The subtext here is that customers don't have any actual rights when dealing with a large corporation. The terms of service have become so lengthy and obscure that it's virtually certain for a corporate lawyer to find some justification somewhere for almost anything. The corporate employees and the police both operate on this assumption. As a customer, your only recourse is to meekly accept whatever treatment is coming your way.
The subtext here is that customers don't have any actual rights when dealing with a large corporation.
The problem is that people now believe that. In fact, lawsuits against big companies often are settled on very favorable terms for the customer. As the article points out, United violated their own contract of carriage and FAA regulations. This is going to cost them.
This is exactly why I'm fighting against Mandatory Binding Arbitration and Class Action Waivers. The system is slow, creaky, and arguably broken, but that's a _feature_ if it means that companies are afraid of it.
I'm not having a whole lot of success in my fight, it seems.
>The terms of service have become so lengthy and obscure
I don't think it's fair of you to criticize either the length or the obscurity of terms of service. After all, you could replace nearly all of them with:
"
1. We have every right of every kind and can do anything, without being liable for anything.
2. you have no rights of any kind and may do nothing, except those afforded by law, which you hereby waive as far as legally possible.
"
More forward-thinking startups might add something to the effect of "Of course this does not mean we are Satan! We will naturally make an effort to provide roughly the service you have paid for. However, nothing in this section should be construed as a statement that we shall not act like Satan in any particular instance. We reserve the right to be Satan at any time and our sole discretion without providing any prior written warning. You've been warned."
An interesting comment I ran across... not sure if it's valid or not, though:
"Lawyer here. This myth that passengers don't have rights needs to go away, ASAP. Here is how United illegally kicked him off the plane:
1. First of all, it's airline spin to call this an overbooking. The statutory provision granting them the ability to deny boarding is about "OVERSALES", specifically defines as booking more reserved confirmed seats than there are available. This is not what happened. They did not overbook the flight; they had a fully booked flight, and not only did everyone already have a reserved confirmed seat, they were all sitting in them. The law allowing them to denying boarding in the event of an oversale does not apply.
2. Even if it did apply, the law is unambiguously clear that airlines have to give preference to everyone with reserved confirmed seats when choosing to involuntarily deny boarding. They have to always choose the solution that will affect the least amount of reserved confirmed seats. This rule is straightforward, and United makes very clear in their own contract of carriage that employees of their own or of other carriers may be denied boarding without compensation because they do not have reserved confirmed seats. On its face, it's clear that what they did was illegal-- they gave preference to their employees over people who had reserved confirmed seats, in violation of 14 CFR 250.2a.
3. Furthermore, even if you try and twist this into a legal application of 250.2a and say that United had the right to deny him boarding in the event of an overbooking; they did NOT have the right to kick him off the plane. Their contract of carriage highlights there is a complete difference in rights after you've boarded and sat on the plane, and Rule 21 goes over the specific scenarios where you could get kicked off. NONE of them apply here. He did absolutely nothing wrong and shouldn't have been targeted. He's going to leave with a hefty settlement after this fiasco."
Yes, passengers don't know their rights but pilots and other administrators should. So United personal should have known they are in a legal grey area when removing a passenger who had boarded.
I found the argument interesting that United should have lied and just invented a plane swap with a smaller body. Would have left the affected passengers is a weak position.
There is so much wrong on all levels including the reaction of the CEO. This will be a case study for long time.
Hence why in the EU, most terms of service are essentially meaningless. If a judge finds your clauses surprising or an undue burden on the customer, they are null and void.
But what will happen is exactly what happens with overbroad patents. It is not possible to make an agreement with someone that requires soul-bonds. This could count as unlawful eviction and assault.
Even if it wasn't a passenger overbooking, it was overbooking in that they failed to properly account for the likelihood of having to ship crews around their network.
If their occupancy ratio was lower, then there wouldn't have been a problem, they could have fit the crew in. If they reserved 4 seats for crew on every flight, again there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had even reserved 2 seats and run sufficient flights such that the crew got to the target airport in time there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had brought crew in from two different starting points - it would have been fine.
It's still overbooking, just not oversold tickets.
The airline played the game, ran too lean and paid the price.
