>And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.
Do you have a citation for this?
Do you have a citation for this?
> United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said Tuesday that all 70 seats on United Express Flight 3411 were filled, but the plane was not overbooked as the airline previously reported.
A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding.
[0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-den...
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...
Assuming it does apply, there's no outright prohibition on denial of boarding to confirmed reserved space passengers. It merely says that the airline must ensure that the smallest practicable number of confirmed reserve space passengers are involuntarily denied boarding.
The deadheading crew was likely using positive-space employee passes that had a higher seating priority than any ticketed passengers on the flight. According to the definition of "confirmed reserved space"[0], those employees may very well qualify as such. I could find no specific statement suggesting that employees are not considered passengers for the purposes of the definition, let alone deadheading employees that are not involved in the operation of that particular flight.
There's even a section on boarding priority that's pretty vague and largely boils down to having a reasonable policy in place to deal with situations where insufficient volunteers come forward to take advantage of compensation.[1]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?width=840&...