United Airlines PR fiasco - police forcibly remove man from overbooked flight

[BrewDog]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...film-moment-police-drag-man-United-plane.html
Airport cop is SUSPENDED over United scandal as new video shows bleeding 69-year-old victim mumbling 'kill me' after he was body-slammed and hauled off overbooked flight to make room for airline STAFF
-One Chicago Aviation Department security officer was put on leave on Monday
-United CEO has apologized for the incident amid mounting anger
-An earlier Chicago Police statement claimed the victim 'fell' but has been retracted
-New video shows the man bleeding heavily from the mouth after incident
-The man was filmed screaming, then being knocked out by cops and dragged off the overbooked United flight at Chicago O'Hare on Sunday night
-He was selected to give up his seat after no volunteers were found
-Passengers had to give up their seats for United staff who were needed in Louisville, Kentucky
-Passengers were offered $800 to take a flight the next day
-The man claimed to be a doctor who had to see patients the next day


All's well that ends well.

 

[Peregrine]

Dude, most of us here don't have a problem with overbooking. And they have every right to use force to eject people who refuse to leave the plane. But you do get that offering a thousand dollars more to another person would've cost significantly less in retrospect than what they're dealing with now, right?

In this specific instance sure it would have been a good idea. However, Huge corporations don't give their peons the power to control that. If they gave their peons the power to give another $1000 on top of what they're already giving it would probably end up being millions in extra compensation every year. They didn't have a magical crystal telling them this was the time that calling LE for the removal of a passenger would go viral.

I disagree. It's well known that the biggest portion of operational risk is legal risk and you can probably attribute 80 to 90% of your operational losses to a handful of legal incidents. There's a strong argument for giving front line staff more flexibility to resolve issues within reason. I have a feeling someone didn't want to kick the problem up the chain or was just plain frustrated. I guarantee their policy changes to "once a passenger is actually seated in a plane (as opposed to denied at the gate), we will never use force to remove them because we need the seat".

Ultimately his ticket almost definitely did cost around $200. How do I know? ...because they kick the lowest fare class and I'm a United elite that flies out of Chicago so I know what that distance from O'Hare would roughly cost on the cheapest ticket.

It is also true that he should've booked a higher fare class if he didn't want to risk getting bumped. His patients probably aren't that important. He clearly hammed up the whole thing, but I would've too. Why can't I ever get the good fortune of having a company rough me up? I'd take a bloody nose or cut lip for a six figure payday as many times as someone's offering.

 

[Gustavus Adolphus]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...film-moment-police-drag-man-United-plane.html
Airport cop is SUSPENDED over United scandal as new video shows bleeding 69-year-old victim mumbling 'kill me' after he was body-slammed and hauled off overbooked flight to make room for airline STAFF
-One Chicago Aviation Department security officer was put on leave on Monday
-United CEO has apologized for the incident amid mounting anger
-An earlier Chicago Police statement claimed the victim 'fell' but has been retracted
-New video shows the man bleeding heavily from the mouth after incident
-The man was filmed screaming, then being knocked out by cops and dragged off the overbooked United flight at Chicago O'Hare on Sunday night
-He was selected to give up his seat after no volunteers were found
-Passengers had to give up their seats for United staff who were needed in Louisville, Kentucky
-Passengers were offered $800 to take a flight the next day
-The man claimed to be a doctor who had to see patients the next day


All's well that ends well.

Can you please point us to the United Press Release that says something like:

"No employee in our organization or local Law Enforcement is being disciplined for this event. Customers need to read the god damn contract. It's all legal. Doctor is probably a malpractice risk anyway at that age. We possibly saved lives by delaying his departure. Sorry, not sorry."

I can't find it

 

[BrewDog]

Can you please point us to the United Press Release that says something like:

"No employee in our organization or local Law Enforcement is being disciplined for this event. Customers need to read the god damn contract. It's all legal. Doctor is probably a malpractice risk anyway at that age. We possibly saved lives by delaying his departure. Sorry, not sorry."

I can't find it

There's a poster in this thread that seems to work for United Airlines. Maybe he can find it.

 

[RIslander]

 

[Repo]

Wow I didn't even see that the guy was 69 years old and they had to bloody him to get him off.

 

[IvanDrago]

Who is masochistic enough to fly though the anus of the planet, O'hare.

 

[BrewDog]

Wow I didn't even see that the guy was 69 years old and they had to bloody him to get him off.

It's because he's Chinese. Everyone knows that the Chinese are Kung Fu experts.

 

[Kona]

Who is masochistic enough to fly though the anus of the planet, O'hare.

Ain't that the truth.

