Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

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> Then, the inevitable outrage led to past stories resurfacing, with a pattern of absurd insensitivity (abused dogs, broken guitars, sexist clothing policies, etc).

You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other airline?

Look, what United did on that flight was pretty awful. But the rest of this to me smacks of the typical rumor mill that spins up when a company has bad PR, which surfaces the typical sort of 2-deviations-below-the-bell-curve scenarios you'll occasionally have when you're a company at United's scale - a scale that employs tens of thousands of people that do not actually all act as one giant United hive mind as much as we'd like them to but rather each as autonomous people that can occasionally do wrong things in a way that has no bearing on the company at large.

(That was a pretty long sentence.)

For what it's worth, I know an employee of United who loves it. But what was that saying about the plural of anecdote again..?

The well-informed discussion on Naked Capital (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-remo...) strongly supports the claim that the removal was illegal. It also provides interesting evidence that the decisions were traceable to United's attempt to reduce costs by using third party contractors and affiliates (the flight was operated by Republic, an affiliate).

This quote is telling: "When I was a outsourced regional jet captain operating United Express flights between 2010 and 2014 the gate agents in charge of the regional (out-sourced) flights at United hub, Washington-Dulles, were third-party contractors. They were horribly trained and frequently surly. The gates were always crowded, everyone there was angry, nothing worked, it was utter chaos and misery. I absolutely dreaded flying there and did my best to avoid it, Chicago was only a little better."

This is the best summary of the issue I have seen to date, and really gets to the root of United's situation. Especially this quote:

"I really don’t think the upper management at United has any clue about the nuts and bolts, day to day, inner workings of the company. Post-merger United is too big to fail, too big to manage and far too Balkanized to govern. I fully expect the ugliness to continue at United."

'Wenn das der Führer wüsste' falacy detected. The CEOs and shareholders know.. Or made it theire job to be not reached by that knowledge. Why be outraged over VW and downtalk this?

I'm not arguing the fact that United did a really bad thing. I definitely agree with that.

I'm only arguing the supposition that United is a uniquely bad company.

It's possible that this situation will cause all the other airlines to try improve their staff and bureaucracy out of fear of being next.

I'd like to know if United is a uniquely outsourced airline. I think that is quite possible and if it is, then it lends considerable weight to the likelihood that it is a uniquely bad airline.

This is the kind of problem a company can get into when the people making the key decisions operate in terms of "metrics" that don't track reality well enough. Plus when a lot of the work is done by outsourced vendors, they probably don't pass on unquantifiable bad news.

Compared to the other two big US airlines, yes -- United has an earned reputation for slashing mainline service in favor of regional affiliates. People occasionally joked (only half joking) that if previous CEO Jeff Smisek were only legally allowed to, he'd have outsourced long-haul international flights to 50-seat CRJs.

This also played a role in United's frankly abysmal on-time ratings; in order to have enough capacity while moving everything into tiny regional jets, they had to raise the frequency of the flights, which led to logistical clusterfucks at their hubs when they just overloaded the ability of the airport operations to handle that many flights.

he'd have outsourced long-haul international flights to 50-seat CRJs...

Smisek did do it with the long-range 757s he gained in the Continental merger. Smaller plane, less crew...and just enough range to get back if the headwinds are light. If not, it's an unscheduled 90 minute refuel in Canada. Add the time to clear immigration and customs, and now you have 200+ people with a missed connection.

http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955

I've had it happen to me, it's not fun.

United isn't the only airline which did/does use 757s on transatlantic flights. And the fact that US east coast to western Europe was within range for the 757 is a big reason why airlines are pushing Boeing for something else in the same class.

Meanwhile, airlines are also looking at Airbus, which is talking up a long-range variant of the A321neo for exactly this purpose.

Certainly compared to pre-merger American. American Eagle, their regional arm, was a wholly-owned subsidiary. They picked up some other carriers under the Eagle flag when they merged with US Airways, though Eagle is still large (now called Envoy Air).

If they're bad but not uniquely bad, it's still helpful for consumers to boycott them. Once they cease to exist (yes, that far!), a strong message has been delivered to all corporations.

Many other bad companies (that keep United from being unique) haven't stumbled in such a harmful, public way. United did, and we consumers need to make an example out of them.

(Edit: grammar).

>You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other airline?

Hitting paying customer head on the armrest until he lost consciousness? I think no. I hope you don't believe "he fell" united version, because that's literally impossible in the economy seats. I may eventually come to terms with the loss of several hundreds dollars (or 1-2 thousand, due to lost car and hotel reservations) but concussion is inexcusable offense for me. I won't tolerate that ever.

Sure, we should collect some data.

That said, I and my family decided over a year ago never to fly United again, based on multiple bad experiences. Independent of this incident, I'm sure we made a good decision.

huh? of course not all employees of the company will think alike. but when an employee does something fucked up like they did in this case, a reasonable company should condemn it and support the affected customer

Which is exactly what Oscar Munoz has done.

...belatedly, after tremendous uproar and a tremendously lukewarm non-apology apology at first.

After the third or fourth attempt which does not reflect well on him.

Sure, it may be an extreme case, but the CEO's reaction is telling. If everybody now accepts this as normal, we're sending United a signal that this is okay and they can continue like this. If we send a signal that this is not okay, they have a reason to try to do better, and so do the other airlines.

Yeah, getting your news from whatever debris viral videos blow up is a modern way of staying informed, and may be the worst one yet invented.

Of course you would be able to come up with similarly bad stories for many other airlines. Especially American ones.

That doesn't excuse them. All American airlines suck. That problem should be fixed.

I don't think this is an entirely fair comparison, as US airlines are far more biased towards domestic flights which globally are held to a lower tier of service. That being said, I would still anecdotally evaluate them as of poorer quality than the better foreign airlines.

So the solution is to automatically give more business to every airline that isn't currently getting slammed in the media? That's not a good way to encourage competition.

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