Much like an ISP having all their IP traffic going down one pipe, and not having enough room to send out the customer invoices because everyone is watching Netflix.
If they had recognized that they needed 4 seats for crew before the passengers scanned their tickets and walked down the jetway as is usually done they wouldn't have had a problem.
They could have started the process before the flight booked, asking for volunteers before they got seated and attached to the idea of being on that flight. If they had no volunteers, they could probably have randomly selected passengers to deny boarding, and rejected them at the gate. While I am offended by them violently dragging the man out of his seat and off the plane, if the ticket scanner doesn't blink green the passenger likely won't force his way onto the plane, and if he was injured by security while doing so, public opinion would not be so united against the airline.
>The airline played the game, ran too lean and paid the price.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, they just didn't follow through with the correct way to free up seats, which is increasing the bid.
Some family cleared something like $13,000 in amex gift cards during the delta debacle last week by volunteering their seats multiple times. If you keep increasing the bid, you will find a price at which someone will give up their seat.
In this case, semantics matter. Overbooking is a legally protected practice, but what you're trying to wedge into the definition of 'overbooking' is not.
Even if that is the case, there are much better methods of dealing with a situation like this than calling a police officer. It seems, like usual for American police, officers are insensitive to anything but violence; no logic, just apply force. The man is lucky they didn't taze him. The crew should have known that. It's good that this policy is about to change, but it is too little too late.
You make good points. Airplanes used to have jump seats, fold down seats, specifically for accommodating these sorts of crew transfers, so that they wouldn't interfere with normal passenger seating. I wonder if the jump seats were removed at some point in order to increase normal seating.
No, the real failure (and the source of this and many other issues in the airline industry) is the lack of competition in the US domestic market.
Pure and simple.
The huge, 350-million US domestic market is served by 4-5 major airlines, while the EU with 500 million people is served by tens of airlines. I recently flew from Barcelona to Nice for 30 euros, round-trip (with seat assignment).
Where are the (potentially Mexican or Canadian-based) low cost airlines?
That's right, none to be seen.
Let's hope this bust-up brings some legislative measures to introduce more competitive practices in the airline industry.
Otherwise we will soon be paying for the right to pee in-flight really soon.
I don't know if it's just airlines that have competition problems in the US. I actually think it's the airports that the problem.
In the EU, many (most?) airports are privately owned. In the US, they're almost always state owned. Furthermore, the Port Authority generally owns all the airports in the area.
In many EU areas, that's not the case. There's 6 airports in the London area and they all compete to offer the lowest landing fees to win airlines.
Ryanair capitalised on this and really injected all the competition in the market by only flying from 'secondary' airports.
I'm not sure the same thing could happen in the US. There isn't the same level of competition for airports, and without that I think it's hard for any airline to really make any difference.
> "Where are the (potentially Mexican or Canadian-based) low cost airlines? That's right, none to be seen."
I'm in the upper midwest and we have two or three low cost airlines. Sun Country is the biggest (and based in MN). Spirit Airlines also has a decent presence. Sun Country flies to lots of places. First class ticket to Anchorage cost me ~$700 last time I flew with them, less than an economy seat on Delta.
This is a new kind of UI/UX dark pattern. The United app lets customers pay for seats, and any reasonable person thinks that's the whole of it. But the fine print says that's not true, and says you can be forcibly removed if the flight is oversold.
"When you use the web, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another."
No. The fine print does not say that. The fine print says they can deny you boarding, not remove you once already boarded. Your point about the dark pattern is all too true, but United still behaved entirely illegally here.
Why didn't they just keep doubling the offer for volunteers? Surely by $1600 or $3200 someone would bite. Then everyone is happy, it all gets finished quickly, and there's no chance of this sort of PR disaster (even docile removees can end up in the news if they then, say, miss the death of a hospitalized family member due to the delay).
Because handbook says a certain amount is the maximum they can offer, and likely the crew offering more would risk their job. Following this fiasco, Munoz said they will expand the handbook. We'll see.
> This seems to reflect the deep internalization in America of deference to authority in the post 9/11 world, as well as reporters who appear to be insufficiently inquisitive. And there also seems to be a widespread perception that because it’s United’s plane, it can do what it sees fit. In fact, airlines are regulated and United is also bound to honor its own agreements.
