Keep in mind that United needed to bump passengers from the plane, which was full, to accommodate four crew members who needed to get to Louisville.

Small but important point: United didn't "need" to bump passengers -- it chose to. The airline could have driven the employees to the required stop, or put them on another airline, or — hell, why am I figuring out their problem for them? Their poor planning is not my emergency, nor is it that man's. They inconvenience enough paying customers each day; they can stand some inconvenience themselves.

(Yes, I know about "contract of carriage," etc. — but if you're asking me to have an eyedropper of sympathy for U.S. airlines: bark, wrong tree.)

Uncle Cridmo Hot Take™ #1 :

After 20(ish) hours, this one is still cooking & bubbling across the internet. All the usual venues for adult as well as college-student distraction, Reddit & Imgur and all their cousins, are pressing on this with considerable uniformity... More pressure than you'd see for any number of other national stories... Missiles into Syria, Trump malfeasance, etc. This seems to touch everyone in a very personal way, as if no American will ever concede that they've had a simply good experience on an airliner. That's notable in and of itself.

Uncle Cridmo Hot Take™ #2 :

After the first day, having read a lot of pieces about things the airlines could do better and a few thoughtful reviews of the difficulty of their challenges, I have one new principle to be applied to everything I'll read hereafter:

Disregard every suggestion/demand for improved response from airlines which specifies a particular dollar figure as compensation.

People who say '$5,000!' or '$10,000!' —or even just "$1,200 or $1,400", as above— are expressing more about their personal budgets than needs to be expressed. Our contracts with airlines are private arrangements, after all. The airlines and their customers should be permitted to seek mutual fulfillment as they each see fit, without the rest of the polity being too nosy about it.

It's a libertarian thang.

I haven't watched the video. Maybe you shouldn't either. There's a lot to be said for having your sensibilities and sensitivities tuned such that you don't need to see someone's blood to accept that they've been beaten.

Has anyone checked their stock price?
Going to be interesting
Might be a good idea to sell and fast.

I'm not sure, but I think $1,350 is the limit that customers can demand from the airline if denied boarding. The airline is free to offer more.

And I think a smart lawyer can do wonders with the "denied boarding" language in the contract. Technically he wasn't denied boarding; he was allowed to board, and then they demanded he leave. I don't think their contract quite covers that.

Lots of B.S. being offered by United in the last 24 hours...my own rant about it is here.

> Might be a good idea to
> sell and fast.

Maybe:

There's evidence to suggest that PR snafus like this weekend's don't have a long-term impact on the airline's stock. An incident nearly two weeks earlier in which United Airlines asked two teenage girls to leave a flight for wearing leggings sparked a media fire storm, but had no effect on the company's share price.

While a boycott would be bad for the company, it's still too early to say whether one will materialize, and whether it would be effective if it did.

The year after I graduated, we were told in no uncertain terms that the Tylenol brand was worthless.

> I think $1,350 is the limit that
> customers can demand from the
> airline if denied boarding

That's what I read this afternoon.

EVERYONE SHOULD DO THEIR OWN READING.

As I understand it, the airline is fully empowered to 'deny boarding' even if you're buckled into your seat and ready for takeoff with luggage stowed... They have that legal right and that's that.

But if you ARE otherwise unconditionally-ticketed and already on the plane when they decide they have other plans for your seat, you can demand the $1350 be provided in cash immediately, no later than when you pass the podium on your way off the plane.

Speaking loudly and clearly about this as you walk down the aisle, and expressing a clear understanding of your other rights (declining to sign settlement agreements, etc.) might *possibly* convince them to ask someone else to give up their seat... That's if you really, really want to continue on that particular flight.

Anyway, do your own homework. No matter what happens, blog commenters aren't going to compensate you when it goes down.

This looks like an authoritative cite. You decide.

Also, if they decide to slap you around, they're only allowed to use their open palms... No closed fists.

(Sorry. Jokes are irresistible, right?)

My son was denied boarding on a United flight from Sea Tac to Denver once.

It was Christmas, and he and four other soldiers had come down from Fairbanks on a plane that was late in.

They got to the gate only to be restrianed by the gate agent as they watched her call up standby passengers and gave their seats away while they watched.

