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Comment by scosman | Hacker News Reader

Exactly! United overbooked as an optimization for profits, fine. However, they should have to pay up when it backfires. They gave up at $800 and just started forcing people off. If it's free market when I'm buying my ticket, it should be free market for United buying it back.

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It's even worse than that. They were disembarking passengers to make room for their own staff who were not even planned on this trip.

You understand their staff needed to be on this flight so that another plane full of passengers in Louisville wouldn't be delayed by not having a flight crew?

Oh well! Then sure!! Its time to start knocking customers out with your hired goons then./s

Everyone gets that. We're mad that United messed up the logistics of having staff in the right cities, and instead of treating their customers well they decided to use literal force to removed a customer with a confirmed seat who was already boarded.

They had better alternatives: other customers had offered to leave for higher voucher value, I'm sure they could have paid someone already in Louisville 4x overtime. Instead they chose force and intimidation.

At least they weren't on the fucking plane already. It was a next morning flight, plenty of time to wave off the customers affected by United's own fuckup. This is why we need to re-regulate the airlines.

> He is allegedly a doctor, not a demigod. Someone else can cover his shift. - You, elsewhere in this thread

So you're saying, unlike doctors, flight staff are demigods and must be given priority because they are irreplaceable?

(The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure United will view their flight crew more as cogs than demigods.)

It looks like it's not an overbooking at all, they just had employees showing up after the plane was full and united decided to kick some passenger out for them. But those employees were not paying nor were they planned to come on board before.

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