Here is the United Airlines video of them dragging a paying passenger off the plane as they did not want to spend more than $800 to correct for their own mistake in overbooking the flight:
United is about to catch a nice healthy lawsuit after this one. pic.twitter.com/YmjO1W1p6I
— Evan (@evanlefft) April 10, 2017
And here is the police statement:
He fell. pic.twitter.com/aQA0YmYWWx
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47) April 10, 2017
And people wonder why there is a trust issue with police.
clay
Not even police. Airport police.
PhoenixRising
Who is the mook smirking at this in the orange polo? The state violence directed at a doctor who paid cash money to a company to get him in front of his patients on time couldn’t have happened without his cooperation.
germy
And people wonder why there is a trust issue with the airlines, also.
I buy two tickets months in advance. I pay extra to ensure two seats side by side. I arrive at the airport early. And after being abused by sekurity, I’m told I can’t sit next to my wife (seat isn’t available) or I can’t make my connecting flight.
Seeing a passenger physically dragged off the plane for no reason is sort of no surprise.
hovercraft
Assholes are assholes.
Ridnik Chrome
If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.hovercraft
@Ridnik Chrome:
Many of us have long know this to be bullshit, but with the advent of camera phones, reality is slowly leaking out.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ridnik Chrome: The problem here is the definition of “wrong” changes on an hourly basis. I mean, it’s one thing to be blah and always be wrong, no matter what it is you’re doing, but the rest of us have no idea what to expect.
Ridnik Chrome
@clay: Actually, according to Chicagoist, this was CPD, not the airport police. But no police should have been called at all.
Oatler.
@hovercraft: They’re Trump’s Praetorians, nationwide.
Keith P.
I see that the passenger ordered the fish.
Ridnik Chrome
@Villago Delenda Est: Some people seem to think that refusing to do what any person in authority tells you, whether that person is a police officer, a private security guard, or an airline steward, automatically makes you “wrong”. Because people in authority can never, ever be wrong…
germy
Airline passengers have grown so accustomed to bad treatment. I expect at some point airline employees will randomly slap, punch and kick customers as they check in and out.
Gin & Tonic
It is actually the complete opposite of “random”. They prioritize a number of factors: your frequent-flyer status, how much you paid for the ticket, when you bought it, several others I can’t recall. Not “random” in any way – it is actually a revenue-maximizing algorithm.
germy
@Ridnik Chrome: Bartleby, the Scrivener would be beaten black and blue nowadays.
Betty Cracker
I hope the lawsuit is massive and successful.
Yarrow
Christ. I saw the tweet but wasn’t in a place where I could watch the video. I can’t believe it’s this bad. Holy shit.
Why was this guy asked to give up his seat? Did United give any explanation? Why not orange shirt guy in the seat ahead of him?
@hovercraft:
Yep. And they’re trying to make videoing the police illegal.
germy
@hovercraft:
At some point they’ll require passengers to hand over their cell phones for the duration of the flight.
Hungry Joe
All United had to do was keep increasing the offer. No takers at $400? Make it $450. No takers at $450? Make it $500. Sooner or later — surely well below $1000, which is less than peanuts to United — someone will jump. Upshot: United is out a pittance, there’s no bad publicity, passengers get entertained by an auction, and the plane flies away leaving behind a very satisfied re-booked customer.
I’ve never worked in PR, but I was able to come up with this solution in about eight seconds. Either (a) I’m a genius, or (b) United hires idiots. I’m leaning toward (b).
Walker
@Hungry Joe:
They offered $800 and there were no takers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
they needed the seats to transport crew members to L’ville for another flight, people weren’t volunteering so they randomly picked passengers to get booted. I don’t know how much they were offering. I have noticed that those numbers don’t go up as high as they used to. Once, about fifteen years ago, on a flight to Denver during ski season, I heard them get up to $2K, been a long time since I heard them get above $500– and meal vouchers!, and then they start kicking people off.
