Overbooking, Flightcrew over paying passengers, the United incident

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

The mistake here is that they were no longer asking him. They were telling him, and like it or not, they have the right to do that.

That's not a mistake: it's an irrelevant aside. The point is, refusing is not escalating. It's the person who introduces violence or the threat of violence that is escalating.

The notion that a refusal to comply is 'escalating' implicitly justifies the use of force on someone who is not complying. It's the exact same argument that underlies so many cases of police brutality. The pattern is: police ask you to do something, you object, you get pepper-sprayed or hit with a baton or even shot, police officer put under investigation, police officer says 'he escalated so I had to use force'.

That, not some nonsense about how everyone hates flying, is the reason so many people I know are upset by this case. They see in it yet another example of this dangerous mentality. They wonder if a white passenger would be treated this way, or if it's only 'escalating' when a racial minority has the gall to say 'no' to an authority figure. Right or wrong, that's what they wonder, and they have reason to IMO.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

17 minutes ago, Ded As Ned said:

They likely did not have that right, see Scot's post above.

I was listening to a panel of lawyers and experts on aviation issues and they concluded that the airline could remove Dao in this situation. I'll try and find a written version of what they said.

35 minutes ago, Ded As Ned said:

I see it as the airline was wasting hundreds of people's time.  With surely a myriad other options available to them to get their crew to Louisville, they chose to hold up a full (not overbooked) flight, and then kick 4 people off the flight to accommodate their employees on a whim. Then when not enough (boarded and confirmed) passengers volunteered to disembark, they further wasted hundred of people's time and picked some at random.  One refused, so they removed him via [excessive, imo] force.  YMMV

I'm not saying that United is without fault, just that absolving Dao of any is wrong. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

36 minutes ago, mormont said:

That's not a mistake: it's an irrelevant aside. The point is, refusing is not escalating. It's the person who introduces violence or the threat of violence that is escalating.

Both are examples of escalation. You can escalate a situation without introducing violence. 

45 minutes ago, mormont said:

The notion that a refusal to comply is 'escalating' implicitly justifies the use of force on someone who is not complying. It's the exact same argument that underlies so many cases of police brutality. The pattern is: police ask you to do something, you object, you get pepper-sprayed or hit with a baton or even shot, police officer put under investigation, police officer says 'he escalated so I had to use force'.

And in many of those cases the police turn out to be in the wrong. That doesn't make it a universally invalid justification. 

Again, if you have a passenger on a plane who has been ordered to get off and refuses to do so, what do you do? By all accounts security tried really hard to coax him into getting off on his on volition. 

54 minutes ago, mormont said:

That, not some nonsense about how everyone hates flying, is the reason so many people I know are upset by this case. They see in it yet another example of this dangerous mentality. They wonder if a white passenger would be treated this way, or if it's only 'escalating' when a racial minority has the gall to say 'no' to an authority figure. Right or wrong, that's what they wonder, and they have reason to IMO.

Then why does the conversation generally revert back to "oh the airlines are so awful"? I'm not saying it's the only reason, but it is generally speaking, the loudest. 

[Swordfish]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Tywin, Swordfish,

The fact that this flight wasn't in fact "overbooked" appears to have greater significance that I thought.  Take a look at this article:

https://www.inc.com/cynthia-than/the-controversial-united-airlines-flight-was-not-overbooked-and-why-that-matters.html?cid=sf01002&sr_share=facebook

From the article:
 

I think we now know why this was originally billed as "overbooking" it may be legally significant that this wasn't an "overbooked" flight.

 

Is it your contention, Scot, that the Airline may only remove passengers from planes if a flight is over booked?

 

2 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

That doesnt mean everybody has to be ok with it. Regardless of what happens legally, the public at large is sending a message with their own rights here.

It should be pretty obvious that most people don't care about the condition of this guy here. Imo, It's more about the frustrations people have with airlines not being shy to enforce these rights they have over their customers.

 

 

Which is all well and good, except that the post you are responding to was specifically addressing the notion of whether or not they ahd the right to remove him.

You may think that the legalities are irrelevant, but that isn't a universal opinion.

