Have you seen the news and social media lately? United has been the butt of the blame "discreetly" the way James Bond making his way from point A to point B in a city while blowing up, crashing, and destroying everything in his path is "discreet".
Can you honestly name or a remember a PR disaster as bad as this one about any company in the past two years?
I would phrase it as "loudly and publicly accepting blame and a tremendous backlash".
There was one, funnily enough much of the bad PR was doled out by the airlines: samsung. Everyone that went though an airport got to hear "samsung galaxy devices are not allowed on this plane".
Volkswagen was probably just as bad at the time. Now of course most people have kind of forgotten or at least moved on and VW just posted strong Q1 results, handily beating estimates.
If I remember correctly the Bosch cheating software was there for testing purposes but VW asked Bosch to leave it.
> Everyone else also uses it
No. Some companies optimize their engine to have optimal emissions in the exact conditions of the emissions test, but no other company has been found to have an actual digital switch modifying the engine's behavior only during the emissions test.
Porsche is the owner of the VW group. They bought most of the controlling stock.
Since everybody uses Bosch ECU's and most of the companies knew about this cheating low temp. switch in the ECU parametrization, it is no surprise that most of them have been caught using it. It is not illegal in Europe though, because laws are different here.
The only surprise is that media is ignoring it, and blaming VW who would be the last to blame.
GP isn't suggesting there isn't any blame, but that United is low-key accepting the blame/'taking one for the team'. United has decided not to throw any of the involved parties under the bus, even though it is likely that most of them - possibly all of them - do not work directly for United.
Maybe because United badly wants Republic to not go into liquidation? As to how badly - the dollar value is the difference between how much United is paying to contract versus how much they would have to pay their own Union staff.