Gin & Tonic
@Hungry Joe: They offered $800, had no takers, then stopped.
SenyorDave
Assuming the reporting on this is accurate, and the guy wasn’t actively trying to injure people, if this went to arbitration, and I was an arbiter deciding the case my thought process would be:
1. The passenger should win a judgment no less than $1 more than the higher compensated United employee for 2016.
2. Triple that amount to some type of charitable fund (something like a fund that assists people who can’t pay utility bills).
United deserves to lose a huge amount of money because of this.
trollhattan
@hovercraft:
“The revolution will
notbe televised.”However, AG Sessions would be tickled pink if everybody handed in their phones, pronto.
germy
‘Just kill me’: Disturbing new video shows removed United passenger with his face covered in blood
MattF
When I heard the story, I said to myself, “Bet he’s not white.” I know, cynical libtard, etc.
catclub
@Walker:
1. They should offer more until there are takers. See also the builders who complain of a lack of construction workers. Free markets, and the motivating effect of cash incentives, are mysterious to them.
2. I bet they only offered United travel voucher dollars, not actual cash.
3. The later flight was 3pm the next day, so losing one day’s business is easily worth $1000 or more to lots of people.
So United were fucking cheapskates in their offers.
Brachiator
I heard about this earlier, but this was tough to watch. I hope the man is OK.
Chris
@Ridnik Chrome:
The catch-all response from right wingers that I’ve been hearing for years to any instance of police abuse, no matter how egregious, is that the reason this happens is that our culture’s gone out of control and has no respect for authority.
Which is utterly surreal when you consider things like the street crime and urban riots of the seventies and sixties, the problems during the Great Depression and Prohibition, the labor revolts of the early 20th/late 19th century, that whole time when some tempers ran a little too high in the 1860s… The American public is “better behaved” in our day and age than at almost any time in history. It’s pretty much the worst possible explanation for PDs overflowing with trigger-happy lunatics.
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, me too. I used to get bumped regularly and often got $300 in vouchers plus hotel and food. These days it seems its rare for anyone to get bumped and you maybe get $100.
Amaranthine RBG
It’s much worse than overbooking – at least from what I have been reading.
They were looking for one person to give up a seat as they did boarding.
Plane boarded and people were sitting in seats.
Then they announced that they actually needed 4 seats, not one seat, for a flight crew that had to make it to the destination city. So it wasn’t other passengers. It was crew that had to get to another city because, presumably, United screwed up somewhere and failed to get them there on an earlier flight.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
I hate United. Rotten customer service the last time I flew with them a couple of years ago, and then after they made a halfhearted attempt to follow up with me they never bothered following through with it. I won’t fly with them again.
Strangely enough, the dozen account executives, middle managers and VPs I book travel for somehow never end up on United flights either. Funny how it keeps working out that way.
sigaba
@germy: Time to take the train.
pk
This is horrific. I just saw a video of the traumatized man bleeding and repeating “just kill me”. Who says that a passenger has to be forced off if they overbook? Tough luck for their employees. Put them on another airline and suck it up. Someone needs to be fired for this! We’ve truly become a police state.
http://gizmodo.com/just-kill-me-horrifying-new-video-shows-united-passeng-1794181325
Ohio Mom
Sure, every now and again a police officer does something helpful for those of us who constitute the general public, but as this video shows, their real purpose is to protect the one-percent of the one-percent from everyone else.
The police could have said, “Say what? No way” to United but they didn’t waste a second when it came to protecting the monied interest from a mere ticket holder.
Starfish
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think I *may* have seen $1600 on a flight to or from Hawaii.
trollhattan
Occurs to me maybe it’s we who need the body cams.
Mnemosyne
I’m assuming that United’s attorneys spent an hour or two screaming at the gate crew this morning and are already preparing their settlement offer. Beating up a physician is not a winning court battle, no matter how much money the airline has.