 

2 hours ago, Ded As Ned said:

They likely did not have that right, see Scot's post above.

 

 

I see it as the airline was wasting hundreds of people's time.  With surely a myriad other options available to them to get their crew to Louisville, they chose to hold up a full (not overbooked) flight, and then kick 4 people off the flight to accommodate their employees on a whim. Then when not enough (boarded and confirmed) passengers volunteered to disembark, they further wasted hundred of people's time and picked some at random.  One refused, so they removed him via [excessive, imo] force.  YMMV

 

So many things wrong here, so little time to go over them AGAIN.

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Swordfish,

It is my contention that there needs to be cause, beyond wanting to put someone else on the flight, to remove a paying passenger on an aircraft when the flight is not "overbooked".

[Swordfish]

21 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Swordfish,

It is my contention that there needs to be cause, beyond wanting to put someone else on the flight, to remove a paying passenger on an aircraft when the flight is not "overbooked".

And what is this contention based on?

And are you suggesting you would not have an issue here if everything had happened as it did, but the flight had actually been oversold?  i find that highly unlikely.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

36 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

And what is this contention based on?

And are you suggesting you would not have an issue here if everything had happened as it did, but the flight had actually been oversold?  i find that highly unlikely.

No, that's not what I'm saying.  United would be in trouble here if everything they did was perfectly legal.  People don't have to like what happens simply because what happens is legal.  I'm saying United may be in more trouble because the actions they contended was perfectly legal, but ugly, may not be "perfectly legal".

[Iskaral Pust]

As a frequent flier, on United unfortunately, I'm glad to see this is shining some light on their contract of carriage.

#1 - this flight was not over-sold, therefore United had no contractual basis to deny boarding to any of the ticketed passengers who checked in on time and presented themselves at the gate for boarding.  The airline's desire to carry their employees is not mentioned in the carriage of contract as a basis to deny boarding to a ticketed passenger.  Nowhere in the contract does it say that airline employees take precedence over a paid ticket.

#2 - once a passenger has been assigned a seat and has boarded the flight, denial of boarding no longer applies.  The carriage of contract has a separate section for removal from a flight, and that is a much narrower list of criteria around posing a danger to other passengers, not merely because the flight is oversold, if it even was oversold.  If it's oversold, they need to bump you before they board you, not after.

This article on Bloomberg lays it out pretty well.  I'm not a lawyer and I doubt the journalist is either, but I'd like to see passenger rights articulated much more clearly after this.

That's all separate from my central complaint that police goons should not physically/violently enforce a petty contract dispute without a court order, but it shows just how much latitude United and other airlines have taken with bumping passengers to suit their own needs.

 

[Ghadrack]

I think the Airline behaved abhorrently here,  but here's how I think they could have avoided this nightmare,

If the issue is that they had 4 crew members what needed to get from point A to point B, first I would have looked for alternative transport, I work for large company, we have corporate jets, I cant' believe that an Airline doesn't have this option to move personnel around in case of emergency.  

If that option doesn't work, they offered the passengers paid incentives to give up seats, that failed.  

Before bringing in law enforcement in to physically remove a passenger if they had determined, come hell or high water they were getting those for employees on the plan, I think they should have unloaded all the passengers off the plan because of a "boarding error" if they treated everyone the same and kicked everyone off the plane, then put their crew members on plane, then disallowed the people they wanted to boot off the plane from getting back on they would have avoided having to literally drag someone off the plane.  It takes 20 to 30 minutes to unload then another 20 to 30 minutes to load a plane, they would have taken less than the two hours they ended up jerking everyone around and they wouldn't have brought in the police to enforce a seemingly arbitrary policy.

P.S. as a business traveler, I have fly periodically for work, but if I can drive someplace in less than ten hours and I would have to fly with at least one connecting flight I drive and often beat my flight.  Airline travel is abject misery, I can't wait for the day I never have to fly again,. 

 

[Dr. Pepper]

I think not allowing boarding until they've determine who will stay behind is infinitely easier than boarding and hoping someone will then get off.

Oh, and also increasing the monetary benefit for being bumped to it's max.  Shouldn't have stopped at $800 when they could have gone up to $1350.