I wrote a letter of complaint and he got a 200 dollar voucher good for a year which he was never able to use on another flight.

Since then I have steered clear of United.

My cousin was an United Enployee during the seventies and early eighties. I dont think she flys with them any more. Almost everyone in my family is a Southwest fan. I like their policies, and the way they run their airline.

United does have a nice non stop to Tokyo from Denver. I have been on it once, on a government ticket. This year the prices aren't anywhere close to competitive with the other airlines, so I may never be on it again.

The airlines are playing games with the tickets. If I flew out of Dallas, or Chicago and connected to the Denver to Tokyo nonstop the ticket would be a lot cheaper. Crazy times. Went to the American airlines web site which has good deals on Cheapo Air, and cant get the site to come up in English with dollar prices. Japanese and yen is all it will do from here.

Well, I have another view (I've watched the video that's available online although it is obviously not the whole story).

Everybody here, and all over the Internet, is trying to negotiate this situation after the fact. Who should have done what and paid what to whom.

I come at it from a different direction.

This man's life was disrupted to the tune of some hours of his life wasted. But, as a result of his childish, irrational and petulant behavior, hundreds of hours of other people's lives were wasted while he was dealt with. Note his playing of multiple cards - I'm a doctor! You're doing this to me because I'm Chinese! And so on. What he's saying is - I'm too special to be bumped! Well, guess what - eventually, everyone gets bumped. Nobody is too special.

The plane can't take off with too many people on it. It just can't. Somebody has to lose. Guess what? It's your day to lose. Doesn't matter why. Planes are overbooked all the time, because some passengers don't show up. The fact that, this time, it was to move United staff makes no difference. If he had been bumped for plain old everyday overbooking, it would have made no difference.

In the final reduction, if nobody will leave voluntarily, then United has to tell someone to get off. And if that someone won't get off, then they will have to be removed, by force if necessary. When men in blue polyester-blend clothing with nickel-plated badges arrive, and tell you to leave - you're going to leave. One way or another. Best to go quietly. Sitting down and crossing your arms and saying 'No!' is the act of a spoiled 7-year-old, not a grown man and a soi-disant doctor.

Sorry he got roughed up. Should have gone quietly. Sorry 100+ people were delayed by several hours. Should have gone quietly. Sorry they lost him in the terminal and left him bleeding, wandering and confused. That's the only bad thing that happened to him for which anyone else is responsible - if the coppers are disciplined at all, it should be for that. But it's United's airplane. They get to say who gets on, and who gets off. Like in your front parlour, if there's somebody there, that you invited in, but now you want them to leave, and they refuse, you can call the coppers to have them removed, using whatever level of force is required to do so.

Butch up. Be a man,and a grown-up. Don't play the 'I'm a special doctor' card. Doctors make patients wait all the time, every day. And accept that, when the coppers come and tell you to do something as straightforward as 'get off the plane', you're going to get off the plane. No matter how much you whine and cry like a spoiled little girl. Now and then, in everyone's life, a bad thing happens to them that is not their fault. Grown-ups learn to accept this, and to deal.

llater,

llamas

@llamas:
You forgot to mention that he's a white man. So, that made it all OK, right? That he had paid for a confirmed ticket and been cleared and boarded, and declined offers to purchase his seat, is trumped by his white privilege. United didn't reserve 4 seats for its employees is his fault. United could have purchased seats on another airline for its employees (there are many flights between Chicago and Louisville (or Lexington, which is about 50 miles by Interstate between the airport)), or had a van drive its employees to Louisville (it's a 6 hour drive). No, fed regs let airlines mistreat the public, and if you can't use power granted to abuse people, why have it? And, all the better when you can publicly, and with impunity, assault a white, male doctor. That's power even bureaucrats don't have.

The economy must be doing pretty well if for $800 + a night in a hotel, no one on the entire plane was willing to wait one day to fly.

"Special Snowflake" should have recognized that the men told to remove him were actually going to remove him. You can be "dead" right but why go there?

His options at that point were to resist or go with dignity. His choice and no one else's.

And when a thug holds you up in an alley, sticks a gun in your face, and says "your money or your life", is that "your choice and no one else's"? Does the thug bear no responsibility?