Yarrow
I’m confused now. I thought the United Airlines statement said he was taken to a hospital. Now there’s this video of him with blood on his face and he’s standing near the front of the plane. And some other article I read another passenger said he got back on the plane. Is United’s statement that he was taken to the hospital total BS?
Roger Moore
It wasn’t even that. They had fixed their problem with overbooking. They bumped 4 additional passengers to accommodate 4 United employees who were supposed to be at the destination for early flights the next day.
randy khan
Here’s an article with a good summary of the bumping rules. I’ve actually never heard of anyone being bumped after getting on board, and I kind of wonder whether the rules cover that or not. As the article says, the airlines usually start with the people who paid least when they start actually bumping, so it probably wasn’t random selection.
Bump bump bump
Ridnik Chrome
@Chris:
And my response to that is: How can people respect authority, when authority does not behave in a way that is respectable?
Scott
He was 69 years old. A senior citizen no less.
SatanicPanic
@Yarrow: I got an offer for $300 voucher last year. It was on Southwest and they just wanted me on a later flight. Didn’t take it though because I don’t like to fly if I don’t have to.
ruemara
Do you guys see the true horror? Not one person stepped up to say this is wrong and intervened. Lots of protest mumbling, no action. Safety pin that. Anyone comforting him, wiping away blood? Nah. Just sit there and film. Humans.
Lee
I have no idea why they stopped at $800. Just suck it up and keep raising the amount or making it real money instead of travel vouchers & they would have had people taking the offer.
Booger
I’m curious how a business goes about monetizing the value/cost of a planeload of terrified passengers, many with fresh cellphone video of a bloodied fellow passenger dragged (belly exposed) down the aisle of the plane, who have nothing else to think about while stuck inside the metal tube for several more hours. Traumatizing experience, anyone? I’ll bet the crappers will be overflowing before that flight begins its descent.
geg6
How the hell does this even happen?
The guy bought his seat. Not his problem that the airline overbooked and had crew that needed to be elsewhere. But the airline is responsible for both the overbooking and for not having crew where and when needed. I wouldn’t have given up my seat, either. And how did they “choose” which passengers to eject involuntarily? And what the hell were the CPD doing there? Are there not airport cops at Chicago airports?
Jesus. United has turned into as big a hellhole as all the rest of them. This is why I don’t fly anymore (well, this and security theater bullshit). And they sure aren’t giving me any incentive to re-think that.
SgrAstar
David Farenthold just won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Trump Foundation and Don’s shenanigans. Great stuff.
TenguPhule
And its only going to get worse.
When the police feel that the powers that be support anything bad happening to the non-whites (Sessions, Trump, Roberts),
their attitudes will begin to warp to follow the examples at the top. This fish really is going to rot from the head down.
joel hanes
@Amaranthine RBG:
Just 300 miles from Chicago to Louisville KY
They could have hired a car for their employees and had them driven
(or done the same for the four bumped passengers)
for a heck of a lot less money than this is going to cost them.
Chris
@ruemara:
Not hard to imagine that nobody wants to be the next person beaten to the point of bloodshed.
rikyrah
Not only United, but the Chicago Police Department.
SUE SUE SUE those muthaphuckas.
oh yeah….JUST SUE!!!
rikyrah
ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL those White folks on the plane…
but, you gotta go up to the ASIAN DOCTOR?
Yeah, right, whatever muthaphucka.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@joel hanes: one article I read said it’s a $300 Uber from Chicago to Louisville. I don’t think that can possibly be right, but less than this is going to cost them
rikyrah
@SgrAstar:
Good for him.
Iowa Old Lady
We had a god awful United flight to Europe a few years back and when we complained, they gave us miles, which they took away when we didn’t use them quickly enough. A ticket agent once rolled her eyes when I mentioned United. At that airport, the ticket agents were all contracted from the same service so she’d issued tickets for all the airlines that flew there and she said United didn’t care about their passengers at all.
rikyrah
@MattF:
Uh huh
Uh huh
trollhattan
@SgrAstar:
Well deserved!
randy khan
@geg6:
I do seem to recall from being in O’Hare that the airport police function is handled by the Chicago police. It may be that the airport is owned by the city, or there may be some other reason.
