The fact that the airline technically didn't do anything illegal here really speaks to the lack of consumer protection laws in this country.
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/593329-usa-today-ua-forci...
If airline employees cannot legally contribute to "overbooking" and if a passenger has different rights once seated, then there will be a legal settlement. In that scenario, every communication by United would need to serve dual PR and legal objectives.
CFR 250.2a covers overbooking but only applies before boarding. Since the United employees had no confirmed reserved seats on the aircraft, they cannot be given priority over a customer with a confirmed reserved seat.
The passenger was already boarded, so they cannot rely on oversales rules to refuse service. Instead they need to rely on their Contract of Carriage which does not allow them to eject customers for any reason whatsoever. The most circular thing they could eject him for was failure to follow the terms of the contract of carriage for refusing to disembark. They publicly stated that their reason for asking him to leave was because he was selected by a computer, but this is not allowed by their rule 21.
They had no legal right to refuse him service at that point.
This whole act of struggling with the police is never going to get a good outcome. It will only escalate things from a civil matter to a criminal one.
United asserts, they prioritise their employees gaining seats on the flight because their employees are actually necessary to the operation of this flight and others.
It makes business sense, and its logical.
There's no law on any book that will force someone to serve you, whether it be transportation wise or by letting you have use of their mobile property (land/residences are a special case). United can pick random people at any time to get off the flight, for any reason, and at worst it will be a contractural breach or a violation of a civil statue (like the overbooking clause).
Once he was told to get off, he should have gotten off.
It was United, not the passenger, who escalated to violence in a purely civil matter. He did not force himself onto the plane, he simply declined to give up the seat he had already been given.
You should go back to law school. They can eject anyone at any time for any reason.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/757712/passengers-rejoic...
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/201...
Both of your examples would violate Rule 21, H, 1, and therefore removal is allowed.
In the case under discussion, the passenger was not in breach of rule 21 for any of the listed reasons.
What did they do that should be illegal?
Overselling each flight makes the tickets cheaper. People want cheaper tickets. So it isn't obvious to me that over selling is wrong. Is the problem that they failed to stop the people boarding before deciding they didn't want to carry them on that flight?
The opposite setup would not, though. i.e., like refundable tickets, offer non-refundable guaranteed tickets that are locked out of the ticket system. This maintains the current pricing characteristics while offering travellers the option of paying more when it matters to them.
Or a sliding scale of probability of being seated. If your typical ticket has a 99% chance of being seated, most people won't care to pay extra but they know they have the possibility of being booted and cannot possibly complain.
The problem with all of these approaches is they add to the complexity of purchasing a ticket, which consumers generally don't like.
Should the airlines be prevented from ever contacting law enforcement? Is law enforcement not responsible for their own actions after the airline asks them to do something?
If someone is actually causing a problem or is somehow dangerous, then yes, by all means, call the police.
Overbooking means airlines can offer passengers refundable tickets.
Occasionally they get it wrong and have too many people show up. So they offer compensation to get people to voluntarily give up seats. If they can't get people to voluntarily give up seats they have the right to pick who to deny service to (but by law have to pay specific compensation to).
It's a system that works well. It keeps planes as full as possible. It keeps fares as low as possible.
I'm not sure it should change based on one guy who decided he was too important to accept being bumped.
Point is the compensation is obfuscated. If people demanded their $1350 or whatever when this happened, things may be better.
Why is it now that the consumer always has no rights? Don't want your private information sold when using the internet? Don't use the internet.
Don't want to be forcibly removed from a plane in which you followed all the rules for purchasing a ticket that was most likely non-refundable if you didn't show up, lost your rights for privacy by being searched to board the plane, stood in line to board the plane, was on time, boarded the plane to sit in an uncomfortable seat, maybe had to pay extra to store your luggage, then get beat up when you were told they weren't going to honor the contract?
What is this country becoming?
I think it's a bad situation, but I also think people giving very high priority to price is a big part of the reason that the contract is shit.
In a sane world, overbooking would be at best illegal, the airline would realize the savings from the flight they were paid for but didn't actually have to carry the 200 pounds of passenger + luggage.
(That's about $90 worth of fuel on top of the average $350 price for a plane ticket)
At worst, overbooked tickets would be required to be disclosed as such at the time of purchase.
There's also fractional-reserve banking, hotels, old-style phones, online / mail-order shopping ("sorry, your stuff is in back order"), etc.
Statistical arbitrage is a thing.
Air travel does none of these things. They know they've sold more than they can provide, and do nothing to tell people until the last possible minute just to make a buck.
You must be joking.
That's false. They overbook because it makes them more money and for some reason people just accept it. Pretty much no other industry could get away with doing that to its customers.
Imagine the shit storm that would have unveiled if some random movie theatre sold 110% of its seats for the midnight premier of Star Wars VII and subsequently physically removed people from their seats because their employees also wanted to see the movie and they sold too many tickets.
Airlines are catering to their customers, if one didn't offer refundable their competitors would.
If one offered refundable but didn't overbook, 10% of their passengers wouldn't show up for every flight. They'd get killed by competitors who did overbook and could offer cheaper fares because that 10% is nearly pure profit.
And though they've actually made big profits the last couple years, historically airlines are one of the least profitable businesses, possibly even posting net negative profits over the entire industry lifetime. They require massive capital costs to buy expensive airplanes, and alternate profitable and unprofitable years. Warren Buffett said if he had been at Kittyhawk he would have done capitalism a favor and shot the Wright Brothers down.
They don't have fiascos like this because they aren't foolish enough to let them into the room before removing them. Unsurprisingly, kicking a guest out of a room/plane has a much higher risk of escalation than not letting them in.
IMO a better system would be a more market-based solution.
Disallow involuntary bumping except under exceptional circumstances, and require airlines to up theirs compensation until enough people voluntarily bump themselves. Airlines would still oversell but at lower % because the cost is now higher. And people who get bumped are at least given satisfactory compensations.
Not that that would justify doing this to anyone else but he had a very good reason to not want to get off the plane.
This is why offering more and more money is a good strategy. There almost certainly were people on the flight willing to get bumped for $1500. But the doctor likely would have turned down nearly any sum of money if it meant putting his patients in danger.
But he's a doctor, not royalty. Hospitals have more than one doctor in case someone can't make their shifts. He was no more important than any other passenger.
If United ran an escalating auction system - like Delta does on overbooked flights - they would eventually have found someone to volunteer to take the incentive and that person would have voluntarily disembarked. Because they were apparently too cheap to do this, their share price is getting pounded into the ground today.
Whether that gets United's sociopathic CEO to change policy or not remains to be seen. If it doesn't, I'm inclined to agree with the OP: the consumer protection laws, at least for commercial flights, need to be updated so this doesn't happen again.