United left us in Dulles when the hotels were full. They held our first flight for connecting passengers. The second leg left early, even though our delay was entirely on them, and it was staying overnight at the next stop. Same $200 voucher offered, and left unused. I will drive, walk or swim before I fly United.

United left us in Dulles when the hotels were full. They held our first flight for connecting passengers. The second leg left early, even though our delay was entirely on them, and it was staying overnight at the next stop. Same $200 voucher offered, and left unused. I will drive, walk or swim before I fly United.

United left us in Dulles when the hotels were full. They held our first flight for connecting passengers. The second leg left early, even though our delay was entirely on them, and it was staying overnight at the next stop. Same $200 voucher offered, and left unused. I will drive, walk or swim before I fly United.

So many things to say here... It's rare these days to find an aspect of customer service in which Delta is superior, but from what I've observed on how they handle these things:

* They have no problem bidding higher than $800 to get someone to take a deal. About a year and a half ago, I took a deal to be bumped on a Sunday. I got $1000 and a first class seat from Atlanta to Phoenix.

* When they have to bump someone, the ones who will be bumped are informed before boarding starts. Usually, they are already gone from the gate area by that time. I've never, ever seen them let a bumped pax on the airplane and then take them off. Bad optics, even if the pax is completely cooperative.

* I've not observed Delta denying boarding on a flight where they have dead-heading crew. First of all, dispatch will generally plan crew movements so that crew who need to dead-head somewhere will do it first thing in the morning, not on the last flight of the evening.
Second of all, why did crew need to dead-head to Louisville? If they were stranded in Louisville due to out of hours or airplane-on-ground, and needed to dead-head back to Chicago, I could understand that. But going to Louisville? That makes no sense. Dispatch wasn't doing their job.

And yeah, the first rule of United Flight Club is...

"There's evidence to suggest that PR snafus like this weekend's don't have a long-term impact on the airline's stock. "

That could be right, at least here. I don't know about Louisville specifically, but these days, most secondary destinations in the U.S. are bastions for one airline (here it's Delta). The only choice the customer has is to like it, or take another form of transportation. Plus, the airlines have been pretty successful at locking in customers with their loyalty programs. Even if the service sucks, you're going to take that one more flight so you can hit gold status next year...

So, United learned nothing from the guitar incident?

The economy must be doing pretty well if for $800 + a night in a hotel, no one on the entire plane was willing to wait one day to fly.

It was a Sunday flight.

People were wanting to go home and be in their own beds.

People were needing to show up to work in the morning, and not have to take $X hours off the next day.

Also, that was going to be airline credits, not cold hard cash, and a 1 year time table to use it.

As I like to remind people who are likely to place demands on my time a lack of forethought or planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. You want me to be inconvienenced so you won't be? pay up, bunkie

But I remember Continental back in the Icahn days as service with a snarl. Seems that was passed down.

No airline should be allowed to overbook. If they want to make sure that a plane with N seats on it leaves full, then sell N tickets followed by some number of cheaper standby tickets. Then let each passenger decide whether to pay for certainty.

This is just one of the many ways in which flying was a pain even before 9/11. The so-called market fails in this situation because there isn't enough competition in the industry to make them be reasonable. The main reason is that government bureaucrats build and control airports, so there is always a shortage of capacity.

But I haven't flown since 9/11 anyway, and don't intend to resume until the needless and unconstitutional Keystone Gestapo (TSA) are disbanded.

"And when a thug holds you up in an alley, sticks a gun in your face, and says "your money or your life", is that "your choice and no one else's"? Does the thug bear no responsibility?"

Brad, yup. Choice. What part of that don't you get?

So...is Neegan an UAL employee?

https://twitter.com/CamboDonut/status/851585091243352064/photo/1

Stolen from

http://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2017/04/10/united-ceo-and-prweek-communicator-of-the-year-pitches-in-to-help-dig-airlines-hole-even-deeper/

Ah, so it's Trump's fault!

http://twitchy.com/sd-3133/2017/04/10/brace-yourselves-guess-who-star-trek-star-john-cho-blames-for-united-mess/

> It's rare these days to find
> an aspect of customer service in which
> Delta is superior, but...