Timurid
@germy:
As disoriented as he is in that video… it looks like he got an upgrade to Concussion Class.
MattF
One may assume:
1) Any statement from either United or the Chicago PD is a lie.
2) Any suggestion that the passenger was at fault (he didn’t read the 500 page PDF covering ‘terms of service’!) is a lie.
3) Any suggestion that the passenger was ‘asking for it’ is a lie.
catclub
@Lee:
When a company offers you travel vouchers only good on their OWN product, that is nowhere nearly as valuable as cash. Now, a a first class round trip anywhere in the US, on any date, would be a valuable thing they could offer, but too valuable.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@Hungry Joe: Why not both?
Fair Economist
@Hungry Joe: Last year I was on a commuter flight in the South. It was a one hour flight, overbooked, and the offer was that you had to wait 2 1/2 hours for the next flight. They had to offer $1000 to get volunteers. I was boggled at how much it took.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Iowa Old Lady: I’ve had more problems with United than any other airline
(The Magick Dolphin Lady won a Pulitzer)
ETA: @catclub: I think people would stampede for a first class voucher, they wouldn’t even ask about the small print
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Was Mr. Jonathan Walker cited as her collaborator?
Aleta
In the video I saw that “security” slammed his head into the armrest across the aisle while they were holding him horizontally.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
I applaud the person who filmed him — without that, CPD and United could make up any story they wanted about what happened. That person is a hero.
Everyone else is a cowardly asshole.
cokane
“he fell” is like the hood lie but not even really disguised for someone who was murdered
Corner Stone
@SgrAstar:
I knew this was going to happen. Fuck this. Some lazy asshole picked up a phone and started calling charities. He should be on VDE’s list, and go fuck himself.
MattF
@cokane: They’re all pretty lucky that the guy (apparently) didn’t sustain a serious injury.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I missed this at first. The problem arose because they wanted to accommodate employees? And forced this man off the plane?
Mere money would not be enough compensation. They should drag the United CEO down the aisle. A few times.
geg6
@SgrAstar:
That’s awesome and well-deserved.
germy
@Mnemosyne: There are multiple videos from different passengers. Different angles. Passengers can be heard yelling at the cop to leave him alone.
Spanky
Well they’ve got your family doctor
And they’ve pulled him from his chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago just to sing
In a land that’s known as freedom how can such a thing be fair
…
Some things, such as Chicago cops, never change
randy khan
I keep wondering as I’m reading this when someone actually has boarded a plane and also whether the bumping rules actually apply when the airline is bringing on non-revenue passengers.
Timurid
I wonder if there’s video of the other three passengers that got booted but didn’t resist. Specifically, what color(s) they were.
I would not be shocked if the ‘random’ selection of bumpees referred to in the news reports consisted of the staff searching the manifest for names with too many… or too few… vowels.
Tazj
@Hungry Joe: That’s right. United overbooked, it was their mistake and they could have avoided this whole situation by offering compensation, I gave up my seat on flights a couple of times in the past when I was much younger and had fewer obligations for a food voucher and a discount on future flights. I’m sure they could have offered something better and people would have volunteered.
MattF
@Timurid: ‘Random’ is so hard to define.
catclub
@Fair Economist:
I bet that still was NOT $1000 cash but ‘ $1000 voucher to fly on this shitty airline again, at prices we set’.
Plus, even $1000 of real cash, for someone who has a schedule to meet or any crucial appointment – job interview – client meeting, conference presentation etc. Is not that much.
Another Scott
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: The last time I flew United, a few years ago, the video had the CEO talking about how wonderful everything was going with the merger with Continental and how they were (almost verbatim) “building value for our shareholders”. I don’t recall him saying anything about their employees or their customers…
Told me everything I needed to know about how he viewed the company.
