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Comment by pigbearpig | Hacker News Reader

It's not really in the interest of the "corporate overlords" to ban all of their customers.

If someone can't go 3 hours without getting intoxicated and berating or assaulting a flight attendant then maybe air travel isn't for them.

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No, but it is perfectly acceptable to said corporate overlords to crush a couple innocent customers under the wheels of a well-oiled machine that usually produces outcomes that are good for them.

Which means that with such a list in place, it'll usually be great because you'll have fewer assholes next to you on the plane... until you get that one flight attendant who has a bad day and gets you blacklisted from air travel for some petty reason with zero recourse.

Can you explain a scenario where the innocent customers get crushed under the wheels of the well oiled machine? I just don't think it's that hard to get on a plane and be reasonable for the time you're on there.

> Can you explain a scenario where the innocent customers get crushed under the wheels of the well oiled machine?

All the people who have their Google or Apple accounts closed or their Paypal or bank accounts frozen with no explanation and no recourse. All the news about newborns and toddlers being denied boarding planes (or facing extra scrutiny, which is easy to temporarily resolve at the gate when the kid is 3 but becomes harder and harder until impossible to resolve as they get older and reach adulthood) because their name is like someone on the list. The French woman whomwas mistakenly declared officially dead and has been fighting for years to be recognized as alive and be able to renew her driver's license/healthcare coverage/passports/etc.

The world is full of these examples. We should avoid adding more to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List_Kids

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/french-woman-s...

I take your point. These situations look very unjust. But for every example you've provided here there is a counter example of passengers who demonstrate that they simply are not fit to be civil members of an airplane flight. It's just not an easy situation. I get that the "customer is always first" but it makes me angry to see so many waiters and flight attendants treated like complete trash these days, by sometimes belligerent people who are simply not civilized. There is a reason why businesses have a right to refuse service. But we don't live in a utopia and mistakes do happen. We need to work to prevent and reduce those mistakes.

Did you read the last sentence?

Yeah, it sounds like pure fearmongering to me. If your waiter or flight attendant is grumpy, are you going to lose your shit and act belligerent, or can you just chill and handle the situation maturely? This will never happen to 99.9999999% of reasonable people who know how to behave in public. Yet 99.999999% of service industry workers are guaranteed to be treated like trash by belligerent customers on a frequent basis.

You mean like when United Airlines employees injured a doctor while forcibly dragging him off on an overbooked flight?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doctor-dragged-united-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...

Unless you demand you money back for a cancelled/ruined/delaid flight and they threaten to put you on that list as a form or retaliation so you back off.

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