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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article, worth a read. Plus the guy has an awesome cartoon avatar. The summary is: United on their smaller flights has lots of people pretending to be united employees but they aren't, and they aren't as well trained as united employees. The police in airports often aren't regular police forces, but are special airport police who might or might not be on a regular police force.

To me, that says there's all these people that probably have substandard pay and training.

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> and they aren't as well trained as united employees

I'm really getting (maybe needlessly) a bit irate over the endless stream of "they didn't have the training" comments each and every time some employee attacks someone. For this incident too but also for many previous ones, in a lot of forums from reddit to local newspaper websites I found this line of reasoning or explanation.

I may get flak for this, but as a German who once (very happily) lived in the US for a decade, the stories as well as the comments seem to come mostly from this country, and I did not notice them (in this number) until this millennium. What's happened in the US, I wonder?

Let me make my position clear: It should be obvious that not attacking people does not require "more training"! That's just being a decent average human being. I don't know what I'm more worried about, the number of incidents (might just be because of ubiquitous smartphones and the Internet) - or that sooooo many people (US-Americans mostly?) seem to think that this is a "training" issue.

To me this seems like a large culture of "it's their fault", meaning "management". Part of it really is, since so much of the work culture (service jobs especially?) is designed to be extremely hierarchical. "Sorry, I can't use common sense, I have to call in a manager, he is allowed to use 1% of his brain but I'm not." (The higher level management is allowed to use ever more brain/judgement.) So it seems the success of this "education" of creating an obedient workforce unquestionably following procedures and rules is too great, it changed the way people think and look at everything, not just those jobs?

I agree, training shouldn't be necessary to tell people not to beat up passengers. But training can help people to learn to deescalate situations, and help people learn to sometimes take a second to think about it.

Presumably, the "the lack of training" is related to how to resolve situations without resorting to force.

When people say that they lack training, it's not about being trained not to attack somebody, it's about being trained (and more importantly empowered) to resolve situations before they get to that point.

Because when there are no options left, you only have force.

That does not change anything I wrote.

> Because when there are no options left, you only have force.

It actually makes it worse that you try to justify it. You used your brainpower to find a justification for what is. But there is none. This is a non sequitur - there is no reason to use force even when people don't cooperate! Also, the vast majority of such instances require no special level of competence to deescalate, only common sense and decency, including a lot of police incidents I had to read about (I myself never had an issue with US police, even though I encountered them a lot when in my youth I crossed the US sleeping in an old car that I had bought).

The entire "deescalation" that was required in this particular case was to just let it be. What training do you need? Not even the next step of offering just a tad more money needs any special training. You make it sound as if we are talking about hostage negotiation or something requiring skills.

What are you taking about? In Germany, to this day, if the airline decides to remove you from a flight, based on reasons they deem justified, and you steadfastly refuse, they don't just shrug and say "oh well, guess we're stuck with you, let's go ahead with the flight". And once security is tasked with removing a noncompliant person, then yes, it does take training to do it without hurting them.

You're right that they could have avoided needing to remove someone who didn't want to. But that's a separate issue from your blanket claim that somehow force is never justified in these situations.

You're taking like no one gets forcibly removed from anywhere in Germany or police are always experts in the minutiae of contract law and instantly see through any unjustified eviction.

The numbers for police actions comparing Germany and the US speak a clear language. Any kind of violence is on a far lower level than in the US. We don't need to talk about the reasons - policing in the US is harder - but your argument does not work. Nor does any of it contradicts my argument, I'm tempted to call yours "whataboutism" (that doesn't even have a basis). We certainly have our own issues, and things like profiling, the same (completely innocent) people getting controlled over and over wherever they go (darker skin, wrong haircut, etc. - who knows the criteria), but none of it pertains to this issue.

Still not seeing how any of that substantiates your earlier claim that "no one is ever forcibly removed by police and if they needed to be, it wouldn't require training". You're just changing the topic to something more defensible.

I don't see the claim you have put inside the quotes as being made by IIIIIIIIIIII, therefore your argument seems fake.

Well, I'm trying to parse it, but as best I can tell, III...'s claim is just "Americans suck at this" combined with implausible claims and explicit rejections of any plausible ones.

Somehow, the mere act of evicting someone is evidence of needing to de-escalate more, as if that could somehow avoid needing to ever remove someone. Or even if you did, you could somehow do it both without training and without attacking, since everyone learns how to remove someone without hurting them sometime shortly after the crying and nursing instincts kick in?

Or, if the eviction wasn't justified, all police are somehow experts on contract law to the point that they could know this?

And then when called on these questionable claims, III... just retreats to, "well look at the stats" (and various other poisoning-the-well unrelated to this specific circumstance).

If there's a coherent claim here, I'd appreciate the correction on what that claim is.

It's easy to say "someone screwed up here", but III...'s attempt to explain what that was ends up making its own dubious claims.

From your previous comment, above, that I didn't respond to:

> that substantiates your earlier claim that "no one is ever forcibly removed by police and if they needed to be, it wouldn't require training".

Fortunately anyone can easily see what I wrote. Your style disgusts me.

Everyone can see the text. No one can see a plausible diagnosis of what went wrong relative to Germany, since you ruled out the possibility of removing anyone or removal needing training to be done safely.

"there is no reason to use force even when people don't cooperate"

This is utter nonsense.

Which he didn't write - you did. You even put it in quotes, nice try. The discussion brings out the worst in some people here.

Are you blind? That is completely false and the evidence is right above for everybody to see...

> Presumably, the "the lack of training" is related to how to resolve situations without resorting to force.

> how to resolve situations without resorting to force

That's exactly what OP refers to. This is supposed to be a basic skill, part of the stuff you learn in your first 7 years from your parents and society, not on-the-job training.

The assistant manager at the car wash I go to is a pilot for one of these airlines. He makes about $25k as a first officer. He considers getting hotel points as a bonus. He kept the car wash gig to make ends meet until he gets a better gig or promotion.

The sad thing is that there is a huge workforce of regional pilots hoping to gain hours and switch to the majors, but the majors are converting routes to regionals faster than they are hiring new pilots.

I've read about this before - US pilots getting shockingly low wages. The Explanation given previously was that the senior pilots get insanely well remunerated and you're expected to work for peanuts until you hit this point (or switch to a European or Emirati airline)

I remember an Air Crash Investigation where the investigators were surprised to hear that the two pilots sounded completely drunk on the black box. It wasn't alcohol, it was the lack of sleep – the guys had just flown halfway across the USA on a jump seat to start their shift in NYC and slept in an 8-bunk-bed subrental in a suburb.

So, yes, pilot's low wages in USA's regional airlines is an endemic problem that has killed hundreds of passengers.

But nowadays drinking and drugs are a bigger problem than hours. Remember the movie "Flight"? Thanksfully those planes fly fully automatic, but still some weather decisions have to be made from time to time.

I actually wonder why we still have pilots on board in 2017.

A lack of subject knowledge when commenting about something does that to you. /s

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