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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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).

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).

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.

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