"I wonder how realistic the operations of the virtual airlines are. In the game, do you get to have local police come on your plane and beat up your passengers and drag them off before you take off on your flight route?"
And, while I am German, I have not seen Ryanair Checkin Simulator 2000. I'll have to check the section behind the curtain, though. May have been x-rated for excessive violence and unsatisfactory kink.
Of course, it's easy to create it yourself in Simulator Simulator 2017 if you have the "Extreme Queuing (Britain)" expansion pack.
The executive summary of the incident seems to be that there just weren't any adults in the room. One can easily picture gate agents, flight attendants, and the aviation department staff involved basically feeling that they must follow instructions, being worried about breaking policies, being written up, whatever.
You'd hope that if the whole thing were put in front of a pilot, they'd perhaps take a more wholistic, pragmatic, problem-solving view, and try a few other options first. Seems like almost anything would have been better - talking to the passengers, getting everybody to leave the plane and reboard / sort it out in the terminal, cancelling the flight, getting a bigger plane, putting the airline staff on a different airline, anything. If a pilot couldn't come up with a better solution to something like this, I'd worry how they'd fare in the air with a mechanical emergency.
I'm still kind of skeptical that the pilots could be completely oblivious about it though. You'd think that if something is serious enough for a flight attendant or gate agent to call law enforcement, and get them onto the plane, then they'd tell the pilot about it too, if only as a courtesy or practical measure so they're not surprised about the noise or banging on the door. Also, at some point the pilots are going to have manifests of passengers vs crew, and that would change, so you'd think they'd see that happening, since the plane was fully boarded it seems possible they'd have had the first manifest, and wonder about / be annoyed about late changes. Or, maybe they'd simply see the law enforcement folks get on, or hear the call on the intercom / radio, etc.
I'm more inclined to think that the situation was misrepresented to them ("we have an unruly passenger, but we're taking care of it"), and they took it at face value without asking any questions. Will be interesting to see what comes out.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/united-airlines-pilots-letter...
[1] [Video] http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/video/united-pilots-issue-statem...
Used to have a different game back in the day, Hard Truck iirc, which was a lot more game-y - areas you couldn't reach with the one truck, offroad sections, truck racing, etc. Very satisfying at the time.
I also appreciated that I could walk away at any point and pick it up later. I didn't feel "trapped" having to finish a mission like too many AAA games. Well worth the ten bucks in my opinion.
They should not have treated him in that way, they should not have been violent, but so long as the pilot wanted him off he was obligated.
So no, I won't "take it from a lawyer".
A lot of those rules kick in only after the door is closed, or when the aircraft pulls back from the gate.