Flight or fight? United's 're-accommodation' of passenger a colossal mistake | Hacker News Reader

Flight or fight? United's 're-accommodation' of passenger a colossal mistake

theage.com.au

24 pointshoodoof10 comments

Seems to me that the reason this sort of thing happens is that in the 21st century there is a general expectation from people in power/authority that they must be obeyed, and that "common people/citizens" who do not obey have crossed authority and can be dealt with in virtually any manner they choose, including physical violence.

This perception has formed because governments have moved more and more towards this manner of interacting with "common people".

When I see this, it seems to be precisely the same behaviour as when the police beat people up for questioning their authority at any level.

In summary: "Well he didn't do what he was told, so what did he expect?"

Agreed, violence as a response to disobeying law enforcement has been normalized in the US, regardless of context/circumstances.

De-escalation and common sense are more often replaced by brute force.

But in this case, it's violence in response to not obeying a company - who someone purchased a service from.

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of-carriag...

Clause 5C.2 "Your purchase of services from Corporation may be provided with a light to medium level beating. Additional fees may be charged for such beating."

From Rule 25:

"When there is an Oversold UA flight that originates in the U.S.A. or Canada"

This flight was not oversold. The passengers had been gate-checked and embarked[0], ready for departure. There was no shortage of revenue seats.

However the airline realised that it needed to position a crew to another destination and to save a few dollars opted to remove four fare-paying passengers from the flight to make space for their non-rev crew.

Regardless of that, it does show that when one party ( United ) subcontracts to another ( Republic Airways ) in order to save money, the blowback of adverse PR is onto the main brand and rightly so.

[0] technically they weren't yet "boarded" because the doors were open, which interestingly also means that the aircraft wasn't "in flight" and therefore the airline can't appeal to concerns of flight safety.

An interesting comment I ran across... not sure if it's valid or not, though:

"Lawyer here. This myth that passengers don't have rights needs to go away, ASAP. Here is how United illegally kicked him off the plane:

1. First of all, it's airline spin to call this an overbooking. The statutory provision granting them the ability to deny boarding is about "OVERSALES", specifically defines as booking more reserved confirmed seats than there are available. This is not what happened. They did not overbook the flight; they had a fully booked flight, and not only did everyone already have a reserved confirmed seat, they were all sitting in them. The law allowing them to denying boarding in the event of an oversale does not apply.

2. Even if it did apply, the law is unambiguously clear that airlines have to give preference to everyone with reserved confirmed seats when choosing to involuntarily deny boarding. They have to always choose the solution that will affect the least amount of reserved confirmed seats. This rule is straightforward, and United makes very clear in their own contract of carriage that employees of their own or of other carriers may be denied boarding without compensation because they do not have reserved confirmed seats. On its face, it's clear that what they did was illegal-- they gave preference to their employees over people who had reserved confirmed seats, in violation of 14 CFR 250.2a.

3. Furthermore, even if you try and twist this into a legal application of 250.2a and say that United had the right to deny him boarding in the event of an overbooking; they did NOT have the right to kick him off the plane. Their contract of carriage highlights there is a complete difference in rights after you've boarded and sat on the plane, and Rule 21 goes over the specific scenarios where you could get kicked off. NONE of them apply here. He did absolutely nothing wrong and shouldn't have been targeted. He's going to leave with a hefty settlement after this fiasco."

It seems that security officers manhandled the passenger. But I wonder if they knew why they were removing the passenger. If a flight crew asks the security crew to remove a passenger who is refusing to leave, i'd imagine they would try what ever they can. I am not making an excuse for any of them, especially for harming someone.

Airport, from the security checks to being in an airplane has been turning into a nightmare process for some. I hope things get better and not worse progressing forward.

I wonder if the security people were operating under a general expectation of concluding such an action within a certain amount of time, or if they were ordered in this instance to conclude within a certain amount of time.

I also wonder if the plane actually was "overbooked," or if the need to get four crew-passengers on the plane was due to a sudden and unforeseen event. Claiming "overbooked" may give the airline some advantage that not overbooked would not. No idea what the rules for overbooked vs not overbooked are in this case, it just seems weird that exactly four people needed to leave for these four crew members, and not, say, five because of a real overbooking.

United dies gave a plan for choosing people, based on ticket class and time if checking (among other things) so no, they would not have asked someone in first class. But they don't have a procedure for removing someone from the plane, at least not for this reason. As far as I can tell all of their procedures deal with people before they get on the plane. They do have a list of reasons to declare someone, but over booking is not one of them.

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