United Airlines forcibly removes passenger from overbooked flight

[ld0595]

I haven't seen a thread about this yet, so I thought I'd make one here.I'm sure many here will have already heard about this. United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from overbooked flight

A man was violently removed from a United Airlines flight by three security officials at Chicago’s O’Hare international airport on Sunday, in an incident captured on video by several other passengers.

In one clip, posted by passenger Audra Bridges to Facebook, guards can be seen aggressively grabbing, and then dragging, the passenger down the aisle of the plane, which was bound for Louisville, Kentucky. Other passengers can be heard screaming and shouting “Oh my God” and “Look at what you did to him.”

The airline said in a statement that the flight was overbooked, and that no passengers agreed to voluntarily give up their seats. United said airline representatives chose four passengers to leave the plane at random based on ticket class, frequent flier status and check-in time, and that one man selected refused to leave his seat.

Officials then requested the assistance of law enforcement, who forcibly removed the man. Bridges said the seats were being cleared for airline employees on standby who were needed by the airline for shifts in Louisville.

Passengers from the flight reported that the man was eventually allowed back on the flight, face bloodied and looking confused. Video seems to confirm that, although the reason why is unclear.

According to Bridges, the man is a doctor and told flight officials he was due for a shift at his hospital.

“This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United,” airline CEO Oscar Munoz said in a statement to the Guardian. “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened.”

The Chicago police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The airlines contract of carriage, an agreement that all customers ascent to when booking, does give United the freedom to deny ticketed passengers travel if a flight is overbooked. Passengers are entitled to either cash or a flight landing near the same time as compensation.

United also reserves the right to remove passengers from a flight if they “fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew”.

The incident comes just a few weeks after another public relations controversy for the airline. In late March, United was accused of sexism for denying boarding to a 10-year-old girl for violating their dress code for “pass riders”. The girl was wearing leggings.

What absolutely terrible PR for United. It would have been far cheaper just to up the incentive a bit more to motivate another passenger to deplane voluntarily compare to the cost of the reported 2 hour delay and all this negative publicity.

I was planning on flying with them in December to Newark but will definitely not be using them after these events. I am disgusted after watching this video - and the fact that they haven't even issued a formal apology yet is very poor form. What tops it all off is the fact that the passenger was displaced because crew needed to travel to catch another flight. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for this.

What does everyone else think?

 

[Mag_seven]

It seems a bit odd that you can be removed from a plane that is overbooked once you are already on it. I thought it would normally be the last to try to check in that would be refused?

 

[Howardh]

Shouldn't overbooking be illegal - even if it ultimately means a slight rise in cost for everyone? I'#ve only glimpsed the video but I hope that doctor sues United for their equivalent of unprovoked assault, and if he was in Europe maybe breach of his human rights.

 

[yorksrob]

Surely they could have just offered an upgrade on the next flight, or a free night in a hotel - someone would have been up for it.

Obviously a stingy rubbish company.

 

[amateur]

What you forgot to mention - unless I missed it

"No one volunteered, so United decided to choose for us. They chose an Asian doctor and his wife."
"The doctor needed to work at the hospital the next day, so he refused to volunteer," Mr Anspach added.
"Ten minutes later, the doctor runs back into the plane with a bloody face, clings to a post in the back, chanting, "I need to go home."

Edit:yes it is mentioned in the original post that he is a hospital worker

 

[Darandio]

What you forgot to mention - unless I missed it

The OP hasn't forgot to mention anything, it's a quote from a newspaper website.

"No one volunteered, so United decided to choose for us. They chose an Asian doctor and his wife."

What about the other two?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Surely they could have just offered an upgrade on the next flight, or a free night in a hotel - someone would have been up for it.

Obviously a stingy rubbish company.

$800 seems pretty reasonable to me.

 

[Cowley]

It beggars belief the extraordinary mess of things people make sometimes. Surely in the age of the camera phone and instant social media, at some point someone would have thought that this scenario wasn't working out very well and it might be time for a rethink?

 

[yorksrob]

$800 seems pretty reasonable to me.

It doesn't say in the quote anyone was offered 800 dollars. I'd have taken it (providing I wasn't expected to pay for the replacement flight out of it).

