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Comment by jedharris | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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).

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