lose critical deals, tourists can't get on connecting flights or get fired for being late back from vacation, and so on.
United just handled it completely wrong - instead of raising the offer as long as necessary, their staff decided that it would be simpler and cheaper to forcibly remove someone from the flight. It went wrong and now they must face the consequences.
How is the passenger unreasonable at all. United could have easily avoided the situation by paying the market price for a seat, they didn't even offer the maximum they could have per their own contract.
I'm sure someone would have opted to delay their lives if the offer was $1k, $2k, hell $3k. Why does United get to economically benefit by getting their pilots to the next flight and profit from it, while inconveniencing someone else who has already purchased the flight? Sure, they're legally allowed to do what they did, but they didn't even bother to offer the maximum amount their own contract says to, so not sure why they would get any sympathy.
The passenger didn't unreasonably escalate. If the airline screws up, they need to pay the price. And physically harming the customer crossed several lines.
From what I've been reading (sources are all over the place, so take with a grain of salt) the man was a doctor and was supposed to see patients the next day and wanted to talk to his lawyer (presumably about the legality).
I couldn't tell with this article if that was guy who was screaming or if they asked the doctor first and then went to this guy. It's not clear at all.
They offered $800 to leave, and nobody volunteered. I'm certain that if they offered $10k, 4 people would. It's just a question of offering enough money. I guess they went for the "millions and millions" option instead...
They should have dealt with it earlier if possible. (I assume operations told them they needed to transport a flight crew after the airline was already boarded.) Given that they didn't, someone should have had the authority to offer enough compensation to get someone to voluntarily deplane. I have trouble believing that if they offered $3K or whatever, they wouldn't have been able to find another volunteer or two.
That said, refusing to follow the instructions of a flight crew and creating a scene is not going to end well for you however convinced you are in the righteousness of your position. (I have been bumped off a flight after I was onboard and sitting down. It was years ago and I don't remember what the exact circumstances were if I ever knew.)
I think physical violence is qualitatively different.
Consider: suppose a kid lays across your driveway and refuses to budge. Are you allowed to drive over the kid? After all, if everyone starts doing this, you will lose your job and can't feed your own family, right?
Well, no. You have to figure out a way. Take a deep breath and call their parents, get an Uber or whatever it takes.
The situation would be different if a random person was just asking you not to go. In that case, you could ignore them.
Well, in your example, I can't run over the kid, but I can call the cops, and have them come and physically remove him. So that's almost exactly what happened, except that the burly guy wasn't a cop (or at least wasn't in uniform).
The cops were there, though, and were (at least tacitly) authorizing the guy to try to physically remove the passenger. Is that legal and/or moral? Or does it have to be a uniformed officer before it becomes legal and moral?
It's easy for a couple of cops (or even one) to remove a kid from your driveway, even a kid who doesn't want to be removed. Removing an adult from what appeared to be a window seat is going to be harder. That is, the adult can make it harder to do without causing harm to the adult. (Also, the adult is presumably more aware of the potential consequences of their actions.)
You have a "contract of lying on the driveway" with him, you've granted him permission to lie on the driveway for the next 1.5 hours, and your contract doesn't list you changing your mind as a reason for rescinding that prior permission, nor has he breached the contract in a way that permits you to remove him.
You're welcome to point out where in the contract of carriage you're basing your opinion. I'm finding no justification.
This shines a light on what is, most likely, a policy that is not in the interest of passengers.
In my experience, the airlines offer a decent incentive for taking a bump and they do this before boarding. I know delays have been crazy the past few days, so maybe people who were already delayed didn't want to wait any longer?
I wonder what kind of incentives were offered? You'd hope United would offer enough to get someone to volunteer, especially in cases like this that are so late into the boarding process. Why not just get a United official on the plane to start raising incentives until the $ amount makes someone bite.
Terms and conditions of the contract may be legal but it could very well result in incidents like this.
It is wholly unsurprising to me that people are willing to be apologists for this. It's always "outrage culture", it's always clickbait, it can't ever be that these people really are pieces of shit. But still disappointing.
They wanted to get an airline crew to another city. Sounds like United fucked up, overbooked a flight, and didn't want to :
1. escalate compensation for passengers to get off the plane
2. arrange alternate transportation for their crew
This was a business decision. They didn't "have to" do shit, and certainly didn't "have to" call in the bouncers to forcibly eject a paying customer who was already in their seat.
Reasonableness is what faceless bureaucracies use to keep everyone in line. In the modern world, half the time an individual is wronged, there is literally no recourse but to speak to an endless string of "agents" who in fact bear no agency and no responsibility. It's a daily occurrence that we get thrust into these kafkaesque situations, and by no means is it our responsibility to take this bullshit with a happy shit-eating smile.
So no, no the passenger was not unreasonable, this is the only type of thing that gets their leadership far above the rank and file to take enough notice to actually change policies to something reasonable which is this: pay enough for volunteers. You overbooked the flight, you pay the price, simple as that.
For the love of god, don't side with corporations where the ones setting the policies and profiting are far removed from both the enforcers of those policies, and the customers suffering at their hands. This is probably the number one source of social problems in the modern age: lack of individual accountability.
This is just a guess...United needed to get a couple of pilots on the flight from Chicago to Louisville or else another flight would be delayed/canceled.
Only reason I can think of an employee would take precedence over passenger.
I don't know. Last minute logistical changes based on timetables, planes, weather, etc. The reason why I guessed this is because my brother is a pilot.
> "The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher."
My reading is they beat him so badly they had to put him in a stretcher. Is that right?
There's a clear difference between fine and physically fine. The man is rather clearly in a rather severe mental state when he got on the plane the second time.
For comparison: a close friend suffers from tonic-clonic seizures. That's the kind you see in movies when they try to be dramating, violent shaking, foaming at the mouth. the whole nine yards. After waking up from a seizure like that he often acts rather single-mindedly towards a goal, turning violent if anything or anyone is in his way. A while back he had a seizure in public, it took 6 police officers to get him wrangled into the ambulance. This sort of significant personality change doesn't happen from a slight bump to the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy has a rather severe concussion.
So no. I don't think the adult man frantically mumbling "I gotta get home, I gotta get home, I gotta get home" with a bloodied face is fine by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I reckon the only reason he managed to get back on the plane is because of, to put it bluntly, retard strength caused by a serious knock to the brain.
They messed up and overbooked the flight, sure. But why on earth would they forcefully drag people out of the plane, while they could just find volunteers?
They could offer cash/miles to whoever volunteered, increasing the offer until someone accepted. I've seen other airlines do this on several occasions. They couldn't have handled it worse than they did.
This is the problem here. If they would have offered $5000 they would have had four seats immediately. They're going to pay a lot more than $20,000 for this disaster.
The airlines have run the numbers, and it is clearly more profitable to sell (for example) 105% of the plane, and then if more than 100% show up, pay people off to take a different flight.
> The airlines have run the numbers, and it is clearly more profitable to sell (for example) 105% of the plane, and then if more than 100% show up, pay people off to take a different flight.
I guess the op's question is, why was it not done here?
(Sadly) Everyone has a price for everything. Obviously that guy's price was not met. As you say, the airline has done the math... does their math include the cost of dragging a passenger bruised and bleeding off of their plane? Probably... Does it include the cost of cameras capturing the whole thing? Probably not.
I imagine that the there was effectively a "CAN'T HAPPEN" comment on what to do when nobody bit at $800. I can imagine the people writing the policy imagining that their employees might collude with friends on board to pocket the money if they let the offer get too high.
That's a problem with the processes in place in the airline. They have to do their own due diligence.
Who's to say that this man's price was the lowest price? Turn it into a bidding process, the lowest 5 bids on the plane get paid, and the airline gets their seats.
The potential for misuse is not a good excuse for accepting negative actions.
Oh, yes, I totally agree. When you have a "CAN'T HAPPEN" in a code comment that's a sign of laziness or bad design and the same applies to company procedures. Hopefully United will go back and seriously rethink how they go about this now. It's just sad it had to come to this to make it happen.
The problem is that's not what happened. They kicked this man off to prioritize their own employees. An overbooked flight would never be boarded before.
That's a horrible reason in my opinion. What other industry could get away with doing this? If someone sold 105% capacity for a concert or sports game and just told the last 5% who arrived "sorry, no more room" people would be extremely upset.
The Telecoms have been selling > capacity for... ever(?). When a major event occurs & everyone picks up a phone to call in/out you get "all circuits are busy". Ever notice the hit to your inet speeds on holidays when all your neighborhood is home & idle?
On one hand, infrastructure costs for idle capacity would/could become cost prohibitive. On the other hand, the provider should be held aaccountable for their failing to provide reasonable uptime/service.
That's not really a fair analogy. It's difficult (or impossible) to predict major events like terrorist attacks or weather phenomena that cause phone circuits to overload. And when these events occur, telecom companies lose money.
But flights fill up every day. When they do, airlines maximize profit.
Agreed, major phenomena are exceptions to the norm, did not intend to convey any judgement on the practice. Those same phenomena affect airlines too. In fact, weather delays had hampered United's ops leading up to the ejection event in the news. My point was airlines are not the only ones who sell > capacity.
When they do this, it's usually a shittier offer than it sounds. They're not offering cash, but value in tickets, which has an expiration a short time in the future, and can only be applied to certain flights.
It'd be interesting to see statistics on how often these offers are even redeemed.
The few times I've taken the offer, the tickets were good for a year. But for someone who doesn't fly a lot, that is a relatively short amount of time.
A friend that works for Emirates managed to get this way to home on Christmas. There are usually 2 spare jump seats. You put 2 pilots there and 2 where the couple was. The flight is quite short.
Airlines operate in very uncertain and variable environments (weather isn't always what it is predicted, mechanical issues are pretty common, and pilots can get sick and other stuff) and having planes or pilots on call everywhere is prohibitive expensive so it's really not surprising that they have to do stuff like this sometimes. Airlines need to be more up front about their policies but there doesn't seem to be a good way to fix it without increasing prices, which they can't really do because people flying are generally so price sensitive.
Or they can just take the hit. In this case, they decided to comp four people so they didn't have to cancel a plane load. Seems like good economics, but no one wanted to give up their seats. I mean why would you. It's bad enough you have to get molested by the TSA once. Twice? Fuck that. I want to go home. No I don't want a voucher for $200 of my next flight with the same shitty airline that will expire before I can use it.
They should have just realized they can get a crew to that plane and canceled that flight; take the hit. Those passengers haven't boarded yet and would be easier to deal with.
You are legally entitled to cash compensation over an airline voucher -- you just have to ask for it and a lot of people either don't know that or just don't do it.
Also the rebooking is not necessarily on the same airline if they don't have a similar flight available that day but others do.
Yeah, good point that cash must be explicitly requested in advance for voluntary denied boarding vs involuntary. The Points Guy has a pretty good guide for VDB.
By cancelling they could be cancelling all subsequent flights from that plane for that day. If I had the choice between kicking 4 people off a plane and cancelling potentially multiple flights I don't get how cancelling the flights would be better? Getting pilots and planes where they need to go after the planning gets messed up is incredibly expensive and also screws a bunch of passengers
Yes but then all the people will miss their connections if you delay that long. Also you run the risk of the guy refusing to leave and you need to take him off anyway.
Oh, I don't think there's a racist angle to it since it was random selection, but I will say that if by chance the guy who had been forcibly removed was black or Muslim instead of Chinese, and the physical force was the same as what occurred here, you can easily imagine the national outrage would be even greater.