:-/
If they needed seats for a crew, they should have offered whatever it took before dragging people off the plane. The fact that they clearly treat paying customers as being less important than moving their crews around is another illustration of how horrible their culture is. As Atrios said, as a last resort they could have rented a car for the crew…
Even if they lose a lawsuit (or none is filed), they’re going to suffer huge damage from this video. And they deserve every bit of it.
Cheers,
Scott.
randy khan
@Corner Stone:
I don’t know if you’re serious or not, but picking up the phone and calling people is a pretty big chunk of the job description of a journalist. And he did a lot of work searching records and figuring out who to call, not to mention getting the people to talk to him.
Shana
I haven’t read the article yet, but just went to the Chicago Tribune site to see what they’re saying about all this, and the article is in the Business section, not the News section. Hmmm.
catclub
@Corner Stone:
Huh? He was notably less lazy than all the other so-called journalists who could not bother to do even that much.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
OT: Nine life sentences.
Yarrow
@Corner Stone: Farenthold did good work, but honestly his level of work should be the basic level of work that EVERY reporter should do. Do the work of calling people and asking questions. That’s the job. Unfortunately it seems like the work of a reporter has morphed to being a stenographer so such work as Farenthold’s seems amazing, difficult to do and immensely innovative. It’s not. It’s the actual job.
MattF
@Shana: Well, O’Hare is the major United hub airport, so there actually is a Chicago ‘business’ aspect to it. But, of course, it should be in the ‘news’ section too.
Mnemosyne
Here’s a story from the Washington Post with more details. It wasn’t caught on video, but people did protest, and several refused to re-board the plane after it was cleared.
catclub
@Tazj:
there are minimum required compensation amounts for people who get involuntarily bumped. There are no minimums for volunteers, so be sure to get enough to make it worth your while.
RobertB
@joel hanes: Word on some of the other websites, where I saw this earlier, is that pilots must have 8 hours of sleep in a 10-hour off-duty period, and that driving or riding in a vehicle doesn’t count. So to fly from Louisville the next morning, they had to be on the last plane out that evening.
Given the PR black eye that United just got, they’d have liked it better if they _really_ upped their offer, or even hired a charter plane to fly the crew to Louisville.
SiubhanDuinne
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Good.
BlueNC
There’s a huge difference between “taking a bump” (voluntary) and involuntary denied boarding. In this story, United is saying:
(http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2017/04/10/video-shows-man-forcibly-removed-united-flight-chicago-louisville/100274374/)
But the key question is, did they IDB him? If so, he’s screwed and has to get off the plane, but would also be owed significant compensation and United is required to report to the US DOT. But the spokesperson makes it sound as though he was asked to volunteer and refused and was then hauled off the plane.
In any event, disgusting behavior by United and the police. I hope the passenger is OK, AND I hope he is able to enjoy his impending bazillion-dollar settlement.
Corner Stone
@randy khan: He wasn’t asking people to disclose their business secrets. It’s a bunch of charities. They kind of have to, for the most part.
And yeah, a big chunk of what investigative journos do is phone leg work, and nowadays interwebs research.
I’m not saying that knowing Trump is a lying, selfish, greedy asshole is not important. But, c’mon. You have all these resources at your disposal, and you are being fucking paid to ask about shit Trump does not want to come out. And what we get to celebrate is that Trump is a fucking lying tightwad? Well, boo fucking hoo.
It seems mind boggling that it is only now, well after he is in office that independent voices are putting obvious pieces together to tell us all the ways Trump and his people are tied like barbed wire to Russia and Putin.
Sorry, nobody gives a shit if Trump ever gave a penny to charity.
germy
@Yarrow:
In the land of the blind journalists, the one-eyed reporter who can pick up a phone is king.
