“United Passenger Dragged From Overbooked Flight” reminds us that the toughest jobs in the airline world are gate agent and flight attendant. It also makes me proud to have been a Delta Airlines employee (through the Comair subsidiary)! The crux of the matter seems to be that United wanted to get rid of four passengers to make room for four airline employees (crew needed to operate a flight starting at the destination?). An $800 voucher didn’t yield any volunteers so, rather than up the offer (Federal law 14 CFR 250.5 protects consumers(?) by limiting how much an airline can offer), the airline “randomly” selected four victims to be hauled back into the terminal. We may have had our shortcomings at Delta, but I don’t remember ever acting out Sophie’s Choice with the passengers.
My Facebook friends are expressing outrage about this. The Trumpenfuhrer is primarily to blame. A sample:
United stock is up for the day. Seems clear they knew there would be no consequence. Expect the rest of the US airlines to adopt the same policies. Now that the airlines have paid the administration to block the good airlines like Emirates why should they care about customer service?)
As I noted in “Unions and Airlines”, it is not a particular President and henchmen/women that make it illegal for Lufthansa or Ryanair to fly you from SFO to JFK, but rather laws made by and preserved by Congress:
In the absence of protectionist regulations, which prohibit foreign carriers from carrying domestic passengers, we would expect the entire U.S. air travel market to be captured by airlines owned by countries where labor laws do not facilitate the unionization of pilots. Without barriers to competition we would expect to see something like the cruise ship industry, where foreign-flagged vessels dominate. An airline might be based in the Philippines, for example, or El Salvador (like the excellent TACA, which has its own history with ALPA), and serve the U.S. with foreign-based crews.
[Separately, the flight seems to have been “United 3411” but flightaware.com shows it to be operated by Republic, a regional airline, on an Embraer E170. So the flight attendants would have been Republic employees, but the folks making the offers and the gate agents deciding on victims would likely have been United people. My job at Comair was unusual in that the regional airline was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta.]
Related:
- Airline losing a bag grows or shrinks the GDP? (my VIP baggage experience with United)
- My moment of airline glory and the passenger’s reaction
- My visual approach, and Asiana’s
Maybe the hubbub will die down when someone puts a number of tons of carbon emissions that are saved each year by over-booking. (I thought the whole point of employee standby was to keep employees from bumping paying customers, and given the repercussions, you’d think they could have further sweetened the pot)
It’s a little nuts that nobody was willing to take the 800 bucks, and it’s even more nuts that nobody was willing to take the 800 bucks so that a doctor could see his patients. (I do confess to having been so exasperated at the end of a long travel day that I would not take 800 bucks to wait another day)
Not to mention that United’s seat pitch can make you crazy.
Slate argues that in many cases $800 comes nowhere close to making it worth getting bumped.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/04/10/united_punished_a_passenger_for_its_own_outdated_overbooking_system.html
The passengers have no one but themselves to blame for the increased security personnel aggressiveness. They, as part of this country, condoned and embraced the nonsensical and humiliating security measures introduced post 9/11 such as whole body scans, pat downs, silly prohibitions on toothpaste and other things of this sort in exchange for the false sense of security. As soon as one steps on the airport grounds, one automatically becomes a suspect terrorist and is treated as such.
That does not forgive of course United ineptitude and their inability to resolve the minor issue without calling the local security thugs for help.
I try to avoid flying as much as can and managed to reduce the highly unpleasant experience to less or equal twice a year. Even so, I went to the trouble of getting the “TSA precheck” pass to make the experience slightly more tolerable.
1) What’s the difference between “oversold” flight and a fully booked flight, but one on which standby employees wish to travel?
2) What’s the difference between “denied boarding” and knocking out and dragging a boarded, seated, paying passenger?
Not sure how authoritative the excerpt below is, but what it says looks quite plausible:
“Can I be removed from a plane?
Airline rules tend to favor the airlines over passengers, and as the Points Guy explains, airplane captains and in-flight staff have wide discretion to remove people from planes. Basically, if they want you off, they can take you off.
”
http://www.gomn.com/news/united-scandal-unfolds-rules-bumping-people-flights/
Essentially, your rights asymptotically approach zero as you get closer to the aeroplane. Again, the sheep does not have anybody but themselves to blame for the status quo, for more reasons than one.
Strongly agree with Ivan.
This was the Stanford Prison Experiment with wings. Complete with the petty sadism.
>>asymptotically approach zero
They are zero once you step onto the gangway. There’s nothing asymptotic about that behavior.
The article says it was a flight from Chicago to Louisville scheduled to depart at 5:40p. Google says this is a 300 mile drive. United was willing to write $3200 in vouchers to get their 4 employees to Louisville.
My question – why not hire a couple of towncars to drive the employees the 300 miles? Presumably this would have been cheaper and would have avoided pissing off paying customers. They would have arrived at a relatively reasonable hour, maybe even earlier than the plane ultimately did since it was delayed 2 hours, and the car does not require a transfer from the destination airport to their final destination.
Is there some rule that requires the employees fly on a company plane?
Like a lot of industries (cable, wireless, health insurance) in the good ole US of A the airline industry has become an oligopoly with poor customer service and high prices. Not happy with United? Think that Delta or American are any better? Not surprising therefor that the esteemed Warren Buffet has been snapping up the shares of the airline cos as oligopolies lead to high profits. Some of these private oligopolies seem almost as bad as the government monopolies. More competition would help, like foreign carriers being given landing rights for domestic routes, but fat chance that is going to happen. We saw what foreign competition did to the US auto industry.
“Is there some rule that requires the employees fly on a company plane?”
I think you are pointing out the first point of failure here: a total lack of imagination on the part of the staff involved.
United Airlines new slogan: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy!”
George: “Is there some rule that requires the employees fly on a company plane?” No. Generally the airlines cooperate and reciprocate. As a Delta employee I could hop in an empty seat on a JetBlue plane, for example. There is an extra level of approval required, post 9/11, to sit in a cockpit jumpseat, and there is an information system that enables gate agents to check pictures of prospective cockpit jumpseaters. No money changes hands, as far as I know, when airline employees fly on other airlines.
The airline business is funny. I’m losing track of the number of times I’ve read about airlines generating “high profits”. I predict that this will last about 5 minutes into the next oil shock. I wonder what airline stock puts are running right now?
Would have taken the money, but the current generation of millenials thinks differently.
An $800 voucher that expires has pretty limited value, perhaps $500 cash equivalent?
The reason the airlines collude (using FAA to enforce the cartel) to limit denied-boarding compensation is obvious. If airlines had to increase on-the-spot bids until some passenger(s) agreed to be bumped, passengers would immediately start holding out for payments equal to the marginal cost (at least) of the next-best alternative of not overbooking and/or sending last-minute supernumeraries by some other route.
The whole point of bumping people is to save the airlines money, and offering compensation instead of simply dragging people off is regarded as a sort of marketing cost– it can be cheaper to pay off people sometimes than to piss off people every time, but it’s only cheaper if it’s really cheaper, which it would not be if the airline had to meet bumpees’ true-market prices.
The airlines need to re-think this in a world where everybody has a video device hooked to worldwide distribution. If just a minute fraction of the people who reacted “never United” act on it ONCE, United loses huge revenue. All flights are not full, so any empty seat is a dead loss.
Stupid to happen, double-stupid not to apologize as the first response (are they that afraid of pissing off a gate agent, who is way past getting emotional about anything on the job), triple-stupid to keep revising the response so it stays newsworthy an extra day.
Next rule is probably all cell phones off period,