I think the best reaction should come from consumers to boycott United airlines for a while and this will teach it a good lesson in customer service and behaviour.
The real thing to fear here is the normalization of violence.
Good perspective in the WP comments:
"The truly shocking thing here is that violence - with the real possibility of serious injury - was viewed as appropriate in a situation that was purely logistical. The airline wanted seats for its own employees. This was not an emergency - such as a terrorist attack or a drunk passenger endangering people. The lack of judgment is stunning. There is no way that violence was justified."
Our society is less violent today than even recent history and continued reductions are more likely than not.
Which I don't mean we shouldn't be concerned about unnecessary use of force, I mean that it requires very careful measurement to say that violence is being normalized (Rather than rejected).
I'm on the doctor's side, United should not overbook a plane and bump a customer to get their own people on board, but when someone refuses to leave what other options do you have? Taze him and drag him off? You'll have to use force to remove someone.
I've also read that it typically comes in the form of dozens of $100 flight vouchers that can't be used in combination. The compensation is essentially the airline printing their own money.
> If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1350 maximum).
You beat them senseless! No need to increase the incentives.
Same should apply in employment contracts: Hey, Joe, listen here! I need to randomly cut your pay and if you don't take it I have security nearby to convince you!
There was no reason for this to even get to a point where physically removing a passenger who did nothing wrong was necessary. There was a very simple solution here: United wanted 4 seats, offered some vouchers, and got no takers. At that point, you start sweetening the deal for giving up your seat until you get some takers. I guarantee it wouldn't have taken much.
If you pay me then you can come. It is called AirBnb.
If you show up, settle in and then see me coming to you and asking you to go out since I need to use the room for myself for the night. Business-related stuff, you understand.
How do you feel?
It is dark, rainy and tomorrow at 8 you have a job interview in the city.
You better pack up nicely and quickly, because I'll call the cops otherwise.
Let me know if you feel like you'd understand the situation.
What you do when someone refuses to leave their seat?
In the free market, you offer enough money until someone decides that the offer is good enough. Everybody has a price.
In a fascist place, you call the thugs to punch an asian doctor unconscious, so that he can be dragged away from his (paid) seat, so that employees can take their (free) seats
> So what do you do when someone refuses to leave?
Pay another airline to ship your employees. This is nothing but horrible planning on United's part. Worst case: Google Maps says a 5-hour drive separates Chicago from Louisville.
Like the GP said : this was a logistical problem. They needed to get 4 employees from point A to point B 300 miles away. There are several ways of tackling this challenge :
1. continue escalating their shitty voucher bribes : sooner or later someone's gonna bite
2. arrange alternate air transport for the crew : they're already in an airport, and 2 of their competitors (American, Southwest) have multiple direct flights between Chicago and Louisville each day
3. arrange ground transport : otherwise known as renting a car and driving. Not super fun, but I've had ironically had United pull that shit on me from NYC to DC - i.e. they cancelled a flight and put us on an overnight coach bus. If it's good enough for customers, it's good enough for the crew.
4. suck it up and delay whatever flight that crew was scheduled for. It sucks, but it was their mistake to overbook and this isn't a safety-critical situation.
Bottom line, there are about 951 different ways to tackle this problem and they chose the absolutely worst one out of the bunch. That kind of stupidity is legitimately impressive to behold.
> 4. suck it up and delay whatever flight that crew was scheduled for. It sucks, but it was their mistake to overbook and this isn't a safety-critical situation.
Isn't there a good chance this happened anyway? I heard the plane was grounded for 2 hours.
United might not have gotten their crew there in time to fly the next day given legal rest requirements, in which case a whole planeload of people (and possibly more, due to knock-on effects) might have been denied a flight.
> So what do you do when someone refuses to leave?
They should not get into this situation. At ALL. They should, like they normally do, handle overbooking at the boarding stage -- by either offering compensation or by issuing IDB checks to people they choose to prevent from boarding.
What happened is major mistake and is morally despicable. I hope the passenger gets punitive damages.
I think United were wrong here (maybe not legally) but morally and, even from their self-interest they took a major PR hit. People involved in this should be getting termination letters immediately.
However, I am curious. Once they made the decision to remove him. How could they have done so if he didn't want to move? A taser?
Maybe they could arrest him first? (Handcuffs and everything.) At least he would then realize that the situation is serious. Maybe also flash a gun or something...
Randomly selecting passengers is not a bright idea, specially after they boarded into the airplane and are already seated. Just offer more money until you find a real volunteer: even if you have to pay $10k that's going to be much better economically and morally than forcing a random client out of a plane.
Plus, there's no way it would get that high. Likely people were willing to be bought out, but wanted it to be "worth it". Fear of missing out would intervene very quickly, once the vouchers reached a certain point.
Even on a plane full of game theorists, willing to bid up to a million dollars, you're still probably miles away from the amount this will cost in negative PR, to say the least.
Based on the circumstances (he wasn't a danger to anyone or acting out in any unreasonable way) the better choice probably would have been to just leave him be. He may not have had a legal "right" to be on the plane and United may have been within their rights to remove him but it can't have been worth the image hit to have him strongarmed off the plane. If they had given up on removing him and just picked someone else, or raised the compensation for someone to voluntarily give up their seat, or found another way to get their crew to their destination, this wouldn't have even been a story.
Did he not have a legal right? I thought the only reason they removed him was because the plane was overbooked and they wanted the seat for their own employees. Sounds like he had a valid ticket and every right to be on that plane. The airline should not have overbooked, and discovering that they had, they should have put their own employee on the next plane. Treating paying customers like this is inexcusable.
Well, yes, but established practice is to deny people the opportunity to board the plane, not to violently remove them after they've already been seated.
Yes, but then there is a prescribed compensation that everyone involuntarily denied boarding (IDB) is entitled. The vouchers is an attempt to avoid this IDB by getting someone to voluntarily fly later.
Plus, I am not a lawyer, but I think IDB means just that -- boarding. Once you board the airline cannot change its mind, not for commercial reasons (although it might be able to weasel out of that by getting everyone off and re-boarding without some people). Again, take with a grain of salt; this is just what I heard.
Just because it is legally allowed or an established practice does not make it right
Lots of things were legally allowed established practices until they were not; people realized they were unethical and immoral, hopefully people will begin to realize this practice is also unethical and work to abolish legal overselling
Yes, lots of things that are legal or established practice are not right.
But overbooking is almost certainly right. Look, fact is that some pax won't show up for their reservation. Without overbooking, planes would fly emptier, wasting money and damaging the environment.
The airlines have fairly good predictions in most cases, and people have different preferences, so that almost always in the small number of cases where there is not enough space you can get people to get bumped voluntarily. It's really a win-win.
That makes them an unreliable partner to deal with. A ticket is not just a simple product, there are other deals depending on it. You may have a vacation booked, an important meeting, a funeral, or anything else. Missing your flight could mean missing a lot more than just the flight. The airline should take their agreements a lot more seriously than this.
Well, differentiating airlines is hard. To me, a for the most part non-traveler, they all offer pretty much the same product, quality-wise. Unless I was to up my ticket to some other class, every coach ticket is pretty much the same. So what am I supposed to differentiate on other than price?
Sure, but part of the point is that it isn't an accident. Airlines are paying attention to what people respond to so instead of going out of their way to compete on quality or whatever other factors, they compete on price.
I understand, but I don't think we can put the blame on the consumer alone. When all pretty-much compete on price alone, we can only compare on price alone.
But if the airline takes their agreement a lot more seriously than this, then they're going to need to have reserve capacity. No more overbooking flights. Have standby pilots and planes available. Those things cost, and will show up in ticket prices.
The public has pretty well demonstrated that they prefer lower-price tickets over a higher-quality flying experience. So the airlines are giving the public what (the majority of) the public wants - a crappy, but cheap, experience.
If people decide that that's actually likely to happen, nobody will buy airline tickets. You pay the airline to get you to your destination, but if it's likely that you won't actually get to your destination, why risk paying the airline?
That's the source of the brand damage here: many people (rightly or not) will be wondering whether the same thing might happen to them if they fly United, and decide it's not worth the risk.
Or, they could probably convince someone else to give up their seat voluntarily by just upping the incentive by a few hundred dollars. A very cheap solution, considering what the current fiasco will cost them.
It costs a lot of money to idle a plane at the gate and even more if the crew times out and the flight gets cancelled. No-one is going to do that because of one difficult person
Or rather because of one difficult corporate miscalculation and unwillingness to pay more for people to get off. I got one would get off pretty much any flight for $10k. That seems cheaper to me than the cost of removing your paying customers by force.
I will point out that it is not United that "chose" violence. They asked the police to intervene. The state is supposed to have a monopoly on physical force, so they did.
Now, for the police, violence has always been normal, or normalized.
Consider the appropriate responses:
1. An airline should not call in the police when dealing with customers because they can reasonably expect violence.
2. The police should be retrained not to use violence. (Is this reasonable? You can imagine other instances where this where this would endanger them.)
3. As a society, we should not let police deal with "civil" situations where violence might occur. Perhaps we need another "force"?
> The police should be retrained not to use violence. (Is this reasonable? You can imagine other instances where this where this would endanger them.)
That is absolutely reasonable. In many countries, police are trained to de-escalate potentially hostile situations. Only in the US and probably a couple of police states are police officers required to escalate to violence.
And it's that tendency to escalate to violence that makes police a threat to society.
> In many countries, police are trained to de-escalate potentially hostile situations. Only in the US and probably a couple of police states are police officers required to escalate to violence.
It's not that simple. The police in the US are trained to de-escalate situations too. That doesn't stop police violence from occurring either in the US or elsewhere (there is no shortage of horrific stories of police abuse from western/central Europe as well, for example).
>The police in the US are trained to de-escalate situations too.
Sure, but practically speaking if you have a realistic understanding of how most US police forces operate, you know that involving them in any kind of dispute greatly increases the chance of violence and harm for all involved. YMMV per locality and situation, but it's a pretty sensible rule of thumb that police involvement equals increased risk of violence, even in previously nonviolent conflicts.
Which is sad and unnecessary. I think it directly results from the prevalence of "warrior mentality" in US police training and operations. They are trained to view all citizens as potential enemy combatants to be dominated, rather than innocents to be protected; they are trained to put the safety of themselves and other officers above the safety of the citizenry; and they are trained to, if not always escalate, certainly to err on the side of escalation if there is any hint of violent action or ill intent from the citizens they interact with.
Right... because a doctor on a plane in the US has some semblance of a chance of carrying a deadly weapon...
This is kinda the point of OP, police violence has become so common-place that we take it as normal happenstance when it's used. There's an air of expected guilt for anyone on the receiving side of the violence but no doubt whatsoever on whether the violence was necessary in the first place.
> The police in the US are trained to de-escalate situations too.
Are you sure? I've never heard of it. I have heard of a police officer who was fired for de-escalating a situation through his training as a marine.
Maybe some police department do train their officers to de-escalate, but it's very clear that many don't. In fact, many US police officers are overly eager to de-escalate.
> That doesn't stop police violence from occurring either in the US or elsewhere (there is no shortage of horrific stories of police abuse from western/central Europe as well, for example).
Compared to the US, there is absolutely a shortage of stories about police abuse in western/central Europe. Yes, it happens, but not on that scale, and the kind of police violence that Americans have come to accept as normal is not considered acceptable in most of Europe.
