Hacker News Reader

Comment by elevensies | Hacker News Reader

I think they handled it poorly, but there is no way that a passenger's wishes will override the pilot or the airline. They probably thought he would come to his senses when the cops showed up, I think that is where they screwed up, IMO they should have disembarked the rest of the plane and then arrested him in-place.

Whether or not bumping him is fair, there is no question about who owns the aircraft and has responsibility/authority. No one would want to fly on an airline where a stubborn passenger could override the flight crew.

View on HN

There may not be a question of who owns the aircraft, but there are definitely questions of whether they have a legal right to force someone from whom they have accepted money in exchange for allowing them onto their property merely minutes earlier and who has not in any way violated the contract.

People seem to think that flight crew somehow have been ordained with god-given authority to suspend the rule of law aboard an aircraft. That is simply not true. People are legally required to obey safety-related crew instructions and placards.

The idea that if the flight crew instructs you to strip naked you are somehow required to obey and if you do not they have a right to eject you from the airplane is frankly ridiculous.

But it doesn't even matter, because the airplane was not in flight, 14 CFR Part 121 does not apply, and the people acting in question were gate personnel, not flight crew.

I think that refusing to leave someone else's private property makes the use of force inevitable. I would expect him to be treated essentially the same if he refused after being asked to leave a bar, a movie theater, someone's home, etc.

I'm not aware of any situation where you can legally be involuntarily strip-searched without being arrested. Maybe by customs but I'm not sure.

Personally, if the flight crew instructed me to strip naked or leave the plane, I would just leave. I can't foresee any situation where I would physically fight the staff for my seat, or recommend anyone else to do so.

I think that refusing to leave someone else's private property makes the use of force inevitable.

I know Americans are a bit high-strung when it comes to "property rights", but here's one example: It may be your property all you want but you can't call the police to kick your tenants out because you decided you don't want them there any longer. IF there has been a contract violation, you can go to court and eventually get an enforceable court order, but if you call the police and tell them to kick your tenants out because you just changed your mind about renting it to them, they're more likely to laugh in your face.

That is what the police should have done in this case. Once they ascertained that the passenger ticketed in his seat and was not a safety issue, they should have said "sorry, this is a contract dispute. You can take him to court."

Edit: Note that after kicking him out he was not arrested and has not been charged with any crime that I've heard of.

Tenancy has strong and unique protections. If you are a tenant you can call the police to kick out your landlord if they are not within their access rights. Someone has the exclusive right to use the space, but it is not the landlord.

I think both of us have a very strong sense of property rights, only we disagree who to ascribe them to. I think it belongs to the airline, so if the man wants to create a dispute with the airline, he should be the one to take it to court (and he probably will.) From my POV, you are saying the man has property rights over the seat because he had a ticket for it and had his arse is in it.

Sure, tenancy is special. But so is common carriage: "A common carrier holds itself out to provide service to the general public without discrimination (to meet the needs of the regulator's quasi judicial role of impartiality toward the public's interest) for the "public convenience and necessity". A common carrier must further demonstrate to the regulator that it is "fit, willing, and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority."

We are not talking about a random piece of property being trespassed upon here. We are talking specifically about a situation where the airline is licensed to take money from the public in exchange for letting people put their "arses" in those seats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com