[Altherion]

24 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

That's all separate from my central complaint that police goons should not physically/violently enforce a petty contract dispute without a court order, but it shows just how much latitude United and other airlines have taken with bumping passengers to suit their own needs.

I completely agree with you about both of the points in your post, but this is the rare case in which this latitude is necessary. Suppose the airline makes a mistake and allows N+1 passengers to board a plane with N seats. Furthermore, suppose that none of them is willing to leave the plane despite the airline's blandishments. Now what?

That said, there need to be (and will possibly arise as a result of the result of this case) strict safeguards to prevent them from abusing this authority in arbitrary situations.

[Swordfish]

let's not forget also that overbooking is not 'THE GREAT AND FINAL EVIL'.

it's not a stretch to point out that for people with some flexibility in their travel schedules, there can be a significant benefit to being voluntarily bumped.

[Iskaral Pust]

29 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I completely agree with you about both of the points in your post, but this is the rare case in which this latitude is necessary. Suppose the airline makes a mistake and allows N+1 passengers to board a plane with N seats. Furthermore, suppose that none of them is willing to leave the plane despite the airline's blandishments. Now what?

That said, there need to be (and will possibly arise as a result of the result of this case) strict safeguards to prevent them from abusing this authority in arbitrary situations.

It's a worthwhile scenario to consider but an unseated passenger who refuses to deplane before take-off is therefore endangering themselves and others, and that meets the standard for necessary removal.  At that point, you just want your police officer to manage the situation appropriately and with minimal violence.  It has shifted from a question of contract dispute to public endangerment.

I would acknowledge that indefinitely delaying take-off would avoid the need for removal, but it's similar to someone walking persistently in the middle of the highway.  I don't want police to brutalize a jay-walker (look at the news report yesterday), but if the person persists in their public endangerment then, rather than stopping traffic indefinitely until they desist, they need to be warned that they face arrest and, if necessary, arrested with minimum necessary force.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Both are examples of escalation. You can escalate a situation without introducing violence. 

OK. What is your definition of 'escalation', then?

Mine is easy: moving things to another level. Introducing something into the situation that was not there before.

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

And in many of those cases the police turn out to be in the wrong. That doesn't make it a universally invalid justification. 

Well, we differ, then. Using force against non-forceful, non-threatening non-cooperation is escalation IMO and morally unacceptable in almost any circumstance. The belief that it's OK has contributed greatly to the culture that encourages police brutality, particularly towards minorities, and that is what is upsetting many people about this case.

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Again, if you have a passenger on a plane who has been ordered to get off and refuses to do so, what do you do?

In this situation, you admit that you did something really stupid, back down and re-think. What really caused this situation was the airline's inappropriate and inflexible use of their legal authority. Abuse of power, in other words. They were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and now people are saying 'what else could they do?' Answer: put the hammer away and calm down.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

44 minutes ago, mormont said:

OK. What is your definition of 'escalation', then?

Mine is easy: moving things to another level. Introducing something into the situation that was not there before.

" an increase in the intensity or seriousness of something; an intensification "

I don't think you can argue that his refusal to get off of the plane didn't caused the situation to intensify. That moved things to the next level. 

48 minutes ago, mormont said:

Well, we differ, then. Using force against non-forceful, non-threatening non-cooperation is escalation IMO and morally unacceptable in almost any circumstance. The belief that it's OK has contributed greatly to the culture that encourages police brutality, particularly towards minorities, and that is what is upsetting many people about this case.

I actually agree with you for the most part. But the rub here is how else do you get Dao off of the plane if he physically refuses to leave voluntarily? I do agree they should have tried to offer him or someone else more money to get off, but once they decided that they weren't going to do that what other options did they have? The only other option at that point was to try and shame him off the plane and there is some evidence that they tried that, albeit not for long enough for it to have an effect.

53 minutes ago, mormont said:

In this situation, you admit that you did something really stupid, back down and re-think. What really caused this situation was the airline's inappropriate and inflexible use of their legal authority. Abuse of power, in other words. They were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and now people are saying 'what else could they do?' Answer: put the hammer away and calm down.