Here in New Zealand, the police absolutely are trained to de-escalate situations. There are times when it's not possible, but every interaction I've had with the police here they've been amazing. Polite but they're still in control and authoritative. I can't speak more highly of the New Zealand police. That said we have strict gun control and most of the time they don't have to deal with offenders with firearms. If they do, they call out the Armed offenders Squad, at that point the gloves are off.
>there is no shortage of horrific stories of police abuse from western/central Europe as well, for example
The biggest difference is most of the time when an officer abuses the public in the EU they are fired and criminally charged
In the US they are given a 3-5 day paid vacation while the police union and the dept find away to cover up the event, and the insurance company for the dept strong arms the victim into taking a no fault settlement that rarely even covers the medical costs for the victim
Police in the US on general received much less training than in Europe.
“In the US, police training lasts on average 19 weeks,” she writes, while “in much of Europe that would be unthinkable. In Germany, for example, police train for at least 130 weeks - http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7709638
Violence will always underlie government, law, courts, and police. Nations can do research on de-escalation or non-violent interventions, but what happens when a nice method doesn't work? Violence comes next.
The objection here is that violence wasn't sufficiently gated, and nor was violence minimally applied -- the airline could've just paid people to get off with a real offer, and not a dishonest offer where people suspect they're going to get tricked by funny coupons and vouchers.
There seem to be no evidence in this case that non-violent methods weren't used first.
Surely the flight attendants politely asked the man to leave, and when he refused they called their manager who did the same, and only at that stage did they call the police, who also probably asked the man to leave first, before finally resorting to dragging him out.
At the end of the day, the plane is owned by United, and they have every right to uninvite him from their property, at which point he is trespassing, and it becomes a police matter. Sure, they might violate their own ToS on their tickets at that point, but that's a purely civil matter.
Maybe, maybe not. Airlines are heavily subsidized by the US government in exchange for regulation so they will offer service to rural areas which might not otherwise be viable to run an airline into our out of. There are also laws and regulations which turn disobedience of airline personnel into a federal offense in particular situations.
Whether these, combined with this passenger's situation, turns this from a civil to a federal matter is something I'd leave for the lawyers.
But there's a really obvious non-violent option that they apparently didn't take: pay people more. If nobody gets off the plane at $800, raise the offer to $1K. Or $5K. Or $10K. Most other overbooking situations are resolved once the offer gets above $1k + hotel, but even if it was, I really doubt that they couldn't have found 4 volunteers at $10K/each. $40K is a lot less than this incident is going to cost them in brand damage, legal fees, and plane delays.
OTOH, demonstrating willingness to use force to boot people off the plane if there aren't volunteers should decrease their future cost of dealing with overbooking, because the perceived alternative to taking a buyout offer is no longer "sit pat and be guaranteed to keep my seat."
Sure, but a whole lot of good that does you if people choose not to book with you in the first place because "Might get beaten up instead of transported to destination."
Yeah that would be nice. Unfortunately the air travel market is a fairly inefficient market. The cost of entry is super high, there are fairly few players and the big ones are good at doing nice nice with the government. In addition we allow them to undermine what little competition there is by creating their anti market alliances. I booked Air Canada to fly to Europe. I traveled via Canada to get away from US carriers. However, a few weeks before the trip they put us on a United flight because they are in some alliance together. Of course you frequently have very few reasonable options to begin with. It's a awfully broken market and I have no idea how we could possibly fix it. I constantly fly with airlines I hate (pretty much all American carriers but Virgin) because it's so cumbersome to avoid.
When you ask the police to intervene, you are explicitly requesting a violent resolution.
You're asking the police, a third-party representing the state and its acknowledged monopoly on legitimate use of force, to become involved. That doesn't necessarily mean that the resolution will or must be violent.
There are a number of things the police can do besides resort to violence (which they are authorized to do if necessary). While news reports highlight violence, the vast majority of police interactions in the USA are non-violent. Just having the police present as representatives of law enforcement will change the tone of the interaction. The police can also act as mediators. Yes, there is the possibility that the police may have to resort to force, but that's not the only possible—or likely desired—result.
Yes, application of force is a type of violence. As you point out (as did I), that's not the only option available to police, and is not necessarily the expected result of asking for police assistance. And deescalation and mediation are part of the training given to US police. That said, law enforcement training is not consistent across jurisdictions in the US. Some likely have more training in mediation and deescalation than others.
They could explain legal consequences of non compliance. Maybe they could even fine you. Knowing that not acting as you are supposed to might result in legal hassle, fines, potential detention and if necessary physical violence to make it happen should usually be enough. Applying physical violence should be the very last resort.
It seems like large portions of the police force in the US and the perception of it has degenerated to be some brutish muscle. It's concerning how much that is accepted.
> You're asking the police, a third-party representing the state and its acknowledged monopoly on legitimate use of force, to become involved. That doesn't necessarily mean that the resolution will or must be violent.
The only thing the police have that United lacks in this circumstance is the monopoly on violence; by asking the police to become involved, United is asking for violence, by force or it's explicit or implied threat, to be deployed to resolve this situation.
It's true that police can use mechanisms other than force or explicit threat, but so can United without involving the police. The only reason to involve the police is because they are violence, at least in the form of implied threat of force.
'ryandrake expressed that by asking for the police, United was explicitly requesting a violent resolution. My initial comment is a reaction to the expectation that the resolution must be violent, which I don't believe is a foregone conclusion just by asking for the police to become involved.
The only thing the police have that United lacks in this circumstance is the monopoly on violence
United can't act as a third-party moderator, which can be useful in confrontations like this. The police can act in this role. Yes, part of their authority in this role is that they represent law enforcement, and the potential for use of force.
One point that perhaps has been made elsewhere in the submission comments but not in this thread is that simply arresting the man is a use of force, regardless of whether the man allows himself to be arrested peacefully or otherwise. In my mind that's significantly different from dragging someone off of a plane or beating them, though those, too, are uses of force. Is arresting someone peaceably violence? I'd argue not, though I'm open to hearing other thoughts on this.
I've been trying to express that just asking for the police is not requesting that the resolution would necessarily be violent, that there are other options available by having the police there, while clearly acknowledging that the police, as law enforcement, are an extension of the monopoly on legitimate use of force (which is a type of violence). Reading the responses I've received, it seems that I haven't been particularly effective in making that point.
In the interest of learning how to better express myself, would you point out to me how I could have done a better job? In particular, what phrases or statements did I make that prompted your response? I believe the only meaningful difference between what you've written and what I've tried to express is that the only purpose of the police in the situation is the use of force (or the potential use of force). Is that a correct assessment in your eyes?
Another way to further your point about police being a third-party moderator; we don't expect the police to shoot one or both people when answering a domestic dispute call.
The police can also talk to the guy, determine he has a ticket and apparently has the right to be there, then leave and tell United to not call back until they've exhausted all their options.
Just because you have a ticket doesn't mean you can refuse to leave the plane when asked by the owner of said plane. Many people with tickets have been booted from planes for many reasons.
That's true. I don't think it would take long for the police to figure out what's going on though. Asking United to explore all of their options before applying force isn't unreasonable. United can ask the police for help and the police can say since it's not an emergency, we'll get there when we get there.
I don't believe that to be true. I believe that often ends up happening but I don't believe it to be a sure enough outcome that one can link the two with such certainty.
I hate to sound like an old guy but I do remember when police used to try to resolve issues. Much like many police interactions I've witnessed in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Police used to try to get everyone to calm down and figure out a solution that did not involve the need to get violent or anyone going to jail.
For instance, in this case, the police could have asked the doctor why he didn't want to deplane. With that knowledge they could have approached the United crew and informed them that this was a doctor who had to be at work tomorrow and imply that getting their four staff to another location seemed to be less important, so maybe they could find another passenger or find another solution.
If United persisted, the police should have gone back to the doctor and said, "Listen, we're on your side. They're being a-holes. But, it's their plane and they're asking you to leave which means you're trespassing and failing to follow the orders of a flight crew. We don't not want to arrest you or have to remove you by force, but we're boxed in a corner here. Just come with us and we'll help you file a complaint."
In the UK the police are still very reluctant to use unnecessary violence. It often surprises me that the US system is so otherwise. I mean who benefits?
It's not really about benefit. UK police, like most european police, have no expectation that anyone they encounter might be in possession of a firearm.
> The police should be retrained not to use violence. (Is this reasonable? You can imagine other instances where this where this would endanger them.)
Yes, there's a fairly wide belief in this, including by many leaders in law enforcement; that is, that American police have been trained in a means which over-encourages use of force, and that this should be changed (in some places, the work has begun an implementing such a change.)
> I will point out that it is not United that "chose" violence. They asked the police to intervene.
Asking the police to intervene because the state has a monopoly on violence, so they are free to use it in ways you are not, is choosing violence, even if the police might also veto that choice. So the issue is exactly that United chose violence.
I'd also add that the police should have denied the request to get involved because this situation was a contractual issue between the airline and the passenger. No laws were being broken.
IANAL, but in the US, he'd be Trespassing if someone from the company asked him to leave and he didn't (which seems to be the case here). In some jurisdictions, DA/SAs will bump it up to Breaking and Entering so long as that statute allows to charge based on "remaining" in a conveyance rather than "entering" one.
It definitely should not have been requested of them, but it's possible laws were broken.
I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be too difficult to place charges of some sort on him. Not complying with police orders might be one, trespass might be another.
The police, and common culture, protect capital above all else. This is a capitalist society first and foremost. The status quo, the police state, and the corporation are all protected before the innocent individual. It's policy.
Agreed. I for one will never fly United again. I hope many others do the same. The way that was handled just goes to show the culture and way things are done at that airline. Nobody had the logic to say, wait a minute, this is wrong. Calling the police to throw a passenger who did nothing wrong off? Countless ways to handle this better.
In the end, this is going to cost United a TON. United could have flown a plane with only those 4 employees on it for way less than the hit they are about to take.
I don't know. I won't for sure, but will this news just die off after a week? I hope politicians step up and media pound on #unitedairline for weeks ripping up their past ugly treatments.
Good luck avoiding them. So frequently there are few options or you end up booking a flight with some alliance that then gets changed to be operated by someone else.
Will it really hurt them financially though? Significantly that is?
Of course very few people will defend the airline's actions here, but while saying you won't ever fly United again is easy, is competition really strong enough among (in this case) US domestic airlines to enforce that boycott?
I am guessing most people will simply opt for United if their flights are the most convenient for them, and leave the boycotting to someone else.
I suspect not just because talk is cheap, but also because we have come to accept the current state of affairs surround air travel. From the moment you step into an airport until you depart at your destination, you submit. You'll docilely submit to standing in a queue being treated as a potential terrorist to the point of being shouted at if you don't comply fast enough or simply don't understand what is required of you, and (for most of us who can't afford first or business class) you'll submit to being treated as a third rate citizen. Flying means keeping your head down and submitting until you regain your sovereignty at your point of destination.
Flying sucks, and we grudgingly accept it in lieu of alternatives, or because we actually believe that this treatment is necessary for our safety. Next week people will have mostly forgotten about this incident and will fly United without a second thought if the need arises.
> The real thing to fear here is the normalization of violence.
Then there's not much to fear, because I don't see anyone at all finding this normal. It's on every news site and social network, everyone is deeply disturbed about these events.
If anything this clearly shows that violence is FAR from normal in peoples' mind.
