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Fly the Unfriendly Skies
United Airlines has a PR nightmare on its hands as a disturbing video burned up the Internet. After overbooking the flight from Chicago to Louisville, the crew chose four passengers at random to leave the flight. Passenger number three was a doctor who said he needed to treat patients in the morning, so refused to leave. The flight crew called security, which forcibly yanked him out of his seat and dragged him down the aisle.
This being 2017, several passengers recorded the whole thing on their smartphones:
@united @FoxNews @CNN not a good way to treat a Doctor trying to get to work because they overbooked pic.twitter.com/sj9oHk94Ik
— Tyler Bridges (@Tyler_Bridges) April 9, 2017
Airline staff first tried a carrot before using a stick. Before boarding, they offered passengers $400 and a hotel stay to give up their seats. Once boarded, they doubled it to $800 and said the flight wouldn’t leave until four people were gone. When no one volunteered, a computer selected four passengers at random.
With condemnation raining down on the airline, United’s CEO issued a statement:
Using the term “re-accommodate” to describe forcibly dragging a customer off a plane only fueled the online firestorm.
How should United have reacted in this situation and what can they do to fix it?
Published in Culture
More compiled data on ‘bootings’
No, I don’t think he “deserved” to get busted up. But I do think he brought it on himself.
And we’re not talking about Rosa Parks protesting Jim Crow here. We’re talking about a guy who didn’t want to be inconvenienced.
So Jetblue with their “no overbooking” policy involuntarily bumps twice as many people (per capita) as United?
There has to be something going on – not sure what. I just looked and JetBlue claims maintenance issues.
That would imply that if you get bumped on Jet Blue, everyone on the plane is getting bumped.
Based on this – I would say American is lucky the Crazy Doc booked with United. In the future, he’ll probably want to book with Delta. They’ll sweeten the pot sufficiently that people will voluntarily get off and his seat will be safe.
And side note to Crazy Doc: If you have something to hide, you’d be wise not to make a spectacle of yourself. Just saying.
Per JetBlue: The numbers reported to DOT reflect instances where flights scheduled to operate on our growing fleet of A321 aircraft have been down-gauged to smaller A320 aircraft to accommodate needs like unplanned maintenance. In the rare cases where this occurs, we work to limit the impact to customers with auto-rebooking on the next available flight or by adding extra flights to the schedule.
Still, bumped is bumped, and they don’t appear to have a great track record of providing sufficient incentive to get people to volunteer.
Maintenance wouldn’t count as bumps, as far as I know. Unless they have a lot of broken seats or something.
Edit: Ah, equipment substitution. That makes more sense.
It would be better f it was broken down to just the number of people involuntarily bumped specifically because of overbooking. Frankly, I’d like access to the raw data. There has to be a reason code in there somewhere.
See comment above – for JetBlue’s explanation.
I’m sure someone has this data, but the report I found didn’t break it down. You’re welcome to continue the search.
However, the assertion was that JetBlue’s didn’t have the overbook policy, so JetBlue is cool. But is that really true if you’re goal is to reach your designation on the flight you booked? There are different kinds of mismanagement.
Well, well, well, it appears the good doctor has some prior experience with the criminal justice system. If the officer had taken the time to run his name he could have used that as verbal leverage to get the him to walk off the plane.
Police officer: Doc it appears you have some prior experience with law enforcement. The good news is that if you walk off the plane your free to go wherever you like. If you don’t you and I are going to discuss your history in front of everyone in this cabin before you are removed the hard way. Your decision doc.
His prior experience explains a lot to me. People that cannot obey the big laws have difficulty obeying simple commands. Trading prescriptions for sexual favors is breaking one of the bigger laws.
You keep leaving out Number Zero: United decided to be cheap, and used police officers to enforce that.
You also keep leaving out the part where the FAA has rules about how airlines can bump passengers for overbooking – and even United has admitted (today) that they had no right to pull this man off the plane, because the four employees showed up AFTER the boarding process had finished.
You’re claiming that airlines have absolute power to bump people, and no, it just isn’t true, according to Federal law. They get away with a lot, but the legal justification is nowhere near what you keep claiming.
By the way: the officer who violently attacked the man and dragged him off the plane is in trouble – since he violated department policy, which also shoots down your “sucks to be him” attitude.