A thousand pardons, but would you all please take a moment to love me dearly for posting a link about this yesterday?

Okay, thanks. Here's Deeb.

More later.

llamas said:

"Planes are overbooked all the time, because some passengers don't show up."

What difference does that make? The tickets are paid for. If I don't show up, I'm not refunded, so United gets their money for a full airplane whether or not the seat is empty.

> What he's saying is - I'm too
> special to be bumped!

I hate, hate your comment.

> "Special Snowflake" should have
> recognized that the men told to
> remove him were actually going to
> remove him. You can be "dead" right
> but why go there?

Hate, hate. Hatred.

> The economy must be doing
> pretty well if

HateHate, plus that's fucking ludicrous.

More about this later.

(Any of you guys remember Amy's commenter Tressider? She too used to argue that people should move down their paths like servile little twats, but I always figured that it was because she wasn't an American... She'd lived her life in countries where there were literal Kings and Queens and stuff, so I figure that a propensity for menial serfdom got baked into her soul as a habit.)

(It'll be fun to figure out what happened to you guys that made *you* so lamblike.)

(KIDDING!!! No one will ever care.)

Men, grow balls

See also this from Silver, from whom I somehow extracted yesterday's PBS link about Delta.

Also--- Turns out Graham Palmer (above) might have been right.

Like I said in UCHT™ #1 at the top here, everyone in America has an opinion about this, and a lot a lot of people are pissed off. There's apparently been a lot of suppressed resentment happening in airports...

This seems like a good moment to remind everyone that Fuck the TSA.

People are piiiissssssssssssssssssseeeedddddd........

Despite the clause in the ticket purchase contract that says United reserves the right to arbitrarily transfer any passenger to other flights or later flights, the passenger in question at least had a reasonable expectation that he had a right to an opportunity to explain why such a transfer would impose an undue hardship on him and request that he be allowed to continue. He was not given such an opportunity.

Hope the patients in Louisville don't mind United deciding to give their doctor's seat to a flight attendant; and don't sue United. 'cause, you know, every job is just as important as every other job. Serving drinks on a flight is no less important than diagnosing and curing illnesses.

Even if United acted within their rights, this is a public relations disaster for them and they deserve every brickbat thrown at them.

As for overbooking flights, yield management is difficult to do well. Most airlines don't do it well. One has to price a plane ticket accounting for refundable cancellations (last minute or otherwise), refundable no shows, passengers who transfer to other flights, and other causes for a seat to be held but not paid for when the plane takes off. Each seat pays for a portion the fuel, crew salaries, and mechanical wear for each flight. If not enough seats are filled, the flight flies at a loss. Too many of those and the airline goes bankrupt. Put the costs on too few seats and the cost of flying becomes exorbitant and you have too few customers.

Nonetheless, there's a better way to do it than to manhandle the customers; especially when you're already the lowest rated airline in terms of customer service and satisfaction.

In this case, however, it was not a paying passenger issue. It was the need to move a crew from Chicago to Louisville for a Louisville flight. Putting them on a bus, as has been suggested, may not have been possible due to union rules, safety, etc.

United chose to deplane four passengers on a single flight, one forcibly, to accommodate it's own housekeeping needs.

United cannot even say the flight was overbooked. United failed to accurately project seating needs and reserve four seats on that flight. United chose to eject three paying customers and forcibly eject a fourth paying customer.

While the first three were willing to quietly deplane and take a later flight, accepting $800 in airline credit for doing so, they were told the flight was overbooked. How do you think they'll feel when the find out on the evening news that the flight was not overbooked, United needed four seats for its own employees? $800 in airline credit will only go so far in soothing ruffled feathers.

WRM might be a little overheated...

...but maybe not.

This is admirably cruel.

This is tragically correct.

An enormous volume of expertise is brought to bear on this one.

The news stories say the passenger refused to be denied boarding. Huh? "Denied boarding?" He was already on the plane. He wasn't being denied boarding, he was being ejected. The time to cull four passengers from the flight is before you let them on the plane and they've stowed their gear and propped their feet up.