The folks carrying out the orders found it normal. At least, we have no suggestion of any kind of extraordinary situation that justified them using violence.
You should read "Debt the First 5,000 Years". It's an amazing book, and one of the things the author talks about is how debt requires violence.
You can't put a man into debt unless you have the capacity for violence to enforce it. He doesn't pay you back, you break his legs, or take his sons and daughters as slaves. Today we have reduced the violence. Now companies ruin credit, get a Sheriff to evict someone from a house foreclosure, harass you with phone calls .. it's a less violence but it's still a form of it.
This violence is also the origin of money (and debt). A conqueror takes a country. That leader needs to pay his army (they are expensive). So you take the area you took and they can only pay taxes with coins; your coins specifically. Only soldiers have those coins, so you leave a garrison that gets paid from the debt you put the people in.
Before the US destroyed Libya, it had the highest GDP in Africa and no debt to the WMF. Today, the "rebels" the US imported are now in debt to the WMF and the people no longer have free electricity or education.
Any kind of property requires violence to exist. If I say "this is my land" and you disagree, the only way I can enforce my claim is through violence. Debt is just a specific case of a general phenomenon. (This applies to communal property, too.)
> Before the US destroyed Libya, it had the highest GDP in Africa
Do you have a source for this? I see Libya's GDP circa 2005 at $41 billion (in 2005 U.S. dollars) [1]. South Africa's 2005 GDP was $260 billion in current U.S. dollars [2] (bit over $200 billion in 2005 U.S. dollars [3]).
You are correct in Libya having the highest African GDP per capita before 2011 [1]. Granted, Libya's economy is more similar to its oil-producing peers in the Middle East and North Africa.
The debt motive for the invasion makes little sense. American banks made more money on Ghadaffi's Libya [2].
I can think of quite a lot of forms of debt that don't require violence unless you define violence very differently from the dictionary "behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."
You borrow £20 from your friends, if you don't pay there is moaning but not usually more. You borrow £100k for a mortgage and don't pay and they may change the locks and put someone else in your house but don't usually hit you.
But then debt and better money management and institutes has created the most peaceful and less violent societies in the world.
In "original" societies it is not abnormal for 50% of males to die violent deads. In our societies it is less than 2% as far as i remember. Including two world wars!
So the violence of debt is not that relevant in the big picture.
They're not just normalizing violence, they're routinely using state power as an agent of the corporation to resolve issues that don't involve criminal activity.
This is an internal business matter for a private company, and United had several alternatives.
United didn't have to overbook the flight in the first place.
United could have accommodated their additional crew on a competing airline or private plane.
United could have offered more compensation to volunteers to leave the flight.
There is absolutely no reason for a taxpayer-funded police force to intervene in this private matter. The passenger violated no laws.
Actually the passenger did violate laws by refusing to leave when he was asked by a part who had the right to ask and the Police. He became a trespasser and can be removed by force if necessary.
I do not see how the passenger violated the contract of carriage.
Section 25 doesn't apply, they were not denied boarding. And I don't see anything in section 21 they've violated either. Their forced removal seems to be the airline violating their own contract, not the passenger.
Some versions of this story state the man that was beaten was a doctor (a specialist) that needed to be somewhere to see patients in an emergency situation.
So, yeah, I'd hate to be United's CEO at the moment, this is now too big to sweep under the rug and blindly quote IDB and other such laws.
Well no one polices the police and there is no repercussion. Its not like the public has any choice. Its a monopoly and will get paid with tax money anyway.
You wouldn't see police acting like that in, say, Germany. So it's not just the structural situation that you describe because that obtains in any country. You would see a scene like that in, say, America, or the Philippines, or many "non-Western" countries.
The depraved part here is that none of United's employees (flight attendants and/or pilots) on board the aircraft stopped law enforcement or whoever it was from forcibly ejecting this guy.
The law may be on United's side but United's employees on board could have been more human about it and not let this happen once the passenger refused to be booted off the plane. Since when is use of force the norm?
1. There will be no personal consequences for any of the belligerents involved in this, including the airline employees and police officers. Nobody is going to get fired.
2. The victim will receive no compensation for his injuries, instead will be further victimized in the courts.
3. There will be no business cost to United. They are already known as one of the most awful airlines in the world, and people still voluntarily choose to do business with them. People will continue to fly with them despite them now having earned the "Beats Its Customers" badge.
I think you're wrong about #3. Quantized at the micro-level (individuals may not choose differently), it's certainly unlikely that people will suddenly change their patterns in large droves immediately.
However that might also still result in people deciding not to fly or switch loyalties where they are flexible (ie, someone having lots of miles in several air programs without any restriction to use UA flights).
Stochastically speaking, this event will likely have an impact if anyone at UA cares to look for it months from now.
May be an opportunity for another airline to offer up "conversion points" for people to switch over, with a promise, not to have you forcibly removed from a plane after boarding for overbooking (or in this case, similar reasons).
I wasn't aware of how terrible they were and I won't be flying with them anymore, and I will be flying in the USA a lot in the next 12 months. But every airline I've tried here has been impossibly terrible, so...
This was such a simple problem to fix for United. They offered vouchers for people to volunteer. No one accepted. So keep raising the offer until 4 people accepted. Problem solved.
I'm honestly flabbergasted by how idiotic United was in this situation. Was a few hundred/thousand dollars in savings worth the negative PR they got out of this whole ordeal? Every consumer knows how shitty economy flying is, especially on United, and would easily sympathize with the consumer who bought their ticket fair and square.
Did they arrest him before removing him? Surely that would be the right thing to do. If they do not have a reason for arresting him then they can't just beat people up to act as "security" for the airline. If they had arrested him and read him his rights I'm sure he'd have understood that the gravity of the situation was such that he really had to stand up and leave.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadThey don't always. Crews call in sick, flights get cancelled, weather changes schedules, incoming flight being late delays connecting flight, etc. One aircraft type gets swapped for another (not all crews are qualified on all aircraft).
Last minute crew moves will always exist.
It's also not 100% clear that these employees were essential crew, or that they couldn't have taken a different flight. There's usually a range of employees flying, not all classed as "must ride", and often some that shouldn't be classified as "must ride".
Of course, how you choose to open up seats is up to you.
I understand the economics, but it's still bullshit. Those customers want to get home and they're boarded. I think everyone should do what this guy did in this situation. He paid for a flight. He didn't read through the 10 pages of bullshit EULA (no one does) and then they assaulted him to remove him from a flight. The whole plane looked angry. Now United has a PR nightmare .. that will last 3 days before everyone forgets. People keep flying United and nothing really happens.
Their estimates are pretty good even - your odds of being overbooked - even on United, one of the worst offenders here - are about 1/1000. From what I've heard, you can sort of bargain with them from what I've heard, free food and drink, hotel accommodations, a partial refund even are commonly obtainable if you get delayed - though that kind of thing may depend on the airline. According to https://lifehacker.com/if-your-flight-is-overbooked-dont-vol... you can actually get 2-4x the ticket price if you deny getting bumped. I'd take that kind of cash in many situations.
This was severely mishandled - the big mistake here was boarding the passengers before knowing the final count with the employees. It caused them not be able to bargain with individual customers to find someone who was willing to give up their seat for some perks or cash.
You're spreading very outdated information. Airlines are currently making record profits:
"2017 is expected to be the eighth year in a row of aggregate airline profitability"
"These three years are the best performance in the industry’s history"
From: http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2016-12-08-01.aspx
Maybe oil prices of the day play a role too... but I wouldn't count on that to be true for long.
Even in this report though, you'll note that the fares are down 63% since 1995 - the competition is pretty fierce here. The absolute profit is only around measured 5% even today. I wouldn't exactly call that a great margin.
You would if you were a grocer. Deregulated airlines have low margins; that's a fact of life. They pay fuel bills, they pay interest, the executives steal what they can, and the unions take everything else. When they miscalculate and pay the unions so much they can't cover their bonds, they reorganize through bankruptcy.
None of this is new, and none of this justifies racist violence.
Though I don't see anything that makes me think this was a racist act, where'd you get that idea?
It's racist because a small middle-aged Chinese physician was forcibly removed. There's no way they would have removed a middle-aged white physician. Likewise, even the big tough airline security asshole who assaulted the physician would have hesitated to forcibly remove someone his own size or larger. This passenger was someone he could handle the way he would handle a child or a woman, without suffering the same legal repercussions that handling a child or woman in that fashion would entail.
Yes, I know there are reports of using a "random computer" to select this passenger. That's what's known in the airline industry as "lying" and in the media industry as "we like to copy and paste press releases".
Which is not relevant to over booking,
>most of the airlines barely operate at margin as it is.
False, extremely false
>You don't want to be flying around in jets which aren't at capacity,
you do not want to be flying around jets that have UNSOLD seats, you do want to be flying around jets that have SOLD but unoccupied seats, it costs far less in jet fuel the fly an empty seat than a 150-250lbs human with all their luggage.
this is why the whole overbooking justification is bullshit.
They lose money when they have to fly a UNDER SOLD flight, meaning the seats are empty because no one bought a ticket. They DO NOT lose money when they sell a ticket and no one shows up. The Rebooking fees, and various other fees more and compensate for the no-shows, and in some cases the fare is non-changeable non-refundable, so the person that does not show up has to buy a new ticket at full value.
There is no ethical, economical, or any other justification for Overselling flights than Greed.. Pure and simple
It should be considered fraud and should be illegal
Parent is right you are wrong. It is economical to sell as many tickets as possible and ecological to try to fit in as many people as possible to a single flight. Overbooking is good and helps with both.
This flight took nearly 4 hours to get to there because of the delay, and it only takes 5 hours to drive, the should have just put their employees in a car.
Some airlines have an alternative means of crew transport, used for such contingencies. For example Jet2 in the UK has a Piper Navajo to move misplaced crew around and TNT in Europe ( now ASL Airlines ) have a Learjet 45.
Even Ryanair, king of the bottom-line, occasionally uses its engineering Learjets to position crews. Much cheaper to send one small corporate jet than have a 189-passenger 737 stuck crewless and causing a cascading schedule disaster.
The airline isn't going to delay another flight because they couldn't get a flight crew there in time; they find a way to get the flight crew there.
In this case, they screwed up procedure and boarded everyone first. Then they screwed up again and had someone assaulted by armed goons in front of a few hundred people.
It's wise to avoid making such inflammatory statements until we know more.
a) the police department assaulted the customer, not United staff (although they did call the PD in the first place)
b) "beating them till they had to be carried out on a stretcher" obviously implies he was beaten until he couldn't walk, which is an allegation that hasn't been substantiated at this point.
I totally agree that United colossally fucked up here, but the statement the parent made that I quoted earlier is patently false. I'm all for being righteously outraged, but can we please stick to factual statements while we're doing it?
To be more explicitly, my parent comment is referring to once the airline escalates the situation to police, overriding it is out of their hands as airlines cannot control the police.
(EDIT: Looks like drcode beat me to that one)
Unfortunately, the way this played out was pretty terrible. My hope would be that events like this could move United (and other airlines) to having more transparent overbooking policies and compensating people fairly, but that's not likely.
Now we have groups who place abandoning a cat on the same level as abandoning a child, as an example. It's going to be very difficult on agreeing what is "ethical" when in the "me" society it translates to "what is ethical for me, right now, based on my current views of some form of science/philosophy/religion/spirituality/etc and what happened to me personally when I was growing up"
If only one company decided to overbook, then sure, I agree with you. But if it were a law, and every airline was forced not to overbook, then it simply means the ticket prices would be a little higher. And if because of those slightly higher ticket prices, the airline might have to retire a plane or two, then so be it, but no airline would go bankrupt because of it.