I'm extremely pro-journalism (donate to various organizations, listen to podcasts hosted by journalists) but I'm completely baffled by how very few if any journalists dived into the details on what happened here in the very video, specifically the legalities and technicalities, compared to Redditors (who happen to be laywers) and bloggers. Going forward, readers who happen to be consumers and passengers could easily be adopting misinformation spread by trusted media sources and have the wrong frame of reference to view what happened.
I definitely agree with the criticism that the media has focused on the video, as "shockertainment" rather than educating their viewers. The awareness of the law and skepticism in media is lacking, they pretty much disseminated incorrect relevant details. Many would decry a 46 page contract of carriage, but then also not aid the viewer in navigating that complex document.
At the very least, a journalist should ask the airline and the police:
-has a crime been committed?
-has a civil contract been committed?
-what breach of law or contract has been committed and can you cite this exactly?
-do you often threaten passengers with removal?
-how often are you asked to do non-criminal passenger extractions on behalf of the airline? which airlines?
Either the passenger committed a crime to cause forced removal, and it seems clear he didn't commit a crime (nor was in breach of the contract of carriage); or the police committed the crime of assault, an unlawful use of force. There's a crime here either way, and that outcome I think is interesting.
But no less interesting is that United appears to have a track record of using threats of violence to get passengers to do things that are not at all required by law, regulations, or their own contract of carriage.
http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...
That passenger decided to acquiesce to the threats, and ended up having no real meaningful recourse, i.e. even for this reasonably affluent person, it wasn't worth it to sue.
Basically the contract is next to meaningless. This is might makes right. And if you won't stand your ground, aren't willing to get wrongfully arrested, and then sue at your own expense, the airline's threats will work and they'll get what they want.
I've been saying for years that the only thing holding back massive disruption in the airline industry is the FAA.
American and United are two of the most poorly run mega-corps in the US. Customers hate them, but need to fly. Warren Buffet thinks they're notoriously bad investments. Why?
There are a lot of regulations for airlines like American, but considering, for example, that there's nothing you can do at 35,000 feet in a giant metal machine if there's a mechanical failure, I'm much happier that there are a lot of regulations than not enough, in this case. There are a lot of things that suck about air travel in the states, but the FAA isn't one of them.
As far as the companies being bad investments, it's most likely due to their extremely low margins and ROI.
Flying is the safest form of transport because of the FAA. Yes there are a ton of rules and regulations, but the vast majority exist for a very good reason and the FAA is very good at cracking down on offenders. Why? Because the consequence of failure is so high that we can't afford not to.
Get rid of the FAA and it's only a matter of time before what was illegal ends up taking down a full airliner, killing hundreds or even thousands of people and ruins flying for everyone.
I don't think the FAA is bad. It's the companies that are. What disruptions do you need? Other airliners can provide service just fine even though they have to follow FAA rules when flying to and from the US.
Apparently Warren Buffet has changed his mind in recent years and invested in airlines. Largely because of what you describe: consolidation means people have no choice but to use them.
If the information in this article is true, which seems to be the case after reading most of the linked sources, then a lot of the news articles that were cited are reporting false information. Now that immediately made me curious to see if Google Fact Check would flag these news articles as false or possibly false. Doing a quick search shows no Fact Check under any of the search results, so seems like the answer is no.
If Fact Check really becomes a thing, I hope that Google will be able to use current events like this as a bar for how fast Fact Check needs to respond to an event to make it useful. If they could find and source well researched information and immediately flag misreported news articles while a topic is at the forefront of the news, then it would immensely help educate people. For example:
My parents have not stopped talking about this since it happened and are still looking at and reading news about it. There was some misreported information that I had to clear up for them. If Fact Check worked, then it definitely would have prevented misinformation spreading to them and probably many others.
There really isn't clarity here. The article argues that the flight wasn't overbooked, therefore UA couldn't kick anyone off. I agree if it wasn't overbooked, but it's not clear that that's evidently true. It's certainly gonna be contentious and probably up to a judge or jury to decide if it actually gets that far. I doubt it.
The more pressing matter is what do you do as a passenger when YOU are involuntarily denied boarding due to overbooking? Are you gonna sit in place, say, "I don't believe you." and wait for the stasi to take you away for a beating?