This is what I was referring to in #216. The Psych evaluation on him wasn’t kind – the man has ‘issues’.
I wasn’t criticizing your research. I did a lot of data mining, and I want to be able to do the stuff I would be able to do with all of the data. But I doubt they release it. I wouldn’t. It’s confidential stuff that goes to their ability to compete.
I didn’t feel criticized, jut confirming that we’d reached the end of the information I’d unearthed. Someone has the data, I’m sure. But it might be the airlines individually, a you note.
The Good ex-Doctor. It appears he had his license pulled. Kinda wonder about those patients he had to see.
But now permitted for some kind of “limited practice.”
Update: and to be honest, I care about him much less than about the absurd United behavior, coz sometimes I actually have to fly United!
I think it all boils down to that right there.
Pulling people off overbooked flights happens every day, but they get pulled before boarding. This entire event happened, from start to finish, because the overbooking situation wasn’t cleared up before the plane was boarded.
And because it wasn’t a matter of overbooking, which is why everyone on the plane had a boarding pass and was allowed onto the plane. It was whatever it’s called when you transport airline employees that he got kicked off for.
I was told (talked to a friend in the industry last night) that the boarding had already started when these 4 crew showed up and needed to be accommodated. The problem was weather earlier in the day, which mixed things up – but, in the end, this crew needed to get to another city in time to fly another airline the next day. If you were booked on THAT plane, I’m sure you wanted them to get to their destination. And I’m also sure there were 10 other, better things that United could have done. Maybe United will work on some of these ideas in the very near future. But this also doesn’t justify the ridiculous behavior of that man. But maybe when law enforcement showed up, he over-reacted because he was “justice system involved”. Some sort of Justice System PSTD?
Agreed. I talked this morning about how the man reminded me of my children when they were small and decided that today was the day they were going to “pitch a fit” – I think they now call it “acting out”. This man has serious maturity problems, and perhaps other mental issues. I won’t defend United, but has anyone ever seen a grown man act like this? I haven’t.
Well… I worked in a retail music store for a while selling new and used musical instruments. While I don’t have the time to recount the entire story… Suffice it to say that approach can be a strong determinant to outcome. It’s been said that united seemed to avoid every good option.
But, the reason I bring up the music store… Just… a mistake was made. A serial number wasn’t checked… Try taking something from someone that they truly believe belongs to them… You’re bound to get a rise out of them.
The childish behavior of the man has nothing to do with United’s actions, before or after. You can gripe about his whining all you want, but he CAN act like that, because he was in the right in wanting to keep his seat. Even United now admits that.
Two of the three police officers were talking to him calmly, trying to talk him into leaving voluntarily, when the third officer suddenly decided to attack and injure him, violating the department’s own procedures. That’s a secondary issue, though.
This all happened because United screwed up. Full stop. They could have found alternate transportation for their employees. They could have arranged for another crew to be transported to the destination. They could have offered more money to get people to volunteer.
The “we’re going to randomly kick some of you off unless you comply” strategy was just flat stupid.
On a regular basis.
I work in the convention business, and several times a year, I see performances from grown men that make his actions seem calm and reserved. They’re almost always doctors or lawyers, too, with an occasional CEO or VP in Charge of Something.
I had a thoracic surgeon go out of his way to walk into me (in an empty hallway), with a thrown elbow so he could say “people get out of my way in the hospital.” He nearly got to visit the local emergency room that day. When I told the conference organizers, they threatened to kick him out of the building, because he does that everywhere he goes.
The New York Times (a former newspaper).
Oscar Munoz, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement that United would take “full responsibility” for the situation and that “no one should ever be mistreated this way.”
It has everything to do with being able to cope with life’s situations. This guy reacted like a mental patient. And some people think he did the right thing. These people haven’t calculated the cost of dealing people constantly refusing to comply with rules and contracts they don’t like.
And he said the guy had a right to keep his seat?
Once they made the choice the guy they pick goes, which is true. And once they drag paying customers off their flights after beating them, the rest of us get to savage them on twitter/facebook/etc… Being within your rights legally doesn’t end my right to say you (that is United) are the scum of the earth and that I hope they enjoy the billions of business they lose for being too cheap &$@&!s to do things the right way.