Police violently drag man from United plane after airline overbooked flight

At first they offered $400 for volunteers.

Then they offered $800 for volunteers.

Then when they still had no volunteers they randomly selected some people using (supposed) computerized random selection.

When one of those randomly selected people refused, they beat him, and dragged him bleeding, off the plane.

Apparently $800 was their limit. After the limit is reached they roll in the muscle and beat you up if you don't comply.

I smell a hilariously large payout for this poor guy sometime soon. This is a PR disaster for United.

This story will probably get flagged and removed, but I think it's worth discussing.

Apparently United offered only $800 for that seat. As I understand it, they needed it to reposition crew so it was obviously worth a lot more than that to them.

I think there should be better consumer protection laws for situations like this. If United wants to oversell a flight there should be actual consequences for them besides some ridiculously low payment to customers for breaking their side of the deal. They should have to do something like a reverse auction.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079837