We have all sorts of laws that protect consumers and employees that "hurt" the absolute maximization of profit. This wouldn't be any different. When it's a law, it just means everyone plays at a higher standard and prices are a little higher than they would be without those protections.
Also, Canada is likely going to pass such a law soon:
http://globalnews.ca/news/3370381/canada-overbooked-flights-...
The cops are likely waiting until the passenger is off the plane to take him into custody.
Actually the real police might well have told United to increase the voucher amount like any civilized human organization would do. The gate agent then looked outside and picked out the biggest meanest baggage handler she saw. I really doubt the Sky Marshals want any part of this disaster.
You can't just refuse to leave an aircraft when instructed to do so by the crew. The reason simply doesn't matter - the time to fight about that is off the aircraft.
It may be considered excessive force however - which likely opens up avenues for assault and similar charges. Heck if I know though, IANAL and now I'm well off into the speculation weeds.
As I read the article, the police showed up, and he still refused to leave the aircraft. You can't just refuse when the cops tell you to leave. There are going to be physical consequences for that.
> It may be considered excessive force however
Yes, it may.
Not that I'm saying this makes United's behavior acceptable - I have no idea how they managed to load the plane before realizing they needed extra seats - just that the law is, in this case, on their side.
Edit: changed he to they.
But also just as certainly he can tell you to leave the aircraft for refusing.
There literally is absolutely no legal right for you to stay on that vessel after the captain requests you leave.
Plenty of incidents support this on a practical level - captains remove people rarely but not unheard of for silly and discriminatory reasons. They likely get disciplined after the fact by the company, but in the moment you have zero recourse as a passenger who was asked to leave. Your options are to grab your bag and walk off, or be removed and possibly go to jail. Either way you are pleading your case on the ground.
What exactly did I say that wasn't true? If a captain removes people for discrimination, then they are removing choice from individual based on making choice for group. People don't want to hear a racist's rationalizations, so as a group decision it might be a good one, especially given it is related to in-flight matters (or the prediction it will be related to in-flight matters). Again, I state that the captain is only allowed (legally) to remove choice for individual when the group (all people in plane) are denied things related to in-flight matters.
Laws are typically rational.
I will note my response was directed to the claim that if they ask you to do something, you must do so. I'm stating that I do not believe, in all cases, the captain has the rational right, by law, to remove choice from an individual if they are not threatening choice for group. That's not to say the captain can't and won't do a removal, but it is irrational to remove choice from individual if they are not threatening group. That also implies it might not pass the muster of law, and a passenger would not be "guilty" of breaking a law by resisting removal. And besides, four people had to go, so the choice to remove that one individual's right to choice was removed by randomness or judgement, both of which are irrational actions.
The captain (afaik) can remove you for wearing blue shoes, and you must leave. He will face zero legal consequences for that action, but of course is subject to company discipline. In the absurd case the captain somehow owns the airline itself, I think there would be zero recourse available to an arbitrarily removed passenger other than IDB compensation and a refund of the ticket.
I also think the level of force in this case can certainly be argued - but I don't think the United crew will face any legal liability even if the officers do. Had they used a bit more discretion I'm quite certain this guy would have no case whatsoever even if physically removed against his will. Knocking him out of course is excessive, and I believe that is a separate argument.
I didn't intend to call you wrong, that wasn't the greatest choice of words. I'm simply stating this has been my understanding of the legal implications for some time now, as explained to me by casual conversation with various lawyers over the years since it's a curious subject for me.
This sounds to be like strictly a contract of carriage violation by the passenger, it is a civil matter, not criminal. I think the airline can't physically coerce the passenger individually once they're in the plane. They can remove his luggage and just wait until that passenger, or some other passenger, complies. But physically removing someone not engaged in criminal activity itself becomes assault.
Remember, the law is different depending on your income and status. Large companies are like very rich people. They can and do often get away with murder.
United unfortunately is probably legally in the right here. However this is a major fuck up and it will take them a while to clear this black PR mark from their record.
Anyone searching for it will find "United" might find this "Airline drags doctor off the flight because they wanted to fly their employees instead" for years to come. Hopefully it was really worth getting those employees there...
While clueless idiots are now making a huge shitstorm on social media, and then fly United next week because it's $3.50 cheaper.
So, not sure that will have any impact on United's actual numbers.
I don't have the contract at hand, but by the above wording, the man was already boarded...
EDIT: Still unsure as to the legality of this. IDB is well established, but the fact that everyone has boarded is a different matter. Reading the contract of carriage did not bring any more light to this point. And let's be clear, denying someone and removing someone are very different. At least one source says it does matter (unknown reputability) "This is important because involuntary denied boarding only applies when passengers have been fully checked in (including baggage) and are at the gate at a specified time, typically 30 minutes before scheduled departure." https://thepointsguy.com/2014/12/what-to-do-if-your-flight-i...
While the rules aren't printed very well (I just scanned United's Contract of Carriage, and the Federal Code), I believe it counts as an IDB even if you are physically on the airplane.
Airlines should make a better effort to avoid overbooking. If they can get away with this kind of despicable behaviour, they'll never improve.
If they don't get their crew to the other airport, the next day a full plane load of people (or more, due to knock-on effects) might have been denied a flight.
However, mistakes happen. For operational reasons, now the flight had a smaller capacity. Could have been that the seatbelt for a seat didn't work, or weight & balance issues.
At that point, it strikes me as perfectly legit to seek volunteers, and then, well, disembark pax involuntarily (while giving them all the help and compensation that they're entitled to, and more).
That's hardly "intentionally screwing over paying passengers".
Sure, mistakes happen. But the real mistake here is that the airline punishes passengers for the airline's mistakes. They should be taking responsibility for their own mistakes, rather than take them out on their customers.
Given this situation with an overbooked plane due to their own stupid lack of planning, they could and should have offered more money until someone did volunteer. That would have been cheaper than this travesty, and not a single person would have complained about it. Instead, they short-sightedly try to save some money by having the police (who also don't work for free) drag a perfectly legitimate customer out of the plane.
It's a distressing rejection of responsibility for their own actions.
But my understanding from the article is that the problem here was not overselling; they decided to give priority to moving their employees around over providing the contracted service to ticketed passengers. It's hard to see how that's justifiable even by the letter of the law.
With that said, don't drag people off your flights. No matter what it costs you to get staff where they need to be when you make this mistake, it'll be cheaper than the negative publicity of a physical altercation removing a passenger (even if you need to retask a commuter aircraft just to relocate the crew, or ask another carrier to get them there).
Of course, that just gives a hecker's veto to anyone insubordinate enough to refuse to leave. What they probably should have done was select another passenger, and have police waiting for the recalcitrant passenger at the destination airport: that would satisfy the need to get personnel to their destination and ensure punishment for someone violating his contract and wouldn't cause a scene.
The moment you've escalated to "we've selected people at random, and we are willing to eject people by violence or arrest them on the other end" you've already lost.
No need for violence.
I think that randomly selecting passengers is the 'other arrangements' their policy works out.
I agree that they should have increased vouchers past $800, but I disagree that it's guaranteed that there would be enough takers at e.g. $1,000 per, or even $2,000 per.
And I'm shocked at the downvotes: flight crew instructions have the force of Federal law; people who violate Federal law get arrested. The biggest mistake United made here was allowing there to be a disturbance in the first place, which caused a PR disaster. 'Man arrested on landing for refusing to leave plane' is a much better PR situation than 'man dragged bodily from plane.' Granted, 'United pays record-setting $100,000 in vouchers to convince four passengers to give up seats' is probably better PR still.
Offer cash!
I, for one, am absolutely not interested in any vouchers that probably come with a shit ton of fine print, which makes them either unatractive, or impossible to redeem. Or probably both.
To do what, exactly?
"Rule 21: Refusal of Transport: UA shall have the right to refuse to transport or shall have the right to remove from the aircraft at any point, any Passenger for the following reasons:"
"H. Safety – Whenever refusal or removal of a Passenger may be necessary for the safety of such Passenger or other Passengers or members of the crew including, but not limited to: "
"2. Passengers who fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew, federal regulations, or security directives;"
Or, if not trespassing, would you like "breach of contract" or something? I'm sure they could find something; I'm neither very creative or experienced when it comes to making up criminal charges in order to punish people for interfering with my profit.
What is clear, though, is that he had a right to be on his seat before the whole sorry mess started. They probably could get him for "interfering with a flight crew" or some such crap after they asked him to leave.
While passengers usually do get the short end of the stick (and in the case of United it appears that the stick is always covered in shit, but I digress) I think the situation in Europe is a lot better.
When bumped, or even if you experience extended delays the airline must compensate you in cash. No useless vouchers, which are hard to redeem. There are a few exceptions, were that doesn't apply, namely if delays are beyond their control. Mechanical problems, however, don't count because it's their duty to properly maintain their gear.
Passenger rights within the EU are clearly spelled out and airlines can't subvert them by mealy mouthed "contracts of carriage"
I'd also wager that this wouldn't have escalated to this point virtually anywhere in Europe. Since the "smack him in the face and that'll teach him to comply" philosophy of policing seems much less aparent.
Edited: for clarity.
If a doctor gets physically assaulted by Chicago's Aviation Authority staff because you didn't leave four seats free on your flight, you most assuredly fucked up.
When a family member, or associate of Congress gets hit with this experience, then maybe the fines get adjusted accordingly.
Anyway, hopefully the guy gets a good lawyer.
No, it's a United policy:
https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of-carriag...
The airline hasn't commented yet on why they didn't go above 800, when they could go to 1350.
Voluntary compensation is entirely different - they are free to offer whatever they like to get someone off the flight. Involuntary unfortunately incentives keeping those limits low as a matter of airline policy though, of course. They can force someone off a plane for usually far less than $800 if they feel like taking a customer good will hit. This ORD-SDF flight certainly was nowhere near $1350 in IDB comp - likely less than $300 in mandatory IDB comp based on average ticket prices.
I've seen these offers go as high as $2,000 during significant service disruptions on major airlines. This is a corporate policy failure, as I'm sure the gate agent was only allowed to authorize up to $800 for that flight or something dumb.
They rolled the dice on saving a few hundred bucks against their reputation this time. I think it's safe to say they lost badly on that calculation.
They were told to save cash, and by golly, they saved that cash.
We have mileage runs and mattress runs already; why can't we have bump runs as well?
Someone get Carl Weathers on the phone!
It's a multi-day play.
The actual penalty is 4x the cost of the segment. Note this is not what you paid for the ticket on your credit card divided by two (in the event of a direct round trip ticket). This guy was likely owed somewhere in the range of a few hundred bucks as a ORD-SDF segment is likely worth about $50-100 after fees are excluded.
The $1350 is simply the max, your ticket has to be worth at least $337.50 for that to matter - at which time it's against you of course.
Think you'd probably have to fire congress to make that limit and multiplier higher :)
The law says
>Compensation shall be 400% of the fare to the passenger's destination or first stopover, with a maximum of $1,350, if the carrier does not offer alternate transportation
Stopover is defined in the law as
>>Stopover means a deliberate interruption of a journey by the passenger, scheduled to exceed 4 hours, at a point between the place of departure and the final destination.