Ruckus
@Fair Economist:
A few months ago I used the transit trains in LA a lot. Always ended up going home on full trains. As in packed room only. Boarded one train and the driver got on the intercom that the train was overloaded and can not move, some passengers need to get off, the next train will be at the station in minutes. Being in the middle of the car packed in, it really wasn’t reasonable for me to leave. But no one, not one soul moved to get off. The driver pleaded, then begged. I said out loud, “Fuck it, I’m getting off, move,” and pushed my way off. I thought maybe if someone started there might be a couple of more folks and the train could leave and we’d get on the next one. (BTW, this was the second full train, I never got near the first one) Know how many other people got off the train? Not one fucking person. The sheriffs had to go to the train and tell people to leave.
Not sure the moral of the story or that there is one, but it sure gave me pause that very many humans give a shit about anyone but themselves.
Corner Stone
@catclub:
PULITZER!!
MCA1
This could be easily fixed by a functioning federal legislature. If it’s a market-based system the airlines want on this, fine, make it a real, functioning, regulated market, then:
1. Overbook to your heart’s content, but for the next 12 months you need to do something to educate the public on how this works so that there’s sufficient market knowledge among potential participants.
2. No involuntary pulling of ticketed passengers who’ve checked in and gotten through security in a timely fashion unless you’ve reached at minimum $10,000 cash offers for rebooking. Sets an upper limit on holdout strategy by customers to ensure people play ball.
3. The moment a flight is overbooked, all ticketed passengers must receive written notification thereof. Starting day before travel on any oversold flight, ticketed passengers receive notification once the flight’s 50% checked in, plus notice of the number of cancellations, if any, by how many seats the plane’s overbooked, and what the starting offer will be from the airline to take another flight. All passengers who haven’t checked in can indicate that they’re going to be there without actually checking in, and the auction must start no later than an hour after you hit 100% of seats spoken for. This is a win-win for everyone. I’d estimate 95% of the decisions I’ve made to not even consider taking a voucher offer or whatever have you, started with “If you’d proposed this yesterday, before I got my ass out of bed at 5:00 in the morning to get here, then stood in security for 45 minutes, I might have considered delaying my trip by a day. But now that I’ve gone through the dehumanizing process of getting to this gate, you’d better start at 2 grand or I’m not even listening.”
4. No voluntary pulling of boarded passengers, ever. You f’ed up and didn’t have people in Louisville on time? Tough cookies. Put some seats and heat in the baggage compartment for extra crew who need to get somewhere. Not the passengers’ problem.
Aleta
And no one stood up to protest or help. This will be continue to be the norm — the more that people witness rough police/security treatment, even on video, the more afraid they’ll be to get involved. I think it’s called ‘subduing the population’ by the police/military, and ‘demoralization’ by students of authoritarianism.
By the time that this treatment is turned on well-off whites, their peers will not help them either.
Chris
@Yarrow:
No reason not to recognize the one real journalist in the bunch.
Mnemosyne
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Good. He deserves to die in prison 50 years from now, friendless and forgotten.
trollhattan
Gun violence visits San Bernardino again.
donnah
I fly often and refuse to fly with United. Too many incidents of lost luggage, overbooked flights, and just recently had to disembark a half hour after boarding because they discovered engine trouble. We passengers then stood in line with a single ticket agent at the gate. I stood in line for two hours, of course missing my connection. I should have been home at two in the afternoon, but got back at midnight.
I filed a complaint with their customer service and was given a conditional voucher for $100. Nope, don’t want a crappy voucher because I won’t fly with them ever again.
Yarrow
@randy khan:
For airline employees and others who fly on passes they do not have a guaranteed seat until the plane is in the air. Airlines will pull them off the plane if a revenue passenger shows up, even if the plane door is closed and it has pulled away from the gate. I have a friend who has been pulled from the plane after it had left the gate–they went back to the gate, took her off the plane off and gave her seat to a paying passenger. That’s just par for the course when flying non-rev.