Maybe United thought their passengers were Chicago school system graduates, who are apparently being conditioned to expect authoritarian intrusion into their lives.

And the plot turns. The New York Post reports that the doctor in question was convicted of trading drugs for sex.

Excerpt:

The board’s probe into the criminal charges found that Dao became sexually interested in a male patient, Brian Case, whom he gave a physical examination to, including a genital examination, and whom he eventually made his office manager.

Case quit that job due to “inappropriate” remarks made by Dao, who then pursued him and arranged to give him prescription drugs in exchange for sexual acts, according to the documents, filed last year.

In 2004, Dao was convicted on a slew of felony counts of obtaining drugs by fraud or deceit and was later placed on five years of supervised probation, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

Fascinating that the man's past is being brought out.

I'm waiting for names and in-depth reports on the personal lives of the three cops, the assorted trolley dollies and the gate agents.

> He was already on the plane.
> He wasn't being denied boarding,
> he was being ejected.

It's apparently a term of art. If you aren't in the sky yet, you haven't "boarded"...

E.g., Request permission to come aboard, Sir.

And this.

Yeah, in airline parlance the plane is still boarding as long as the door isn't closed and secured.

> And the plot turns. The New York
> Post reports that the doctor in
> question was convicted of trading
> drugs for sex.

In what possible context could this turn the plot? He wasn't delivered in virgin youth at the top of the jetway to be United's meat plaything... So what?

Also, when no one was looking, he stole the two pieces of peppermint chewing gum from Terry Milburn's winter coat in Mrs. Jackson's* second-grade class at McCulla on April 18, 1967.

Does that mean he should be beaten bloody by the airlines when he's already seated?

Wait a minute... That was ME in Mrs. Jackson's class!

Does that mean I should be beaten bloody by the airlines when I'm already seated?

* Yes…  Mrs. Jackson was the
  foxy one.  Good memory,
  blog-comment reader!

Yes, yes, but he was trading drugs for gay sex. United, why you so homophobic?

Does that mean he should be beaten bloody by the airlines when he's already seated?

No. It does not. AFAIK, the airline did not know he was a convicted felon when it chose to have him forcibly ejected from the plane. And even if they did, beating him bloody for crimes for which he's already paid his due is not their prerogative. I'm not on United's side on this. This was an idiotic move by them.

At least I hope they didn't know. That would indicate far too much intrusion into passengers' personal lives by airlines. We get enough of that with the TSA.

I provided the link because it adds an interesting element to the story. Not enough for a court of law or an assignment of guilt, but an interesting element nonetheless. It could indicate the passenger is a self-centered prick. Not that anything in that article or the passenger's past behavior in any way abrogates his right to insist that United live up to its end of the contract and take him to Louisville as scheduled.

United did this for its own logistics and not due to overbooking. I hope he sues United blind. His ticket purchase contract says he will relinquish his seat if asked on *overbooked* flights, not to help United clear up its own scheduling SNAFU. I hope the other three passengers also sue United; they weren't bumped for an overbooked flight either.

Does that mean I should be beaten bloody by the airlines when I'm already seated?

I've never flown with you, so I'm going to have to hold off answering that question until I have more data.

Seriously though, there are some people you wish the airline would beat bloody, and it's not this guy. The guy who takes up half your seat with his sweaty bulk. The guy who slams his seat back, almost breaking your nose. The guy who spends his time kicking or kneeing the back of your seat. Why are these guys never beaten bloody?

The guy who just wants to get home in time to get to work the next morning. That's not the guy you beat bloody.

Via Paul.

We may not want to acknowledge this, but United is actually in the legal right here.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

An airline ticket is really a contract that the airline will transport you from one city to another. You actually haven’t purchased a specific flight or a specific seat; the airline can change all that on you. When the airline bumps you to a different flight, you are entitled to compensation, but only in certain circumstances.

AND

Airplanes are dictatorships, for safety reasons. Passengers are required by federal law to comply with crew instructions. That’s important especially in the air where arguments can distract crews and boil into altercations that lead to injuries, diversion of flights and arrests.