I took one flight that stopped there last summer and been through other times. The ticket printed in HNL had a gate number. So I told the stewardesses since it was real far away and 45 min stop. They had a golf cart pick me up like I was a VIP. We get to that gate, and they had changed it to one that was right next to where I came in. So I missed. American tried to tell me it was my fault since I didn't look at the screens. But how could I when they were driving me. They could have looked.

That's part of the problem. Every policy they have puts so much more responsibility on you. When they fuck up its your fault for not reading fine print. Stupid.

And this incident with the wounded chinaman will do nothing to affect any policy, and passenger volume won't change at all.

The airlines know they suck, passengers know airlines suck, and everyone just excepts it.

Aloha!

 

[ElFlaco]

 

[Scoundrel]

We may well be witnessing the unfolding of one of the biggest PR nightmares of all time. Regardless of what actually happened on the plane, the impression that millions of people are getting from the story & videos is that of a heartless airline that doesn't give a damn about its customers.

-Passengers had to give up their seats for United staff who were needed in Louisville, Kentucky

"United's staff are important people — United's customers are not." Again, this is the impression millions of people are getting of United right now.

You can argue that the airline had a right to kick him off, that the airline policies are spelled out clearly in the fine print that nobody reads. This is probably correct. You'd also be right if you said the guy should have complied and exited the plane at some point before security had to drag him off bodily.

None of this changes the fact that United is in the midst of a mega-crisis right now. People are reading this story and watching the videos, and can't believe that an airline could be so stupid (and so cruel) as to allow an overbooking situation to get that out of hand.

People already hate flying, and dislike airports and airlines for a whole bunch of reasons. These same people are now mentally substituting themselves and/or their loved ones for the man in the story right now. They feel for him. OK, so maybe he's a bit odd and overdramatic. Ultimately, he's a traveler who had just settled down into his seat, and all he wanted was to go home.

United should have offered more money or other perks to persuade people to willingly give up their seats. Everyone has their price; If they kept upping the amount, eventually somebody would have taken it.

In the age of cellphone cameras & social media outrage, no company or corporation can afford to have a situation like this to take place. I'm sure if the CEO of United could go back in time and offer folks on that plane $25,000 each to give up their seats, he would. That would be a rock-bottom bargain compared to how much United now stands to lose over this debacle.

 

[Robert High Hawk]

This whole "read the fine print" thing is beyond stupid, as are those who defend it (in this kind of context).

There was one study that said that the average person breaks like 10 laws a day, because the fine print on so many services and products you use. Copyright laws, safety regulations, etc... Have you all read the fine print on every app you have downloaded?

Who has time for all that shit? I'm not talking about reckless disregard for norms and having situational awareness. This is about the over litigation/criminalization of every single thing in our lives, and the phaggotry (yes it warrants that term) of those that defend it.

We complain about snowflakes, yet that same mindset is the blind obedience to authority and rules. Snowflakes cannot understand nuance, and they have an acute sense of narcissism, while lacking any genuine empathy. That same mentality applies to blind obedience to process and procedure, rather than evaluting the intent and social consequences behind them.

This is the kind of thing you see nowadays with the TSA at airports. This agency is utterly useless and humanly degrades every man who goes through it. Occasionally I will gripe in line about how stupid this all is, and invariably a fellow passenger actually DEFENDS the process, as if it's really keeping us safer. Or my favorite line "well you don't HAVE to fly, when you buy your ticket you accept to go through this process!". So sheepish have we become as a people, that common sense and independent, personal judgement a foreign concept. It's all about liablity coverage, and then you get the trainweck of a plane ride (heh) that occurred with United.

 

[Delta]

A lot of people don't like the optics of how law enforcement is accomplished lately because we've turned into a generation of snowflakes -- this incident is another example. Dragging someone out of a tight airline seat against their will doesn't sound like a simple task.

Putting aside the "snowflake" part that makes you sound like a parody...

No one here is even arguing about the way the passenger was removed. Obviously the cop was left with little choice at that point.

The blame falls squarely on United for being too cheap to offer a compensation amount that would've enticed someone to willingly give up their spot. If they just extend that simple courtesy to their paying customers, then everyone goes home happy. The "optics" of the extraction have nothing to do with what anyone is saying.

 

[Kabal]

The blame falls squarely on United for being too cheap...

You would say that, Delta.

 

[Seadog]

Maybe I'm a white knight, but in this case, the cop slamming the sorority girl, or the black guy slamming that other girl after a drink was tossed, the autist being shot on the ground, in all cases despite perhaps initiating things or *technically* being in the wrong, the reactions are way out of line. It isn't a sex thing, it's a disparity of power thing. With the girls being thrown to the ground I'd feel the same way if it was a 120 lb guy. Where one party has such a dominant one sided advantage (legal+physical) and are basically also operating under a bully mindset it isn't a society I want to participate in. Yes you should know better, but at the same time being eaten isn't an appropriate consequence for annoying a lion. I like probably most other people here have had bad days, acted like an ass, been in the wrong. It shouldn't be a carte blanche for whomever I've wronged, however minor, to go open season on me.