So I don’t know if that answers your question as to when a person has “boarded the plane” but certainly airlines don’t consider crossing the threshold of the plane as having a guaranteed seat if you’re flying on a pass.
Ksmiami
To the twitter hell we go on this. I find the best way to deal with bad ppl and companies is to scorch them on social media.
Mnemosyne
@Aleta:
See the stories above — this is just one video, and other people on the flight said there were complaints and some people left the flight entirely. The other videos are longer and you can hear the other passengers yelling in them.
randy khan
@Corner Stone:
I guess I have a different view. He took what looked like a minor story, stuck with it, doggedly got the facts, and reported them clearly, carefully, and in great detail, and turned it into a major issue in the campaign, which it was.
That kind of stuff, particularly the level of care and detail required to get it right, is not particularly easy. And, most important, it was independent journalism – he dug out the information himself and wasn’t handed a story by someone. I don’t think you should poo-poo it because he didn’t, say, get the Russia interfering in the election story. I mean, nobody else really got the Russia interfering in the election story, either.
marcopolo
This is OT but just heard a story on National Petroleum Radio that was framing the use of “sarin nerve gas” (in quotes since that is what I read was used) as a failure of the Obama administration, because, wait for it, Susan Rice said in January just before the Trumpers took over that we had been successful in getting Iraq to divest itself of such weapons. And then there was some hemming and hawing about what words mean and whether if the Obama administration was wrong about Iraq’s chemical weapons should we be worrying that Iran really does have nuclear weapons and so on and so forth. The entire piece was nauseating and just sounded like the kind of framing that an operative in the White House would use.
So I am wondering why NPR didn’t first start with the fact that Iraq did not use such weapons after 2013 until Trump took office. If you go that route you might find yourself asking: 1) could Iraq, having seen that Trump wasn’t interested in regime change, have felt themselves free to make new batches (anyone know how long it takes or how difficult it is to manufacture the stuff?); or maybe, 2) whether they still had some from 2013 or purchased some from someone, why they felt free to use them now since they hadn’t under the Obama administration?
Perhaps someone else with better insight on this could throw their two cents in. And has anyone else seen this framing of the issue?
Hoping everyone is having a decent start to the week.
germy
@donnah: My last experience with them was horrible. But I’ve heard bad things about other airlines. I honestly don’t know who is supposed to be the least horrible.
bowtiejack
@Mnemosyne: Bet United will claim mandatory arbitration under the adhesion contract you agreed to by buying a ticket from them. Amazingly enough corporations do very well under these arbitrations that they require.
SiubhanDuinne
@Corner Stone:
Seriously, CS? Fahrenthold was curious, proactive, and diligent for months on end as he worked on this story. I’m not sure exactly what you think he should have done to avoid your epithet “lazy.”
I do agree with Yarrow at #86 that Fahrenthold’s work should be the baseline for journalism, but in fact it isn’t and mostly hasn’t been for a long time. I hope his Pulitzer may in some measure be both an inspiration to other reporters and a blunt message to them that the kind of work he did can be/sometimes is rewarded in real life.
MattF
@randy khan: There’s also the larger story that Trump lies about everything all the time. One can claim that calling Trump a pathological liar is just partisan rancor– but Fahrenthold went to the trouble of showing that the accusation is true.
Adam L Silverman
Corner Stone
@randy khan:
He was reporting sports scores. Habitat? zero. St. Judes? zero. Fisher House? zero.
It’s good work. It is solid reporting. But it should scare the fuck out of all of us that this is what is being celebrated as “primo investigative journalism” in the run up to the GE.
In the end it was less than a minor story. It meant nothing to anyone.
Mnemosyne
@bowtiejack:
If they have dumb lawyers, they may try that. I can’t see any judge upholding an arbitration clause when someone suffered an actual physical injury due to the airline’s actions, but IANAL.
donnah
@germy:
I gave them a couple of chances and they’ve failed to deliver. I don’t fault airlines for delays due to weather but to find that they consistently lose my suitcases, sit on the tarmack for forty minutes, and have me waiting for a seat when I paid early ahead of time…nope. I find better service at Delta and American. We lost our Southwest connection at the Dayton hub.