I believe this is exactly the kind of thing that will be resolved by the tools the market provides.
If they wanted volunteers to fly the next flight instead of this, they should have offered more than $400. Kind of like an auction: $500, $600, etc. and eventually enough people would have been incentivized to take the deal.
The company failed at that and now their competitors will get their business and increase their market shares at United's expense.
IANAL, but they might even be facing a very expensive lawsuit and will have to settle.
The market will ultimately work things out, I don't think the FAA should intervene much.
My guess is it will be like the Wells Fargo fiasco. Some low-level employees - probably the staff that worked that flight - will lose their jobs while those that actually created the policies that led to this will be just fine.
On overbooking, this is a solved problem: hold an auction where the max payoff is the risk in dollars X, distributed amongst Y passengers (the number of seats you need to free up). Start at some low anchor point ("$300 to get off the plane") and increment up until you have takers. If the total value exceeds X, write it off - you messed up.
I believe other airlines implement this in some capacity.
Seems to me that what is most unfortunate is that surrounding passengers didn't support the passenger dragged off the plane. 4 or 5 people standing up and threatening something along the lines of "Why don't you take my seat too jackass; I don't want it anymore" would have been far more effective at righting this situation than proper media reporting or crying about passenger contracts.
While that sounds like a nice thing to do on a personal level, it distracts from the real issue at hand - poor service and handling of a situation that was bad from the start. I strongly disagree that the passengers should have stepped up and taken the fall for poor practices from United. People don't need to be better humans - companies need to be held accountable for their actions and act better towards their customers.
Maybe in those few minutes, but in the long run a high-publicized international incident will be a million times more effective in creating conditions for improvements.
Has everyone watched the video? There is a point in the video where "things went wrong" and it happens right before the officer makes the decision to physically touch the passenger and begin to assault him in order to remove him.
Immediately before that point, there are a multitude of things that could have been done or done differently. The choice was made by that one individual to physically take hold of the passenger who was ultimately, peacefully, declining to deplane.
For example ... the officers could have:
1. Explained to the passenger and everyone around him about how he is single-handedly delaying everyone else's arrival home right now.
2. Gave several warnings, spaced out appropriately over time, that increased levels of escalation will be involved, up to and including the point of physical removal. In other words, telling him he will be forcefully removed against his will for not obeying the law.
... and so on with certainly more creative approaches that I wouldn't necessarily expect a typical police officer to think of and/or employ.
[+] [-] zeteo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that people now believe that. In fact, lawsuits against big companies often are settled on very favorable terms for the customer. As the article points out, United violated their own contract of carriage and FAA regulations. This is going to cost them.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
Well, no -- they just don't have much bargaining power. Which is different.
[+] [-] dwyerm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicallee|9 years ago|reply
I don't think it's fair of you to criticize either the length or the obscurity of terms of service. After all, you could replace nearly all of them with:
" 1. We have every right of every kind and can do anything, without being liable for anything.
2. you have no rights of any kind and may do nothing, except those afforded by law, which you hereby waive as far as legally possible. "
More forward-thinking startups might add something to the effect of "Of course this does not mean we are Satan! We will naturally make an effort to provide roughly the service you have paid for. However, nothing in this section should be construed as a statement that we shall not act like Satan in any particular instance. We reserve the right to be Satan at any time and our sole discretion without providing any prior written warning. You've been warned."
Did I miss anything?
[+] [-] t0mbstone|9 years ago|reply
"Lawyer here. This myth that passengers don't have rights needs to go away, ASAP. Here is how United illegally kicked him off the plane:
1. First of all, it's airline spin to call this an overbooking. The statutory provision granting them the ability to deny boarding is about "OVERSALES", specifically defines as booking more reserved confirmed seats than there are available. This is not what happened. They did not overbook the flight; they had a fully booked flight, and not only did everyone already have a reserved confirmed seat, they were all sitting in them. The law allowing them to denying boarding in the event of an oversale does not apply.