This guy didn't give up the seat for $800. Clearly being on that plane was was worth more than $800 to him. Overbooking planes exist to maximize efficiency. With less seats going empty, fares can be lower. However; as here, occasionally the system fucks up. Forcibly ejecting people shouldn't even be an option. They should be forced to go high and higher until there is a taker. They want the benefit of overselling, but none of the potential costs that come up when they can't deliver what they promised.

I suppose the people on United's side here are also on Enron's. After all, pretty much everything you needed to know it was in trouble was laid out in black and white in thousands of pages of public documents with all their wildly optimistic assumptions right there. That should have been obvious to any moron who happens to be well versed in corporate/tax law and accounting who took a couple months to go through it.

The North Wind boasted of great strength. The Sun argued that there was great power in gentleness.

"We shall have a contest," said the Sun.

Far below, a man traveled a winding road. He was wearing a warm winter coat.

"As a test of strength," said the Sun, "Let us see which of us can take the coat off of that man."

"It will be quite simple for me to force him to remove his coat," bragged the Wind.

The Wind blew so hard, the birds clung to the trees. The world was filled with dust and leaves. But the harder the wind blew down the road, the tighter the shivering man clung to his coat.

Then, the Sun came out from behind a cloud. Sun warmed the air and the frosty ground. The man on the road unbuttoned his coat.

The sun grew slowly brighter and brighter.

Soon the man felt so hot, he took off his coat and sat down in a shady spot.

"How did you do that?" said the Wind.

"It was easy," said the Sun, "I lit the day. Through gentleness I got my way."

 

[BrewDog]

LOL, get 'em Piers!


PIERS MORGAN: Fly the Friendly Skies? You get better treatment on Con Air than on most domestic US airlines
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4399862/PIERS-MORGAN-Domestic-airlines-worse-Air.html

He was a totally innocent fee-paying passenger who just needed to get home, possibly to help save someone’s life.

This wasn’t about security, or him behaving badly or being unfit to travel.

It was just about money.

United needed to save a few thousand dollars by getting their crew in the right place for a particular flight.

To achieve that, they needed to kick off passengers.

Yet ironically, penny-pinching United have now earned themselves millions of dollars worth of horrendous publicity, and I’m very confident they will end up paying further millions in compensation if and when this doctor sues their shameful little ass*s.

‘I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers,’ said United CEO Oscar Munoz.

Re-accommodate?

Is that a joke?

You pummelled a customer’s head in, knocked him out, and had him dragged off your plane as other passengers shrieked their fury.

That’s not ‘re-accommodation,’ Mr Munoz, that’s called assault and battery, as you will shortly discover when he takes you to court.

But there is one positive for United from this appalling incident. And it’s this: they won’t need to worry about over-booking ever again.

They could pay me $800,000 and give me a free holiday to the Moon with Jessica Alba - and I still wouldn’t let them drag me ON to one of their planes, let alone off it.

 

[anthony]

Its amazing a company who was paid money for a service decided to beat the shit and drag out one of their customers because the company had too many customers.

The surreal comes to mind here.

 

[CaptainChardonnay]

Pretty stupid how they didn't just drive those employees to where they had to go since it was a 4 hour drive. To the guys saying he should have paid the higher fair, I don't think thats a valid way to look at it. He might just not want to spend money on plane tickets.

Bottom line is he paid for a service and it was not delivered.

 

[Travel Museums]

I'm in China and discovered this news on wechat. There are some negative meme photos going around. UA is opening new several new China routes. They were right but they will likely lose the public opinion battle on this. Chinese are so nationalistic they're all posting offense at an American of Chinese descent getting manhandled. VERY UNLUCKY that this doctor was ethnicly Chinese. They're going to lose a lot of business over it. And with the president visiting the USA? Only more focus and pressure over this. Hope it blows over. They are a good airline.

 

[SamuelBRoberts]

I'm in China and discovered this news on wechat. There are some negative meme photos going around. UA is opening new several new China routes. They were right but they will likely lose the public opinion battle on this. Chinese are so nationalistic they're all posting offense at an American of Chinese descent getting manhandled. VERY UNLUCKY that this doctor was ethnicly Chinese. They're going to lose a lot of business over it. And with the president visiting the USA? Only more focus and pressure over this. Hope it blows over. They are a good airline.

In general, good airlines don't beat their customers bloody until they scream "Please kill me".