Thus the carrier is responsible for 4x the total cost of the ticket, from Pick to destination unless the connecting layover is more than 4 hours in length
as to the point on "after fees excluded" the law requires compensation based on the full fare
fare is defined as
>>Fare means the price paid for air transportation including all mandatory taxes and fees
SO while some fees may be included, if they are optional addons like baggage fees, upgrades, drinks, meals, etc. Any mandatory fees and taxation must be included
Source:https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.5
Ah wait, I think it's some formula based on miles and delay.
Regardless, it's some arbitrary cap for no good reason.
United have a price they were willing to cost the seat, they were unwilling to bear the cost.
Either way, it's United's PR disaster to handle.
I guess we should film everything while traveling. Editing the laughter together with the dragging and screaming would be golden...
Ubiquitous surveillance of citizens is bad. Ubiquitous surveillance by citizens is good.
Learn from my lesson though, try negotiating before you accept, not after. Not sure if it would have made a difference, but definitely less embarrassing.
But if you have to take people off the aircraft, that looks like a last minute decision made by the airline to move staff.
The best approach would have been to up the reward/incentive.
Does this imply you're much more likely to get picked for last-minute eviction if you didn't check anything in?
I've flown on budget flights before that have a similar case where your checked lugagage is not necessarily on your flight to the destination but could be on a later one. Even much later. Very few guarantees before they actually start paying out for lost or delayed baggage.
They're also allowed to ship your baggage to you or hand deliver with a shipping courier.
1. You are correct that is what they CoC states, however its not like this is really a free market (ie. the customer didn't really have a choice but to accept those terms). United, and all commercial airlines, effectively have a monopoly license. So, it wasn't really a free and open market that produced those CoC terms.
2. As sign of the "bad faith" of United's contract, the reverse situation is not permitted. That is, a customer who chooses not to fly at the last minute doesn't get to reschedule - and in many cases will simply forfeit his money. So, on one end of this contract a government monopoly can kick you off a flight via force based on whim (breaking the implied contract that they were going to service you), but on the other end the customer either has no other competitor choice nor has any recourse once they've handed over their money.
At some point, every US carrier has has or will have to IDB people, and they all have a policy that gives them as much leeway as possible under federal regulations to do so.
In this case, denying IDB would force the airlines to pay the passengers whatever it cost to get them to voluntary leave the plane. This constitutes a penalty for overbooking to the point where they have to refuse carriage, and also just compensation for those inconvenienced.
These things could be so simple and self-correcting if everyone acted instead of screaming oh my god.
Booting people off a plane is pretty shitty behavior for an airline. It's bad customer service and they should dealt with it earlier than after boarding.
But if they have to do it, the passenger shouldn't be allowed to just refuse.
This guy did. And he had to get dragged off the plane. I don't really see an alternative other than just letting anyone willing to scream to stay and then boot off another customer with dignity.
This is shitty service by united escalated unreasonably by the passenger.
So, yes, the initial fault is United's. But there's blame enough to go around.
Note well: I am not saying that the cops are always right. I am not saying that we should all be good little citizens and obey whatever the authority figures tell us to do. I am saying that, in the actual world we live in, disobeying police orders will often involve painful physical consequences, almost immediately. You can argue about whether that should be. Fine. I'm saying that it is that way, though, and you'd better plan on it being that way in your situation before you decide to ignore what the cops tell you to do.
> Because the cops told him to, that's why.
"I am not saying obey authority figures whenever they tell us to do something. Even though I said in the previous sentence, 'because the cops told him to, that's why'."
Your note completely and utterly contradicts your previous statement. There is no way to reconcile them.
That is, when the authority figures are morally in the wrong, you can make a case that the moral thing to do is to disobey them. But just in terms of the actual way things work in this less than perfect world, you'd better think seriously about the price you're going to pay for doing so. You can say "they shouldn't use force". Fine. But in the real world, they're going to use force.
So, no, I'm not contradicting myself. I'm speaking in two different senses. There's the ideal world, and there's the practical way things actually work. In the real world, if you disobey an order from the cops, it's going to hurt you, no matter how morally right you are.
Trying to solve business disputes by force, which is what the passenger did by refusing to leaves, is bad policy.
It's amazing how Americans can justify the most extreme violence for the most petty of reasons. This incident was absolutely meaningless _until_ this man had his face bloodied.
There were a thousand different options, besides force. Do that instead!
If I were in his position I'd quietly fume about it and United would get more comfortable about booting people who have boarded without repercussions. It's pretty rare that passengers' cases get brought to light so it's kind of refreshing.
If he had just left when the police arrived, as commenters above you are suggesting, then that would mean that the threat of violence was a successful solution to United's mistake, and we'd never have heard about it.
Otherwise this becomes might makes right.
And by I mean getting dragged off the plane. Some are spectulating he was beat off camera. Nothing would justify that.
But if you force someone to drag you off a plan, you are asking for the natural consequences.
At a particular moment it's $800 and voluntary. At the very next moment passenger is subject to forced removal.
This makes no sense. And I also see nothing in the contract of carriage that permits it.
The airline can deny boarding, but this person is physically inside the airplane having used his boarding pass for the purpose for which it exists: to facilitate boarding the plane. He is boarded. He was not in any way denied boarding. Rescinding that status is not listed at all in the contract of service.
Second, this is deeply uncivilized. The airline invited violence for a civil, non-criminal dispute resulting from their own planning negligence, and their own unwillingness to provide monetary compensation that anyone on board thought was reasonable.
And the police have liability here as well for agreeing to become violently involved in what is ultimately a monetary dispute.
Shame, shame, shame.
They needed the seats, fine. They asked for people to volunteer and no one did? Did they even offer maybe a 1st class on a flight taking off a few hours later? I can't imagine that out of more than 100 people they wouldn't find at least 4 interested in waiting in the airport to travel 1st class.
They handled that like bozos and I can absolutely see how a passenger chosen "at random" would make a fuss.
Apparently they did. The law is pretty clear on this. You can be refused a flight for this reason - United decided that they wanted the seat for their employee more than the passenger.
Once the passenger starts resisting, he/she should get removed by any means necessary, up to and including force. When people are acting unreasonably they should be prepared for unpleasant outcomes.
Some comments here talk about $800. I don't think that's equivalent to a 1st ticket, but I may be wrong.
In any case, they may have the law, but I still think it was very poorly handled.
I'm also curious to know what was their random process to select the 4 passengers.
Public opinion I think will also be very "unreasonable" regarding United in these circumstances.
It's lawful, and eventually you will be taken off the plane. The time to fight the battle is after you get off, not struggling against overwhelming odds and then getting charges piled on you.
Laws/rules don't change if people don't make a fuss about them being wrong.
This situation is akin to getting kicked out of a store that you were asked to leave.
Your rights and compensation are spelled out in the law dealing with situations like this. One person is not allowed to make these unilateral decisions because they feel as though the law is wrong in that time.
Laws and rules don't change if you act like an entitled drama queen that tries to bring race into the situation
I don't see United's contract of carriage rule 21 or rule 25 applicable. The passenger was granted boarding, not denied. FAR 91.3(a) doesn't apply, this has nothing to do with the operation of the aircraft. And federal regulation preempt state and local law, but you're welcome to try and convince me.
I see no contractual basis for involuntary removal after boarding is granted, other than being in breach of some other portion of the contract of carriage. The airline was basically in a position per their own contract, of auctioning off a seat on their own plane and they got pissy and called the police, which was improper, and then the police didn't bother to evaluate the appropriateness of removal.
Trespass doesn't apply, the passenger was authorized. Rescinding that state requires a basis in the contract, or FAA regulations or other law and so far the people engaging in victim blaming are providing a lot of jabber and no convincing explanations.
From united contract of carriage: UA shall have the right to refuse to transport or shall have the right to remove from the aircraft at any point, any Passenger for the following reasons...:
He was definitely not complying with and interfering with the duties of the members of the flight crew.Also, the distinction for boarding granting and non-granting is unclear to me. Is the fact that you receive a boarding pass indication that you're on the plane for good? Apparently not.
> people engaging in victim blaming
Assuming that the passenger was a victim. You should be blamed if you're at fault and unreasonable. If you're unhappy with the situation, deal with it later in the courts. Just like you can't talk your way out of a speeding ticket by "asserting your rights".
And in fact there's no oversold issue either, as it turns out. Exactly four paying passengers were removed for exactly four non-paying non-customer crew. That is not an oversold situation.
H) What safety issue applies here? This isn't a safety issue.
The contract has allowances in specific situations for passenger removal, not one of those allowances is applicable. You have to stretch way above and beyond the simple meaning of words in a dictionary to get where you're going.
> If you're unhappy with the situation, deal with it later in the courts. Just like you can't talk your way out of a speeding ticket by "asserting your rights".
That's asinine. Speeding tickets presuppose a civil or criminal offense from the outset. There is no civil, criminal or contractual offense at all on the part of the passenger/victim.
so instead, sell a couple of seats twice, and bet that not everyone will show up. if you're wrong and everyone shows up, you have to pay people extra to take another flight, but that apparently happens infrequently enough that overbooking makes money over the long term.
If they sold tickets up to the plane is full, no more: they would have to charge people for missing their flight since the seat left without them. While that might be legal (and moral?) it isn't something people like to happen to them, so the airlines sell just a little over so that they can tell the guy who missed his flight, "sorry, but you can use your ticket on the next flight so you are only out your time."
In short overbooking when it works right is a way to earn some goodwill from people who make a mistake.
When a business is acting in an abhorent, immoral, or unethical manner profit and greed are nearly always the fundamental reasons.
Depends on the ticket. For lower price tickets, generally speaking you don't get anything if you miss your flight. For Business and First class tickets you can generally re-book or get the ticket refunded if you miss your flight. There are also some insurance policies you can get which will refund at least most of your ticket if you miss your flight due to medical or family emergencies.
There are other reasons that this can happen. An aircraft change (due to maintenance issues, for example) might result in fewer seats being available. In this case, the airline needed to relocate some employees and seats weren't available. For the record, I believe they handled it very badly.
I've never seen EasyJet or Ryanair overbook flights (and they operate at WAY higher load factors that legacy airlines - Ryanair is up to 97% load factor on average).
Edit: looks like Ryanair actually doesn't overbook. "Ryanair is the only airline in Europe that does not overbook its flights; therefore Ryanair has eliminated the possibility of passengers being denied boarding due to overbooking."
Offer people compensation. Raise the offer until either (a) someone takes it, or (b) it's cheaper to send the employees via another route.
At some point the compensation isn't worth the profit margin of the other flight. They can just cancel it and let the flight crew go home.
why not? if the passenger in this situation was allowed to just refuse, Delta would have had to get its employees to another location via some other method, or delay/cancel whatever it was they were supposed to do when they go there.
why is that a worse universe than this one?
Actually, scratch that - the profession does not matter. Flying is an expensive form of travel and most people travelling do have a schedule to meet. Military can get very severely punished, businesspeople can lose critical deals, tourists can't get on connecting flights or get fired for being late back from vacation, and so on.
United just handled it completely wrong - instead of raising the offer as long as necessary, their staff decided that it would be simpler and cheaper to forcibly remove someone from the flight. It went wrong and now they must face the consequences.
I'm sure someone would have opted to delay their lives if the offer was $1k, $2k, hell $3k. Why does United get to economically benefit by getting their pilots to the next flight and profit from it, while inconveniencing someone else who has already purchased the flight? Sure, they're legally allowed to do what they did, but they didn't even bother to offer the maximum amount their own contract says to, so not sure why they would get any sympathy.