2. Even if it did apply, the law is unambiguously clear that airlines have to give preference to everyone with reserved confirmed seats when choosing to involuntarily deny boarding. They have to always choose the solution that will affect the least amount of reserved confirmed seats. This rule is straightforward, and United makes very clear in their own contract of carriage that employees of their own or of other carriers may be denied boarding without compensation because they do not have reserved confirmed seats. On its face, it's clear that what they did was illegal-- they gave preference to their employees over people who had reserved confirmed seats, in violation of 14 CFR 250.2a.
3. Furthermore, even if you try and twist this into a legal application of 250.2a and say that United had the right to deny him boarding in the event of an overbooking; they did NOT have the right to kick him off the plane. Their contract of carriage highlights there is a complete difference in rights after you've boarded and sat on the plane, and Rule 21 goes over the specific scenarios where you could get kicked off. NONE of them apply here. He did absolutely nothing wrong and shouldn't have been targeted. He's going to leave with a hefty settlement after this fiasco."
[+] [-] heisenbit|9 years ago|reply
I found the argument interesting that United should have lied and just invented a plane swap with a smaller body. Would have left the affected passengers is a weak position.
There is so much wrong on all levels including the reaction of the CEO. This will be a case study for long time.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] revelation|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helthanatos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpollock|9 years ago|reply
If their occupancy ratio was lower, then there wouldn't have been a problem, they could have fit the crew in. If they reserved 4 seats for crew on every flight, again there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had even reserved 2 seats and run sufficient flights such that the crew got to the target airport in time there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had brought crew in from two different starting points - it would have been fine.
It's still overbooking, just not oversold tickets.
The airline played the game, ran too lean and paid the price.
Much like an ISP having all their IP traffic going down one pipe, and not having enough room to send out the customer invoices because everyone is watching Netflix.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|9 years ago|reply
They could have started the process before the flight booked, asking for volunteers before they got seated and attached to the idea of being on that flight. If they had no volunteers, they could probably have randomly selected passengers to deny boarding, and rejected them at the gate. While I am offended by them violently dragging the man out of his seat and off the plane, if the ticket scanner doesn't blink green the passenger likely won't force his way onto the plane, and if he was injured by security while doing so, public opinion would not be so united against the airline.
[+] [-] hueving|9 years ago|reply
There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, they just didn't follow through with the correct way to free up seats, which is increasing the bid.
Some family cleared something like $13,000 in amex gift cards during the delta debacle last week by volunteering their seats multiple times. If you keep increasing the bid, you will find a price at which someone will give up their seat.
[+] [-] huebnerob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoNatan25|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoy|9 years ago|reply
I would argue that the unconscious paying customer with a bloody head paid the price.
[+] [-] droithomme|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mason55|9 years ago|reply
Many (some? most? warning, weasel words) airports operate at capacity so just adding more flights might not have been possible even if they wanted to
See, for example, the fights going on at Love Field over gate space
[+] [-] xenadu02|9 years ago|reply
They broke federal law by breaking their contract of carriage. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.
[+] [-] jazzyk|9 years ago|reply
Pure and simple.
The huge, 350-million US domestic market is served by 4-5 major airlines, while the EU with 500 million people is served by tens of airlines. I recently flew from Barcelona to Nice for 30 euros, round-trip (with seat assignment).
Where are the (potentially Mexican or Canadian-based) low cost airlines? That's right, none to be seen.
Let's hope this bust-up brings some legislative measures to introduce more competitive practices in the airline industry.
Otherwise we will soon be paying for the right to pee in-flight really soon.
[+] [-] martinald|9 years ago|reply
In the EU, many (most?) airports are privately owned. In the US, they're almost always state owned. Furthermore, the Port Authority generally owns all the airports in the area.
In many EU areas, that's not the case. There's 6 airports in the London area and they all compete to offer the lowest landing fees to win airlines.
Ryanair capitalised on this and really injected all the competition in the market by only flying from 'secondary' airports.
I'm not sure the same thing could happen in the US. There isn't the same level of competition for airports, and without that I think it's hard for any airline to really make any difference.
[+] [-] strictnein|9 years ago|reply
I'm in the upper midwest and we have two or three low cost airlines. Sun Country is the biggest (and based in MN). Spirit Airlines also has a decent presence. Sun Country flies to lots of places. First class ticket to Anchorage cost me ~$700 last time I flew with them, less than an economy seat on Delta.
[+] [-] jph|9 years ago|reply
https://darkpatterns.org/
"When you use the web, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another."