Airline crews are particularly sensitive to noncompliant customers on the ground, where they can easily boot someone off a flight. Passengers have complained in many incidents of crews abusing that authority and having passengers removed for the slightest disagreement. Bottom line: If a crew member says you have to get off a plane, federal law says you have to comply.

[Emphases mine]

From a purely civil standpoint however, the airline's treatment of Dr. Dao was reprehensible. The airline could have found another way to solve it's staffing dilemma in Louisville. This will be a public relations nightmare for them for the next few years, perhaps longer - mostly because it was United's own error or issue that caused them to need four seats on that flight.

If they'd let Dr. Dao keep his seat and picked another passenger to deplane, it would have set a bad precedent and the fifth passenger would likely have complained about it publicly on social media, but the optics would have been better than the evening news showing video of a bloodied man being dragged off a plane by civil authorities.

This comes down as the crew being petty tyrants abusing the "federal" authority allocated them. Any customer-oriented approach would have worked better and maintained the crew's authority without Gestapo tactics.

"If I were King of the World I would roam my kingdom in rags, incognito, dropping fortunes onto the people who are nice with no special reason to be nice, and having my troops lop off the heads of the mean, small, embittered little bastards who try to inflate their self-esteem by stomping on yours. ... By God, there would be so many heads rolling here and there, the world would look like a berserk bowling alley." ~ John D. MacDonald, The Empty Copper Sea

"No. It does not. AFAIK, the airline did not know he was a convicted felon when it chose to have him forcibly ejected from the plane. And even if they did, beating him bloody for crimes for which he's already paid his due is not their prerogative. I'm not on United's side on this. This was an idiotic move by them."

United seems to have taken the offense here and hired laid off members of Hillary Clintons disastrous presidential campaign to do their PR.

Smearing this poor guy doesn't make me like their airline more. It makes me like them even less.

"We may not want to acknowledge this, but United is actually in the legal right here."

And if this were a legal battle and I was on a jury, I might very well side with them, but it isn't.

Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean it is a good idea to do it.

This has nothing to do with United's legal rights. This is about how their customers and potential customers perceive them.

I wonder how busy the Adelson Dental clinic is these days?

Yes, I'd say Graham Palmer at April 10, 2017 11:33 PM was right-er than I thought.

Whoops, I meant right-er. More correctous than me.

"The New York
Post reports that the doctor in
question was convicted of..."

If you want to properly discredit him, accuse of him of being a podiatrist loudly protesting that he IS a real doctor.

I seriously hope that doesn't turn out to be the case, I'm going to have to go quietly delete about 72 re-tweets.

Whoops, I meant right-er. More correctous than me. ~ Crid at April 11, 2017 2:28 PM

$500 million down.

And here I though Norwest destroyed Wells Fargo in record time.

Not only did the airline screw up big time; but, they played that ol' law enforcement magic word - the passenger acted "belligerently" - therefore I have the right, no, make that DUTY, to beat the crap out of him.

Sorry, Llamas, but, sometimes your fellow men in blue make it hard to support Blue Lives Matter. I usually side with the police; but, not in this case. They should have told the airline YOU screwed up, don't make us be the bad guys cleaning up YOUR mess.

There had to be a much better way to remove someone from the flight who wasn't harming anyone until the airline decided to screw with him than by making him all bloody.

These guys make the Keystone Cops look like professionals.

Honestly, I do think United won't have too many "overbooked" flights anytime soon - and that won't be because they plan things better. A loss of paying customers will teach that idiot CEO just how "re-accommodating" passengers will be. Sure, most folks go with the cheaper flights - but not when the cheaper flight, literally, costs you an arm or a leg, or a bloody lip and concussion.

Pretty good analysis #1

Pretty good analysis #2

United backed into this and it turned to shit on them, one bad decision piled on another which is the way most disasters happen..

Im sure this sort of thing has happened before, but even ten years ago, there probably would not have been video of the incident.

So now instead of pissing their customers off, one at a time, they are doing it over the internet on a larger scale.

What would Southwest do? An airline without the top down stilted management and union rules?