 

[AlterEgo]

I saw this earlier on today. It really is mind boggling. While the brutality was done by the airport police and not United employees, United's complete lack of empathy and sincerity during and after the event is staggering.

I'm an enthusiast of airlines and air travel and this has ensured that I will definitely not consider using United for internal USA flights I've yet to book.

 

[DarloRich]

A PR disaster

 

[Barn]

Hopefully overbooking won't be a problem for them for a while...

 

[najaB]

Shouldn't overbooking be illegal - even if it ultimately means a slight rise in cost for everyone?

No, not really. It is a very common practice and rarely results in major disputes like this. I almost got $300 on Sunday as my flight from JFK to RDU was overbooked - though in the end one of the other passengers failed to show up and I got to travel on my booked flight.

 

[Merseysider]

I flew United with a couple of mates last April from Memphis to Las Vegas. Ended up delayed about 4 hours because their crappy airplane had a fault, and not only that, they neglected to mention to anyone that a half empty plane was leaving for Texas (with a connection to LAS) an hour after ours was scheduled. We had to look that up ourselves; we argued our way on with the help of a passing pilot - despite United wanting to charge us for the change - and after arriving in McCarran found out that our original flight had been cancelled and they'd left everyone else in the airport overnight

Absolute trash airline. We each got a $50 voucher after complaining online, which we haven't used. I've flown about ten different airlines and United were by far the worst.

Doesn't surprise me that this has happened, overbooking is a regular problem in the USA and United are often reviewed as one of the worst airlines

If this happened in the UK all hell would break loose in the media, online, etc.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It doesn't say in the quote anyone was offered 800 dollars. I'd have taken it (providing I wasn't expected to pay for the replacement flight out of it).

I've seen this mentioned elsewhere and other stories mention them having started at $400 and upped to $800 before they went onto involuntary bumps which were decided randomly by the computer.

It is odd for this to happen after boarding - but it's quite possible that if the crew hadn't been flown another flight would have been cancelled, "bumping" hundreds of people.

 

[Bletchleyite]

No, not really. It is a very common practice and rarely results in major disputes like this. I almost got $300 on Sunday as my flight from JFK to RDU was overbooked - though in the end one of the other passengers failed to show up and I got to travel on my booked flight.

It's done mainly because US airlines carry a lot of passengers on fully-flexible tickets, which like railway Anytime tickets mean you can just not show up for your booked flight and obtain a penalty-free change or refund later (indeed often with not even an admin fee). Calculations are done to see how much to oversell by based on experience, and the last few are often bumped voluntarily with a decent payout, upgrade or similar.

easyJet and Ryanair etc rarely overbook to any significant degree if at all because your ticket, even if "flexible", dies with the departure of the booked flight (give or take hefty "rescue fees" which nobody would choose to pay deliberately).

The US could switch to the latter method, but it would significantly reduce flexibility in a country where people take planes like we take trains and desire the same kind of flexibility rail gives us, with the limitation that you can't just cram 10 people into each vestibule to take the slack.

 

[WelshBluebird]

What I find odd is that this was done so some United employees could travel.
At least in this country the general take is that if you are an employee travelling then normal passengers come first. But this seems to have gone the other way!
I wonder if there is more to this than we have heard. Why did the employees need to travel on that particular flight? Was this a United Airlines mess up in terms of staffing?

 

[MotCO]

What has not been mentioned so far is that the four airline staff who needed to fly and caused four passengers to be bumped, only needed to travel from Chicago to Louisville, a distance of 300 miles. Surely a hire car or train would have been a suitable alternative for the aircrew. This would haved saved all the bad PR and the $$$ damages.

 

[Bletchleyite]

What has not been mentioned so far is that the four airline staff who needed to fly and caused four passengers to be bumped, only needed to travel from Chicago to Louisville, a distance of 300 miles. Surely a hire car or train would have been a suitable alternative for the aircrew. This would haved saved all the bad PR and the $$$ damages.

Would the staff have been in a safe condition to do their jobs after 300 miles in a car?

If a car was good enough, the passengers could have taken their $800 and hired one themselves.

 

[WelshBluebird]

Would the staff have been in a safe condition to do their jobs after 300 miles in a car?

If a car was good enough, the passengers could have taken their $800 and hired one themselves.