[+] [-] Vivtek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunesmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drfuchs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoNatan25|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmvp|9 years ago|reply
I'm extremely pro-journalism (donate to various organizations, listen to podcasts hosted by journalists) but I'm completely baffled by how very few if any journalists dived into the details on what happened here in the very video, specifically the legalities and technicalities, compared to Redditors (who happen to be laywers) and bloggers. Going forward, readers who happen to be consumers and passengers could easily be adopting misinformation spread by trusted media sources and have the wrong frame of reference to view what happened.
[+] [-] cmurf|9 years ago|reply
At the very least, a journalist should ask the airline and the police: -has a crime been committed? -has a civil contract been committed? -what breach of law or contract has been committed and can you cite this exactly? -do you often threaten passengers with removal? -how often are you asked to do non-criminal passenger extractions on behalf of the airline? which airlines?
Either the passenger committed a crime to cause forced removal, and it seems clear he didn't commit a crime (nor was in breach of the contract of carriage); or the police committed the crime of assault, an unlawful use of force. There's a crime here either way, and that outcome I think is interesting.
But no less interesting is that United appears to have a track record of using threats of violence to get passengers to do things that are not at all required by law, regulations, or their own contract of carriage. http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...
That passenger decided to acquiesce to the threats, and ended up having no real meaningful recourse, i.e. even for this reasonably affluent person, it wasn't worth it to sue.
Basically the contract is next to meaningless. This is might makes right. And if you won't stand your ground, aren't willing to get wrongfully arrested, and then sue at your own expense, the airline's threats will work and they'll get what they want.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
American and United are two of the most poorly run mega-corps in the US. Customers hate them, but need to fly. Warren Buffet thinks they're notoriously bad investments. Why?
[+] [-] yladiz|9 years ago|reply
As far as the companies being bad investments, it's most likely due to their extremely low margins and ROI.
[+] [-] jameskilton|9 years ago|reply
Get rid of the FAA and it's only a matter of time before what was illegal ends up taking down a full airliner, killing hundreds or even thousands of people and ruins flying for everyone.
[+] [-] TerminalJunkie|9 years ago|reply
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/warren-buffetts-big-bet-on-...
[+] [-] chrisper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hysan|9 years ago|reply
If Fact Check really becomes a thing, I hope that Google will be able to use current events like this as a bar for how fast Fact Check needs to respond to an event to make it useful. If they could find and source well researched information and immediately flag misreported news articles while a topic is at the forefront of the news, then it would immensely help educate people. For example:
My parents have not stopped talking about this since it happened and are still looking at and reading news about it. There was some misreported information that I had to clear up for them. If Fact Check worked, then it definitely would have prevented misinformation spreading to them and probably many others.
[+] [-] throw7|9 years ago|reply
The more pressing matter is what do you do as a passenger when YOU are involuntarily denied boarding due to overbooking? Are you gonna sit in place, say, "I don't believe you." and wait for the stasi to take you away for a beating?
[+] [-] gspetr|9 years ago|reply
If they wanted volunteers to fly the next flight instead of this, they should have offered more than $400. Kind of like an auction: $500, $600, etc. and eventually enough people would have been incentivized to take the deal.
The company failed at that and now their competitors will get their business and increase their market shares at United's expense.
IANAL, but they might even be facing a very expensive lawsuit and will have to settle.
The market will ultimately work things out, I don't think the FAA should intervene much.
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rargulati|9 years ago|reply
I believe other airlines implement this in some capacity.
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jksmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ductapemaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speby|9 years ago|reply
Immediately before that point, there are a multitude of things that could have been done or done differently. The choice was made by that one individual to physically take hold of the passenger who was ultimately, peacefully, declining to deplane.
For example ... the officers could have:
1. Explained to the passenger and everyone around him about how he is single-handedly delaying everyone else's arrival home right now.
2. Gave several warnings, spaced out appropriately over time, that increased levels of escalation will be involved, up to and including the point of physical removal. In other words, telling him he will be forcefully removed against his will for not obeying the law.
... and so on with certainly more creative approaches that I wouldn't necessarily expect a typical police officer to think of and/or employ.
[+] [-] Mithaldu|9 years ago|reply