After violently dragging a passenger from overbooked flight, United Airlines apologizes to everyone else

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I’d guess that their fight or flight instinct was leaning toward flight - in a tight situation where they couldn’t run, they could only sit still and try to avoid catching the attackers’ attention. People sometimes intervene when attacked by terrorists, but rarely. Seems reasonable it would be even less likely when those terrorists are dressed up in costumes to look like law enforcement and are being ordered around by employees of the airline.

I’m only on chapter 7, but it’s really good so far. I think more people should read it.

When my mother got cancer, our flight to visit her was canceled and we had to reschedule and arrange additional time off from work etc., but we accepted it. Then on the way to my mother’s funeral, at a connecting airport, they told us that we were bumped because they were going to cancel all flights the next day and wanted to send their employees home rather than pay them. Asked us couldn’t we just stay at whatever city we were in and delay my mom’s funeral for a couple of days, or split the family and leave some there while others went to the funeral.

Luckily, it wasn’t United. One or more of the employees stepped up and volunteered to stay (and get a couple more days pay) so that we could have what we had paid for. I think that was a win-win. I would have been a bit upset if they hadn’t resolved that. Not everyone is just traveling on a whim.

Given the costs that travelers frequently have associated with travel above and beyond ticket price (special events, hotel and car rental reservations, time off from work, etc.), I think that the minimum airlines should have to pay for bumping someone should be much higher. A $5,000 or maybe $10,000 minimum, quadrupled if it’s involuntary, might make them consider other solutions.

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Failure to comply with the duties of the flight crew is a valid reason to be kicked off the plane. And of course, if their duty is to kick you off the plane…

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That was quite the windup to try to justify a not very funny joke.

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Daneel, I hope you know I respect you as a witty level-headed vintage member of the Boing Boing commentariat. This comment is meant in friendship and the awareness that you and other people advocating more bystander action are doing so out of righteous kindness. It’s also more general remak than direct response to you; your comment was merely the catalyst to my thoughts on the matter.

I applaud @orenwolf’s comment. I too would like to believe I’d try to do something. I hope I’d be smart enough not to initiate or join an attempt to physically remove the man from the the rent-a-cops’ hands. Not because I’m some sort of pacifist (oh I am most certainly not) but because it would be ineffectual and help the jackboots’ cause more than the passenger’s. We’d both be arrested, but the situation would be grist for the victim-blaming mill.

What, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I hope I would have done is to stand up and politely but firmly insisted the rent-a-cops place the unconscious man back in the seat while an airline personnel retrieved the airport’s EMTs to take the unconscious man off the plane. There’s a very small chance they’d listen and agree, and probably arrest me anyway, but I’d offer to be taken into custody if they agreed to send for the EMTs. I have the privilege of excellent lawyers. More likely, because these hired thugs are the dumbest of the dumb, they’d continue dragging the unconscious man down the aisle and detain me anyway. But a peaceful protest would at least show dissent with the airlines’ brutality. It would work even better if I was not the only one.

All that said, the people berating the other passengers for filming instead of attempting to physically intervene are not only missing the point, but making a mistake. Even if it occurred to some of them to intervene - and though it occurs to me in hindsight from the safety and comfort of my computer, I don’t know if it would have occurred to me when my blood was up in the fury of the moment - you’re asking people to risk their own neck when you weren’t there. Asking them to is fine, but berating them for not is unfair. And even if they should have or did intervene, berating them for filming the incident is simply foolish. Look, I get it, no one feels clean living in a society of gawkers and rubberneckers who want to pass responsibility to others. I feel the same way. But filming these dimwitted thugs and, even more importantly, the airline culture that hires, tolerates, backs-up and stands by this kind of brutality, shines what little light we can on their callous abuses of authority. By framing it as they filmed instead of helping, your suggesting that helping precludes filming and that filming wasn’t helping. Neither is true.

All of which is to say that @orenwolf’s comment had my total agreement. A positive example, even in what one would hope one would do, might get people more involved. The comments that followed arguing whether the filmers were being careless bystanders, that’s a great way to discourage filming of these things and to lend leverage to the people who want to make filming them a practical or legal impossibility. Do not give ammo to the people who want you electronically deaf, dumb and blind around authorities under the pretense of a bug in battery firmware that momentarily set a handful of devices out of hundreds of billions on fire.

Support citizen video!

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I freely admit that I am no expert when it comes to aviation law or the airline business. But I am not going along with the idea that the airline has a right just because it says it does.

“Don’t blame us! We have the right to do this, according to the rules. That we made. For ourselves. To follow.”

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I’m not even sure I was. I’ve been wondering today how I would have reacted in that situation.

Probably much like everyone else on that plane did. It’s easy to imagine that you’d stand up for the guy against the police, but I’m really not sure I would. Probably I’d have been trying to make myself small and then feel both guilty and grateful that I wasn’t the person picked out. I’m under no illusions about how good I am standing up in situations like that. I can imagine how I’d like myself to act, but I doubt that I actually would.

But those later videos where the guy got back onto the plane, and was clearly distressed, and nobody would even make eye contact with him made me profoundly uncomfortable. I wanted someone to help him. Not fight the police, but just help the guy.

They weren’t rentacops, though, were they? I thought they were Chicago PD. And there’s a group of people I’d be really iffy about sticking my head up in front of.

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Entirely agree. And we do have a problem in our culture with Not Wanting To Get InvolvedTM. I too recognize that this starts at him in my own heart.

Were they. I was thinking they were airport officers. Especially agree about not fucking with Chicago PD. If my decidedly inexpert understanding of jurisdiction is correct, it also makes the airline more culpable, not less, since AFAIK the airline had to allow the cops on to the plane.

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I must concede I don’t understand which airport/aviation “officers” are security hired by corporations and which are municipal cops :confused:

Not that it would really change the calculus. Even if they can’t make official arrests, the actual cops are bound to close ranks with them.

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. . . it still is regulated by big bad government, in every other developed country in the world. Please don’t think I am getting at the States there, last thing I want to do.

You guys deserve better than that sort of behaviour being standard business practice, it seems to me. The Government of The People, for the People, needs to put the people first, first, first.

Business interests need to be relegated to what they really are, the narrow interests of some very few investors. Big Business isn’t even efficient, the market is built on fail, there are no invisible hands protecting people.

If Laissez-faire was good for societies, more successful* states would be forced to use it as their guide.

*as measured by happiness, social mobility, childhood mortality, health, etc.

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They were Chicago PD, not TSA and not United private security. CPD doesn’t have the kind of reputation that makes anyone want to interfere in whatever they’re doing.

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I wouldn’t chalk that up to this incident. The fact that the airline treats passengers like shit and a small percentage of them swear off of ever flying United again has been known and factored into the stock price a long long time ago.

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it’s one of the EU commie things, as they hate freedom: Air passenger rights

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Ahaahah oh god it gets better and better. Reminds me of that Italian anarchist who “fell from a window” after being (wrongly) accused of planting a bomb, back in '69. Glad to see the finest police traditions are alive and well in Chicago.

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Not airport security, local cops. Now suspendedhttps://twitter.com/SamCarvalho/status/851589702369017856

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Did they break his guitar as well?

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In the video I watched, there were definitely people saying, “WTF? He’s a doctor, this isn’t right!” They sounded stunned as much as anything else that it was happening.

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Yeah, I’ll grant you that.

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Tell me a lawyer is being crowdfunded for this person