Thank you for being beaten up with United today
The CEO of United Airlines says it’s all rather upsetting. To them.
Videos of a United Airlines passenger being forcibly dragged from his seat on a Sunday overbooked flight at O’Hare International Airport have been viewed more than 1 million times, and the airline’s CEO on Monday called the incident “an upsetting event to all of us here at United.”
Well that’s sad and everything but what about that doctor they beat up? What about his patients in Louisville who had appointments to see him today?
Another passenger on the flight, Audra Bridges, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that United asked for a volunteer at the gate to take a later flight, offering $400 and a hotel stay. Bridges, of Louisville, told the Courier-Journal that passengers were then allowed to board the flight.
Once the flight was boarded, passengers were told four people needed to give up their seats for stand-by United employees that needed to be in Louisville for a Monday flight and the plane wouldn’t depart until they had volunteers, Bridges said. United increased the offer to $800, but no one volunteered.
So they should have kept going.
Instead they said the computer would select four people to throw off. A couple left reluctantly, but the passenger who said he’s a doctor said he’s a doctor and refused. (So far it’s only his word that he’s a doctor.) Security came along to talk to him, and he still refused. So United called the cops, who got violent with him.
“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” United spokesman Charlie Hobart said in the statement. “We apologize for the overbook situation.”
But not for the calling the cops situation or the beating a guy up situation or the dragging a guy bleeding up the aisle of the plane situation.
Travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt questioned why United didn’t simply offer a larger sum.
“Everybody has their price. If they had allowed the agent to offer a higher incentive, we may never have heard about this,” said Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group.
Hobart said United tries to come up with a reasonable compensation offer, but “there comes a point where you’re not going to get volunteers.”
At that point, United’s contract of carriage says the airline can select passengers to bump to a later flight, based on a priority system that can take into account how much passengers paid, how often they fly, whether missing that flight could affect a connecting flight and how early they checked in. People with disabilities and unaccompanied minors are generally last to be bumped.
Usually, passengers — however angry — comply with the airline’s orders. But even if it’s an unusual situation, it raises questions about what rights passengers have when being removed from a flight against their will, Harteveldt said.
Yes, yes it does.
I know it’s very first world problem and all, but the high-handedness and casual violence of it grabbed my attention.
Missing a flight and being pushed back a day – with a hotel paid for and a cash incentive – is a first world problem. Heck, it’d be barely a problem at all – for some, it’s an opportunity. When it comes down to being beaten and forcibly moved, well, it’s getting into the sort of problems people can, alas, have anywhere.
Here’s a hint for United: keep the problems you inflict on your passengers first world problems, if that. Leave the relocation and beatings to dictators and failed states. We’ve enough of them as it is.
Not that it should matter…after all, he paid for his ticket.
I ‘love’ (and by love, mean hate) that they select the passengers in part on how much they paid for their ticket. Yes, in our classless society, we have first class passengers who do not get bumped; business class passengers who do not get bumped; coach class passengers who do get bumped. And now, apparently, bloodied.
It may bring out a new genre of joke: coffee, tea, or a bloody nose?
Look how it seeps into our everyday vocabulary. Slowly, subtly:
The airline’s “orders”. Not requests, their “orders.”
Which, if not obeyed, will be backed up by taxpayer-funded police who can issue orders, and, apparently, any manner of beating they like.
I know; I noticed that. I think there’s a slippage involved: to some extent airline employees do legitimately get to give orders, for safety reasons – like sitting the fuck down during turbulence and similar. But here they seem to be helping themselves to that kind of “ordering” to justify a kind that’s solely about their convenience and profit-maximization.
Even more noteworthy:
Ah no no no no no. The passengers did NOT “need to” give up their seats. The airline wanted them to, because of the employees who needed to get to Louisville. Different thing.
It shouldn’t matter whether or not he’s a doctor except that his need to see patients the next day makes United’s behavior that much more outrageous. But yeah: everybody should have the right to expect the airline to refrain from kicking them off the plane because it wants our seat. Even though that’s officially Their Right. They must have good lobbyists.
It is actually a somewhat difficult line to draw. The captain on a plane is, I heard, totally in command and has authority “up to and including having youshot dead” (from tv serial LA Law many years ago). It may in fact be necessary to concentrate power like that — for safety and security reasons, nota bene! BUT NOT for the sake of commercial expedience! Never.
To me it appears that this commander (and/or his deskpushing corporate superiors) need to be taken out back and …well, subjected to drug tests and ethics retraining. In fact, in my opinion this resort goes all the way up into the board room.
I agree with what you all have written above. For clarity, I’m not taking issue with the airline in this limited example of the word “orders”. It’s the fact that major news writers casually drop that word in place of “requests” in situations like this that I’m pointing to. To me it indicates a cultural change. We citizens are more and more accepting of the idea that the government and even corporations have the powers to “order” us to do things, and that this is normal and not worth remarking on.
It’s absolutely true that airline staff on a plane have the power to issue orders like “sit down,” and this is appropriate. I’m not referring to that even obliquely.
Oh that “needed to give up their seats” drove me nuts, too.
My friend Clay, who works at the Denver airport, says United employees are universally the worst. Rude, help themselves to resources and parking spaces that do not belong to them. He says that other airlines hate them and routinely file complaints with airport mgmt. Clay thinks there’s a top-down sense of entitlement that’s saturated everything from the CEO down.
There’s a weird rot going on where the meanings of words evaporate. A contract, which is what an airline ticket is, a contract to ferry you somehwere in return for the money, a contract used to mean that both parties were obligated to fulfill the agreement.
Now it’s becoming meaningless. The more powerful party can change the terms or renege entirely and the losers can come up and sue them sometime. And this is now normal. The telcos do it, the airlines, landlords, hell, the baboon sitting in the White House considers it a smart business practice.
I’m not sure that is a First World problem. I think it’s a fast-track-to-the-Third-World problem.
Why was United unable to transport its own employees without disrupting ‘normal’ service? It would appear that they had been unlucky with their (normal) overbooking, or more greedy than usual, and THEN tossed in a sudden demand for paying customers to make way for United staff.
And…as ever, we have the issue of violence and incompetence on the part of the ‘real’ police. At first report, I was assuming airport security was responsible.