I'm not sure if this idiom works for someone outside of the U.S., but that's a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking. I can see how in the moment things spiraled and if you're the security guard how you might eventually resort to using force to remove Dr. Dao.

That said, I think we can all agree that some good will come out of all of this. The airline industry was already heavily in need of reform and this should hopefully kick start the process from both the corporate and legal sides. 

2 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I think not allowing boarding until they've determine who will stay behind is infinitely easier than boarding and hoping someone will then get off.

Oh, and also increasing the monetary benefit for being bumped to it's max.  Shouldn't have stopped at $800 when they could have gone up to $1350.

I agree with the second part. As to the first, I believe it was reported that it originally started with needing to bump one person and then after boarding it jumped up to four. But generally speaking the policy of most airlines is to bump people before boarding them.

1 hour ago, Swordfish said:

it's not a stretch to point out that for people with some flexibility in their travel schedules, there can be a significant benefit to being voluntarily bumped.

This. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Swordfish said:

let's not forget also that overbooking is not 'THE GREAT AND FINAL EVIL'.

it's not a stretch to point out that for people with some flexibility in their travel schedules, there can be a significant benefit to being voluntarily bumped.

Yeah, exactly, so there's no need to violently remove someone who doesn't want to be ejected from the flight they've paid for.

 

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I was listening to a panel of lawyers and experts on aviation issues and they concluded that the airline could remove Dao in this situation. I'll try and find a written version of what they said.

I'm not saying that United is without fault, just that absolving Dao of any is wrong. 

Great that the lawyer panel decided that.  Did they say that the airline had the right to call in police to bloody the guy?  Why are you caping for the airline so hard here?

[Wethers]

Quote

I actually agree with you for the most part. But the rub here is how else do you get Dao off of the plane if he physically refuses to leave voluntarily? I do agree they should have tried to offer him or someone else more money to get off, but once they decided that they weren't going to do that what other options did they have?

Didn't they have the option of NOT removing Dao from the plane, cutting their losses, and finding an alternative way to get 1 or more of the flight crew to St. Louis, which is a 5 hour drive and 1 hour flight away.  This is a large airline operating out of their hub (Chicago O'Hare), potential options to buy seats from other airlines, or to hire a town car etc. - seems like $800, and certainly $1,350 would have been enough to cover one of those approaches and perhaps even leave enough to compensate the somewhat inconvenienced United flight crew employee in a minor way.

Longer term of course, United could switch to a reverse auction like Delta to more efficiently identify passengers willing to get bumped and not end up picking the one guy that apparently was *least* willing!

[DunderMifflin]

5 hours ago, Swordfish said:

 

 

Which is all well and good, except that the post you are responding to was specifically addressing the notion of whether or not they ahd the right to remove him.

You may think that the legalities are irrelevant, but that isn't a universal opinion.

Close enough to universal that it's a huge problem for United.

[Fragile Bird]

I think one of the points you are all forgetting about was, as the prez of United said, the employees were not provided with the training or the flexibility to be able to use common sense. That is likely the root of the problem.

The law says passengers should be offered up to 400% of a one way ticket, with a cap of $1350. Not, passengers can be offered up to $1350.

A one way fare next Sunday from Chicago to Louisville can be had for $200, so $800 meets the cap. If reports are true that the airline had actually gone up to $1000, they probably went as high as they were allowed, an additional 100% of the one way fare.

 

[IamMe90]

2 hours ago, Wethers said:

Didn't they have the option of NOT removing Dao from the plane, cutting their losses, and finding an alternative way to get 1 or more of the flight crew to St. Louis, which is a 5 hour drive and 1 hour flight away. 

Yes, yes they did. And that's all that really needs to be said to completely defeat your argument, @Tywin et al.

I'm sorry, but Mormont is completely correct here. There were so many options available to the airline that did not involve violence. The airline made the decision to exercise their discretion that way, and no one else. Your point is completely asinine; "once they decided they were going to do that, what options did they have?" 

Like, you could literally say that about anything. "Well, once they decided they were going to take a certain course of action... what choice did they have but to take that course of action?" Well, obviously, none, since that's what they decided to do. The whole point is that there were a host of other, more desirable options they could have decided to take.