Also, it looks like United violated their own rules: https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of-carriag...
You've skipped over the part where the people involved bashed his head against another seat, then dragged him down the aisle while concussed and limp.
That said, refusing to follow the instructions of a flight crew and creating a scene is not going to end well for you however convinced you are in the righteousness of your position. (I have been bumped off a flight after I was onboard and sitting down. It was years ago and I don't remember what the exact circumstances were if I ever knew.)
Consider: suppose a kid lays across your driveway and refuses to budge. Are you allowed to drive over the kid? After all, if everyone starts doing this, you will lose your job and can't feed your own family, right?
Well, no. You have to figure out a way. Take a deep breath and call their parents, get an Uber or whatever it takes.
The situation would be different if a random person was just asking you not to go. In that case, you could ignore them.
Because physical violence is different.
The cops were there, though, and were (at least tacitly) authorizing the guy to try to physically remove the passenger. Is that legal and/or moral? Or does it have to be a uniformed officer before it becomes legal and moral?
Having a cop makes it legal, but the moral question is the one we are arguing.
I think the cop has the responsibility to remove the kid without endangering the kid.
If my doctor was laying on my driveway I'd drag him off and then leave. And it's morally and legally right to do so.
You have a "contract of lying on the driveway" with him, you've granted him permission to lie on the driveway for the next 1.5 hours, and your contract doesn't list you changing your mind as a reason for rescinding that prior permission, nor has he breached the contract in a way that permits you to remove him.
You're welcome to point out where in the contract of carriage you're basing your opinion. I'm finding no justification.
In my experience, the airlines offer a decent incentive for taking a bump and they do this before boarding. I know delays have been crazy the past few days, so maybe people who were already delayed didn't want to wait any longer?
I wonder what kind of incentives were offered? You'd hope United would offer enough to get someone to volunteer, especially in cases like this that are so late into the boarding process. Why not just get a United official on the plane to start raising incentives until the $ amount makes someone bite.
Terms and conditions of the contract may be legal but it could very well result in incidents like this.
They wanted to get an airline crew to another city. Sounds like United fucked up, overbooked a flight, and didn't want to :
This was a business decision. They didn't "have to" do shit, and certainly didn't "have to" call in the bouncers to forcibly eject a paying customer who was already in their seat.So no, no the passenger was not unreasonable, this is the only type of thing that gets their leadership far above the rank and file to take enough notice to actually change policies to something reasonable which is this: pay enough for volunteers. You overbooked the flight, you pay the price, simple as that.
For the love of god, don't side with corporations where the ones setting the policies and profiting are far removed from both the enforcers of those policies, and the customers suffering at their hands. This is probably the number one source of social problems in the modern age: lack of individual accountability.
Only reason I can think of an employee would take precedence over passenger.
> "The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher."
My reading is they beat him so badly they had to put him in a stretcher. Is that right?
Edit: it was a tweet quoted by Vanity Fair, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/united-airlines-passe...
https://twitter.com/Tyler_Bridges/status/851228695360663552
https://twitter.com/kaylyn_davis/status/851480498186485760
For comparison: a close friend suffers from tonic-clonic seizures. That's the kind you see in movies when they try to be dramating, violent shaking, foaming at the mouth. the whole nine yards. After waking up from a seizure like that he often acts rather single-mindedly towards a goal, turning violent if anything or anyone is in his way. A while back he had a seizure in public, it took 6 police officers to get him wrangled into the ambulance. This sort of significant personality change doesn't happen from a slight bump to the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy has a rather severe concussion.
So no. I don't think the adult man frantically mumbling "I gotta get home, I gotta get home, I gotta get home" with a bloodied face is fine by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I reckon the only reason he managed to get back on the plane is because of, to put it bluntly, retard strength caused by a serious knock to the brain.
They could offer cash/miles to whoever volunteered, increasing the offer until someone accepted. I've seen other airlines do this on several occasions. They couldn't have handled it worse than they did.
Note the weasel wording. I don't actually know.
To be clear, every flight is overbooked.
The airlines have run the numbers, and it is clearly more profitable to sell (for example) 105% of the plane, and then if more than 100% show up, pay people off to take a different flight.
I guess the op's question is, why was it not done here?
(Sadly) Everyone has a price for everything. Obviously that guy's price was not met. As you say, the airline has done the math... does their math include the cost of dragging a passenger bruised and bleeding off of their plane? Probably... Does it include the cost of cameras capturing the whole thing? Probably not.
Who's to say that this man's price was the lowest price? Turn it into a bidding process, the lowest 5 bids on the plane get paid, and the airline gets their seats.
The potential for misuse is not a good excuse for accepting negative actions.
On one hand, infrastructure costs for idle capacity would/could become cost prohibitive. On the other hand, the provider should be held aaccountable for their failing to provide reasonable uptime/service.
But flights fill up every day. When they do, airlines maximize profit.
1) $400
2) $800
3 and final) Leave the airplane or we'll beat the shit out of you.
Glad I made the decision to not fly United 4 years ago.
I find it hard to believe no one volunteered, even for a small amount, unless they were already delayed
It'd be interesting to see statistics on how often these offers are even redeemed.
Hmmmmm....
It is annoying and terrible but it is ehat it is.
They should have just realized they can get a crew to that plane and canceled that flight; take the hit. Those passengers haven't boarded yet and would be easier to deal with.
Also the rebooking is not necessarily on the same airline if they don't have a similar flight available that day but others do.
https://thepointsguy.com/2010/08/points-guy-pointer-anatomy-...
There is a racist angle here too. Why target the Chinese guy?
Most likely the lowest fare ticket on the plane, since compensation is capped at 4x the cost of the segment.
But when law becomes a reason to induce immoral and/or unethical (but legal) behavior - the civilization collapses.
Good luck to us all!
> [Charlie] Hobart said in the statement. "We apologize for the overbook situation."
In other words, "sorry about selling more seats than there were on the plane, but yeah, we had that guy beaten and dragged off. Deal with it."
Good perspective in the WP comments:
"The truly shocking thing here is that violence - with the real possibility of serious injury - was viewed as appropriate in a situation that was purely logistical. The airline wanted seats for its own employees. This was not an emergency - such as a terrorist attack or a drunk passenger endangering people. The lack of judgment is stunning. There is no way that violence was justified."
Our society is less violent today than even recent history and continued reductions are more likely than not.
Which I don't mean we shouldn't be concerned about unnecessary use of force, I mean that it requires very careful measurement to say that violence is being normalized (Rather than rejected).
I'm on the doctor's side, United should not overbook a plane and bump a customer to get their own people on board, but when someone refuses to leave what other options do you have? Taze him and drag him off? You'll have to use force to remove someone.
Ok, we're offering $10,000 to anyone who gets off.
I see twenty hands and we only need four.
How about $8,000, ok, down to 19 hands.
10 minutes later, and they probably would have ended up paying LESS than $800/seat.
DOT, Air passenger "Bill of Rights"
https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/fly-rights#Overbo...
> If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1350 maximum).
What else can you do?! Am I right?!
How do you feel? It is dark, rainy and tomorrow at 8 you have a job interview in the city.
You better pack up nicely and quickly, because I'll call the cops otherwise.
Let me know if you feel like you'd understand the situation.
In the free market, you offer enough money until someone decides that the offer is good enough. Everybody has a price.
In a fascist place, you call the thugs to punch an asian doctor unconscious, so that he can be dragged away from his (paid) seat, so that employees can take their (free) seats
Pay another airline to ship your employees. This is nothing but horrible planning on United's part. Worst case: Google Maps says a 5-hour drive separates Chicago from Louisville.
1. continue escalating their shitty voucher bribes : sooner or later someone's gonna bite
2. arrange alternate air transport for the crew : they're already in an airport, and 2 of their competitors (American, Southwest) have multiple direct flights between Chicago and Louisville each day
3. arrange ground transport : otherwise known as renting a car and driving. Not super fun, but I've had ironically had United pull that shit on me from NYC to DC - i.e. they cancelled a flight and put us on an overnight coach bus. If it's good enough for customers, it's good enough for the crew.
4. suck it up and delay whatever flight that crew was scheduled for. It sucks, but it was their mistake to overbook and this isn't a safety-critical situation.
Bottom line, there are about 951 different ways to tackle this problem and they chose the absolutely worst one out of the bunch. That kind of stupidity is legitimately impressive to behold.
Isn't there a good chance this happened anyway? I heard the plane was grounded for 2 hours.
They should not get into this situation. At ALL. They should, like they normally do, handle overbooking at the boarding stage -- by either offering compensation or by issuing IDB checks to people they choose to prevent from boarding.
What happened is major mistake and is morally despicable. I hope the passenger gets punitive damages.
However, I am curious. Once they made the decision to remove him. How could they have done so if he didn't want to move? A taser?
Even on a plane full of game theorists, willing to bid up to a million dollars, you're still probably miles away from the amount this will cost in negative PR, to say the least.
Plus, I am not a lawyer, but I think IDB means just that -- boarding. Once you board the airline cannot change its mind, not for commercial reasons (although it might be able to weasel out of that by getting everyone off and re-boarding without some people). Again, take with a grain of salt; this is just what I heard.
Lots of things were legally allowed established practices until they were not; people realized they were unethical and immoral, hopefully people will begin to realize this practice is also unethical and work to abolish legal overselling
But overbooking is almost certainly right. Look, fact is that some pax won't show up for their reservation. Without overbooking, planes would fly emptier, wasting money and damaging the environment.
The airlines have fairly good predictions in most cases, and people have different preferences, so that almost always in the small number of cases where there is not enough space you can get people to get bumped voluntarily. It's really a win-win.
Sure, you can try to go to the courts to get monetary compensation for that, but you can't force them to provide the service.
In future one might consider, "how likely are they to violently drag me off a plane?"
The public has pretty well demonstrated that they prefer lower-price tickets over a higher-quality flying experience. So the airlines are giving the public what (the majority of) the public wants - a crappy, but cheap, experience.
That's the source of the brand damage here: many people (rightly or not) will be wondering whether the same thing might happen to them if they fly United, and decide it's not worth the risk.
Sure, the flight would be delayed, perhaps significantly, but the impact of that would pale in comparison to this horrendous PR controversy.
I will point out that it is not United that "chose" violence. They asked the police to intervene. The state is supposed to have a monopoly on physical force, so they did.
Now, for the police, violence has always been normal, or normalized.
Consider the appropriate responses:
1. An airline should not call in the police when dealing with customers because they can reasonably expect violence.
2. The police should be retrained not to use violence. (Is this reasonable? You can imagine other instances where this where this would endanger them.)
3. As a society, we should not let police deal with "civil" situations where violence might occur. Perhaps we need another "force"?
And so on.
edit: clarity of last point
That is absolutely reasonable. In many countries, police are trained to de-escalate potentially hostile situations. Only in the US and probably a couple of police states are police officers required to escalate to violence.
And it's that tendency to escalate to violence that makes police a threat to society.
It's not that simple. The police in the US are trained to de-escalate situations too. That doesn't stop police violence from occurring either in the US or elsewhere (there is no shortage of horrific stories of police abuse from western/central Europe as well, for example).
Sure, but practically speaking if you have a realistic understanding of how most US police forces operate, you know that involving them in any kind of dispute greatly increases the chance of violence and harm for all involved. YMMV per locality and situation, but it's a pretty sensible rule of thumb that police involvement equals increased risk of violence, even in previously nonviolent conflicts.