They probably, with their open seating, would have put the crew on first, and the four guys at the end of the passenger line would have to deplane. (But they wouldn't have been forcing anyone out of their seats or calling the airport police to pull a ticketed passenger with a boarding pass out of his seat)

Small but important point: United didn't "need" to bump passengers -- it chose to. The airline could have driven the employees to the required stop, or put them on another airline, or — hell, why am I figuring out their problem for them?

---

I've not observed Delta denying boarding on a flight where they have dead-heading crew. First of all, dispatch will generally plan crew movements so that crew who need to dead-head somewhere will do it first thing in the morning, not on the last flight of the evening.
Second of all, why did crew need to dead-head to Louisville?

Speaking as an airline pilot, you have -- nor should you -- any idea what you are talking about.

Without going into many paragraphs of a full explanation, my bet would be that weather drove delays and perhaps involved diversions. Either or both will require, due to FAA rules, putting the original crew on the ground long enough to either get required crew rest, or even longer to get there allowed number of block hours in a week down to the maximum allowed.

Passenger airlines never plan to deadhead crew to outstations. Never. Ever.

If these crew members don't get to the outstation on time, then the flights they were supposed to operate will get delayed for hours.

I don't mean to excuses United's actions in any way -- if they had the company had any sense at all, they would have auction policies in place in case enough people don't accept the standing bid.

The plane can't take off with too many people on it. It just can't.

This true in more ways than one.

I have piloted flights where we had to take people off the plane and leave empty seats, because hot days at high altitude airports with long flight times mean offloading either payload, or fuel.

And you don't want to offload fuel.

Jeff Guinn +1

-----

I am still wondering why anyone thinks they get to tell cops at the airport, "no".

Jeff Guinn +1

Radwaste +1

I love how everybody and his dog is all over the Internet, telling United how to run their business and acting as though a reserved seat on an airline flight is some sort of magic talisman that protects the holder from anything bad ever happening to them, ever.

As I said before - this clown was quite happy to waste the time of hundreds of people, disrupt scheduling and prevent United from running their airline for the benefit of all their passengers, just so that he would not be inconvenienced by a few hours. And to fight the coppers about it. If the pilot had said 'the weather is too bad, I'm not flying', would he still be demanding that the plane take off and fly the schedule, Right Now?

If you don't want to run the risk of ever being delayed or inconvenienced when travelling by air - buy your own airplane. But if you want to travel from Chicago to Louisville in an hour for $243.50 - which is a technological marvel that would have been inconceivable just a hundred years ago - accept that there will sometimes be delays or issues, and some days, it's just your day to lose. Or don't fly.

llater,

llamas

llamas,

yyou are ttalking out of your ass.

llove,

ggail

Sseriously. I'm a llawyer. I analyze and llitigate llegal llanguage for a lliving. Amy has this rright. Uunited is going to llose this one, bbig time. That is, if it goes to ccourt. I predict they shell out an enormous ssettlement to avoid llitigating this.

@ Gail - OK. You're on.

Analyze for the rest of us how United does not have the right to refuse to transport Dr Dao for his breach of the contract of carriage, Rule 21, section H, subsection 2 - refusal to comply with the duties of the flight crew. Which include limiting the number of persons on the aircraft. Doubly-so if a member of the flight-deck crew was involved (subsection 4) (I don't know that the flight-deck crew was involved but I am sure that they must have been - no captain would allow armed police to be called onto the aircraft without the presence of the captain or first officer). They told him he had to get off. He refused. Case closed.

This should be fun.

My prediction - United isn't going to lose/settle anything, and it won't go to court. Or not with United as a defendant, anyway. There's no case, as a lawyer will advise Dr Dao in the fullness of time.

llater,

llamas

That's compensation by voucher, folks, not cash, and the vouchers come with restrictions.

Yes, yes, but he was trading drugs for gay sex.

I R A Darth Aggie at April 11, 2017 12:28 PM

Some young people just call that a party.

Though it looks like that particular party might have been with a different doctor who has a similar name.

Llamas -- see the other, more recent thread.

they had no right to tell him to get off in the first place because none of the reasons in the contract of carriage fit.

it is fucking hilarious that you think United is neither going to settle or lose in court. Even if they weren't wrong (and they are) the optics would drive them to a settlement. if you don't live under a rock, you surely will have noticed there's a bit of a brouhaha about this.