Or perhaps United should have made sure they had staff in the right place without having to turf passengers off the flight?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Or perhaps United should have made sure they had staff in the right place without having to turf passengers off the flight?

Ideally, yes. But sometimes these things happen. And not flying the staff could have meant a cancellation and hundreds of passengers displaced.

Sometimes the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.

 

[WelshBluebird]

Sometimes the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.

Ironic considering the guy who got turfed off was supposed to have appointments with patients the next day! Wonder how those patients feel now?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Ironic considering the guy who got turfed off was supposed to have appointments with patients the next day! Wonder how those patients feel now?

No idea, but every single passenger on that aircraft had a reason they didn't want to get off it even for $800 (it's the BBC article that confirms this), his reason is not necessarily any more important than anyone else's.

 

[WelshBluebird]

but every single passenger on that aircraft had a reason they didn't want to get off it even for $800

Because they had paid for the flight and planned around getting that flight? As you tend to do when you are travelling!

God can you imagine the uproar here if someone had bought a (fairly expensive) advance ticket for a rail service, was told they couldn't actually travel through no fault of their own with their tickets taken by staff instead? Why the double standard?

 

[Bletchleyite]

God can you imagine the uproar here if someone had bought a (fairly expensive) advance ticket for a rail service, was told they couldn't actually travel through no fault of their own with their tickets taken by staff instead? Why the double standard?

Because you can have standees on trains.

If those staff hadn't travelled, a flight would probably have been cancelled, displacing hundreds.

 

[najaB]

God can you imagine the uproar here if someone had bought a (fairly expensive) advance ticket for a rail service, was told they couldn't actually travel through no fault of their own with their tickets taken by staff instead?

If they were travelling non-rev then I agree, but they are the first to get bumped. Going back to my example from yesterday, it was 2pm and there was a non-rev passenger who had been waiting since 3am and still didn't have a seat.

Operational staff need to get where they have to be or flights get cancelled.

 

[RichmondCommu]

Operational staff need to get where they have to be or flights get cancelled.

In which case they should start cancelling flights. That way minds will quickly become more sharply focused.

 

[DarloRich]

Neil - give it up. Even if United followed their policies to the letter this is a PR disaster for them. They should not be dragging a semi conscious man off a flight because their staff want a seat, a seat, lets not forget that he paid for and was already occupying. You must see that.

I think their handling of the PR aspect of this episode has been terrible. They simply do not have control of the issue or a plan about how to regain control. They should simply hold their hands up, apologise and try to close things down asap.

BTW: involuntary denial of boarding process - comedy gold!

 

[AlterEgo]

It'll be interesting to see if the guy hauled off really was a doctor, or whether this was misinterpreted.

If you've seen the video where he gets back on the aircraft, bloodied, repeating "I need to get home" then you'd start questioning whether he was the full shilling.

 

[ld0595]

United CEO doubles down in email to employees, says passenger was 'disruptive and belligerent'

United CEO Oscar Munoz doubled down in a letter to employees on Monday evening, claiming that employees "followed established procedures" when removing a passenger from a plane because it was overbooked, and calling the passenger "disruptive and belligerent."

United had to ask several passengers who had already boarded a flight from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday evening to leave, as the airline had sold too many tickets. One man refused to leave, and United called airport officials, who forcibly removed him from the plane.

Video circulated of the incident earlier in the day, showing the man being dragged from the plane and later returning with blood on his face. The incident drew scorn on Twitter and other social media, especially when Munoz used the euphemism "re-accomodate" in a public statement to describe the customers booted from the flight.

According to the letter, which was obtained by CNBC, when crew members first approached the passenger to tell him to leave, he "raised his voice and refused to comply," and each time they asked again "he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent."

Crew members "were left with no choice but to call Chicago Aviation Security Officers to assist in removing the customer from the flight," Munoz wrote, and at one point the passenger "continued to resist - running back onto the aircraft in defiance of both our crew and security officials."

Munoz acknowledged to employees that the company could learn lessons from the incident, but said: "I emphatically stand behind all of you."

Found this update this morning claiming the passenger was 'disruptive and belligerent." Even if this is the case, I still firmly believe that there is no justification for the force shown in the videos.