Which is sad and unnecessary. I think it directly results from the prevalence of "warrior mentality" in US police training and operations. They are trained to view all citizens as potential enemy combatants to be dominated, rather than innocents to be protected; they are trained to put the safety of themselves and other officers above the safety of the citizenry; and they are trained to, if not always escalate, certainly to err on the side of escalation if there is any hint of violent action or ill intent from the citizens they interact with.
Obviously not the case here, but in general, when anyone could realistically be carrying a gun, I don't think the current situation is a big surprise.
This is kinda the point of OP, police violence has become so common-place that we take it as normal happenstance when it's used. There's an air of expected guilt for anyone on the receiving side of the violence but no doubt whatsoever on whether the violence was necessary in the first place.
Even being fired for cause just means getting the same job in the next town over.
Are you sure? I've never heard of it. I have heard of a police officer who was fired for de-escalating a situation through his training as a marine.
Maybe some police department do train their officers to de-escalate, but it's very clear that many don't. In fact, many US police officers are overly eager to de-escalate.
> That doesn't stop police violence from occurring either in the US or elsewhere (there is no shortage of horrific stories of police abuse from western/central Europe as well, for example).
Compared to the US, there is absolutely a shortage of stories about police abuse in western/central Europe. Yes, it happens, but not on that scale, and the kind of police violence that Americans have come to accept as normal is not considered acceptable in most of Europe.
Wonder why. Because it's not newsworthy.
The biggest difference is most of the time when an officer abuses the public in the EU they are fired and criminally charged
In the US they are given a 3-5 day paid vacation while the police union and the dept find away to cover up the event, and the insurance company for the dept strong arms the victim into taking a no fault settlement that rarely even covers the medical costs for the victim
“In the US, police training lasts on average 19 weeks,” she writes, while “in much of Europe that would be unthinkable. In Germany, for example, police train for at least 130 weeks - http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7709638
The objection here is that violence wasn't sufficiently gated, and nor was violence minimally applied -- the airline could've just paid people to get off with a real offer, and not a dishonest offer where people suspect they're going to get tricked by funny coupons and vouchers.
Surely the flight attendants politely asked the man to leave, and when he refused they called their manager who did the same, and only at that stage did they call the police, who also probably asked the man to leave first, before finally resorting to dragging him out.
At the end of the day, the plane is owned by United, and they have every right to uninvite him from their property, at which point he is trespassing, and it becomes a police matter. Sure, they might violate their own ToS on their tickets at that point, but that's a purely civil matter.
Maybe, maybe not. Airlines are heavily subsidized by the US government in exchange for regulation so they will offer service to rural areas which might not otherwise be viable to run an airline into our out of. There are also laws and regulations which turn disobedience of airline personnel into a federal offense in particular situations.
Whether these, combined with this passenger's situation, turns this from a civil to a federal matter is something I'd leave for the lawyers.
You're asking the police, a third-party representing the state and its acknowledged monopoly on legitimate use of force, to become involved. That doesn't necessarily mean that the resolution will or must be violent.
Much more useful would be deescalation and mediation, but that is not the training given to US police.
It seems like large portions of the police force in the US and the perception of it has degenerated to be some brutish muscle. It's concerning how much that is accepted.
The only thing the police have that United lacks in this circumstance is the monopoly on violence; by asking the police to become involved, United is asking for violence, by force or it's explicit or implied threat, to be deployed to resolve this situation.
It's true that police can use mechanisms other than force or explicit threat, but so can United without involving the police. The only reason to involve the police is because they are violence, at least in the form of implied threat of force.
The only thing the police have that United lacks in this circumstance is the monopoly on violence
United can't act as a third-party moderator, which can be useful in confrontations like this. The police can act in this role. Yes, part of their authority in this role is that they represent law enforcement, and the potential for use of force.
One point that perhaps has been made elsewhere in the submission comments but not in this thread is that simply arresting the man is a use of force, regardless of whether the man allows himself to be arrested peacefully or otherwise. In my mind that's significantly different from dragging someone off of a plane or beating them, though those, too, are uses of force. Is arresting someone peaceably violence? I'd argue not, though I'm open to hearing other thoughts on this.
I've been trying to express that just asking for the police is not requesting that the resolution would necessarily be violent, that there are other options available by having the police there, while clearly acknowledging that the police, as law enforcement, are an extension of the monopoly on legitimate use of force (which is a type of violence). Reading the responses I've received, it seems that I haven't been particularly effective in making that point.
In the interest of learning how to better express myself, would you point out to me how I could have done a better job? In particular, what phrases or statements did I make that prompted your response? I believe the only meaningful difference between what you've written and what I've tried to express is that the only purpose of the police in the situation is the use of force (or the potential use of force). Is that a correct assessment in your eyes?
I hate to sound like an old guy but I do remember when police used to try to resolve issues. Much like many police interactions I've witnessed in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Police used to try to get everyone to calm down and figure out a solution that did not involve the need to get violent or anyone going to jail.
For instance, in this case, the police could have asked the doctor why he didn't want to deplane. With that knowledge they could have approached the United crew and informed them that this was a doctor who had to be at work tomorrow and imply that getting their four staff to another location seemed to be less important, so maybe they could find another passenger or find another solution.
If United persisted, the police should have gone back to the doctor and said, "Listen, we're on your side. They're being a-holes. But, it's their plane and they're asking you to leave which means you're trespassing and failing to follow the orders of a flight crew. We don't not want to arrest you or have to remove you by force, but we're boxed in a corner here. Just come with us and we'll help you file a complaint."
Yes, there's a fairly wide belief in this, including by many leaders in law enforcement; that is, that American police have been trained in a means which over-encourages use of force, and that this should be changed (in some places, the work has begun an implementing such a change.)
A key write-up of this is: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/248654.pdf
EDIT: also:
> I will point out that it is not United that "chose" violence. They asked the police to intervene.
Asking the police to intervene because the state has a monopoly on violence, so they are free to use it in ways you are not, is choosing violence, even if the police might also veto that choice. So the issue is exactly that United chose violence.
It definitely should not have been requested of them, but it's possible laws were broken.
This passenger violated no laws but the CPD willingly intervened as an agent of the corporation.
Guys with guns weren't required. United could have offered more compensation to volunteers or accommodated their crew on competing airlines.
In related news, we learn that Barclay's "received assistance from a US law enforcement agency" to unmask a whistleblower.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/04/10/whistleblowin...
Law enforcement have become lackeys of corporations, when their job should be to protect ordinary people from these abuses.
I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be too difficult to place charges of some sort on him. Not complying with police orders might be one, trespass might be another.
I've never heard of trespass being used in this situation.
Since he appeared to be reasonably passive, I suspect it would be difficult to charge him with anything.
An aviation attorney commented about this and seemed to suggest it's very gray: http://denver.cbslocal.com/2017/04/10/united-airlines-remove...
In the end, this is going to cost United a TON. United could have flown a plane with only those 4 employees on it for way less than the hit they are about to take.
Of course very few people will defend the airline's actions here, but while saying you won't ever fly United again is easy, is competition really strong enough among (in this case) US domestic airlines to enforce that boycott?
I am guessing most people will simply opt for United if their flights are the most convenient for them, and leave the boycotting to someone else.
I suspect not just because talk is cheap, but also because we have come to accept the current state of affairs surround air travel. From the moment you step into an airport until you depart at your destination, you submit. You'll docilely submit to standing in a queue being treated as a potential terrorist to the point of being shouted at if you don't comply fast enough or simply don't understand what is required of you, and (for most of us who can't afford first or business class) you'll submit to being treated as a third rate citizen. Flying means keeping your head down and submitting until you regain your sovereignty at your point of destination.
Flying sucks, and we grudgingly accept it in lieu of alternatives, or because we actually believe that this treatment is necessary for our safety. Next week people will have mostly forgotten about this incident and will fly United without a second thought if the need arises.
Then there's not much to fear, because I don't see anyone at all finding this normal. It's on every news site and social network, everyone is deeply disturbed about these events.
If anything this clearly shows that violence is FAR from normal in peoples' mind.
You can't put a man into debt unless you have the capacity for violence to enforce it. He doesn't pay you back, you break his legs, or take his sons and daughters as slaves. Today we have reduced the violence. Now companies ruin credit, get a Sheriff to evict someone from a house foreclosure, harass you with phone calls .. it's a less violence but it's still a form of it.
This violence is also the origin of money (and debt). A conqueror takes a country. That leader needs to pay his army (they are expensive). So you take the area you took and they can only pay taxes with coins; your coins specifically. Only soldiers have those coins, so you leave a garrison that gets paid from the debt you put the people in.
Before the US destroyed Libya, it had the highest GDP in Africa and no debt to the WMF. Today, the "rebels" the US imported are now in debt to the WMF and the people no longer have free electricity or education.
Any kind of property requires violence to exist. If I say "this is my land" and you disagree, the only way I can enforce my claim is through violence. Debt is just a specific case of a general phenomenon. (This applies to communal property, too.)
> Before the US destroyed Libya, it had the highest GDP in Africa
Do you have a source for this? I see Libya's GDP circa 2005 at $41 billion (in 2005 U.S. dollars) [1]. South Africa's 2005 GDP was $260 billion in current U.S. dollars [2] (bit over $200 billion in 2005 U.S. dollars [3]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Libya
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/country/south-africa
[3] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com
http://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-from-africas-richest-stat...
The debt motive for the invasion makes little sense. American banks made more money on Ghadaffi's Libya [2].
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/business/dealbook/libyan-...
You borrow £20 from your friends, if you don't pay there is moaning but not usually more. You borrow £100k for a mortgage and don't pay and they may change the locks and put someone else in your house but don't usually hit you.
The United violence has nothing to do with debt.
This book?
In "original" societies it is not abnormal for 50% of males to die violent deads. In our societies it is less than 2% as far as i remember. Including two world wars!
So the violence of debt is not that relevant in the big picture.
This is an internal business matter for a private company, and United had several alternatives.
United didn't have to overbook the flight in the first place.
United could have accommodated their additional crew on a competing airline or private plane.
United could have offered more compensation to volunteers to leave the flight.
There is absolutely no reason for a taxpayer-funded police force to intervene in this private matter. The passenger violated no laws.
Section 25 doesn't apply, they were not denied boarding. And I don't see anything in section 21 they've violated either. Their forced removal seems to be the airline violating their own contract, not the passenger.
https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of-carriag...
So, yeah, I'd hate to be United's CEO at the moment, this is now too big to sweep under the rug and blindly quote IDB and other such laws.
The law may be on United's side but United's employees on board could have been more human about it and not let this happen once the passenger refused to be booted off the plane. Since when is use of force the norm?
1. There will be no personal consequences for any of the belligerents involved in this, including the airline employees and police officers. Nobody is going to get fired.
2. The victim will receive no compensation for his injuries, instead will be further victimized in the courts.
3. There will be no business cost to United. They are already known as one of the most awful airlines in the world, and people still voluntarily choose to do business with them. People will continue to fly with them despite them now having earned the "Beats Its Customers" badge.
However that might also still result in people deciding not to fly or switch loyalties where they are flexible (ie, someone having lots of miles in several air programs without any restriction to use UA flights).
Stochastically speaking, this event will likely have an impact if anyone at UA cares to look for it months from now.
Instead they chose violence.
I will never fly United Airlines again.