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman: Someone got hacked by people with a sense of humor and a wicked taste for vengance.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Aleta:
Again, this is not true. Other passengers protesting and remonstrating with police and crew are clearly audible in the video. Many of the passengers left the plane in protest before the crew cleared it. Here’s a news story with more details.
How do you think it would have gone if passengers had attempted to physically interfere with armed police?
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
#EconomicAnxiety.
TenguPhule
@germy: Southwest & Hawaiian for domestic. If you have to fly outside the country, use a foreign carrier.
Yarrow
@Chris: He deserves the recognition. It’s just sad that he’s being recognized for doing the basic level of work that all journalists should do, instead of that level of work being the baseline and excellence above and beyond being recognized.
Elmo
I literally just yesterday was reading an article online about a family of three who scored $11,000 by being repeatedly willing to volunteer at the highest price point for bumping from a series of overbooked flights to Florida. I can’t remember the airline – I think it was Delta but I’m not sure. They eventually canceled their vacation, but with that wad of cash in hand they really didn’t mind.
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne: Hey, I’ve got an idea for WaPo reporters. Trump can’t get a loan from any US Bank. He’s still in business. Where is he getting the loans and funding from?
Maybe tax returns?
Sexual assaults?
No, no. Let’s find out if he’s a good Christian charitable type or not. Agreed! PULITZER!!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Let it never be forgotten
“reasonable assumption”, and she is counted as one of the Most Serious of the Very Serious People
(“reasonable assumption” is nuts, “possible evidence of the reasonable assumption”, that’s Pulitzer quality writing)
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@TenguPhule: Looks like it’s been reverted.
EriktheRed
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hope they put him in GenPop, too.
randy khan
@Corner Stone:
We’re going to have to disagree on this one.
Roger Moore
@Iowa Old Lady:
I don’t think that’s true. United cares a lot about their high mileage passengers. All the airlines suck up to their frequent fliers at the expense of hoi poloi, but United is the most obvious and consistent about it.
germy
Eric U.
I’ve had to fly United a couple of times. It’s really bad. I can’t believe people fork over money to them willingly
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
If the rest of the fucking worthless media had bothered to follow up on the stories, Trump could have been nailed for federal tax crimes. Which WOULD have been a big deal on par with Russia. Blame the lazy bastards, not the one guy actually working.
Corner Stone
@randy khan: We can agree to disagree, but you’re still wrong.
Elmo
@Elmo: Here’s the article. And yes, it was Delta.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
I would feel a lot better about the general run of cops if at least a few of them in this type of situation said, “Hey, this isn’t our problem. You guys work it out.”
Corner Stone
@TenguPhule: Not saying anything negative about DF. Nicely done, DF. But it’s another ratcheting downward of expectations that some dude with a phone called 100+ charities and now is getting a Pulitzer.
Yay?
different-church-lady
“Sir, we’re the
phone companycabin crew, there is no higher authority.”(Or perhaps I should have gone with the phone cops…)
Elmo
@Roger Moore: That’s why I fly United.
aimai
@Hungry Joe: That is what they usually do. How weird that they wouldn’t.
SiubhanDuinne
@Corner Stone:
In every one of those cases, and the hundreds of others, he had to look up numbers, place the phone calls, leave messages or be bounced around or play telephone tag until he was able to talk to the right person at the agency, wait (sometimes a few minutes, sometimes days) to hear back, track the answers he got, check them against the money the Trump Foundation claimed to have donated, track down the illegal stuff like buying portraits of himself or paying off legal bills incurred by his for-profit enterprises or making political donations, and crafting an accurate yet compelling narrative. This is hardly “reporting sports scores.” It takes skill to take financial filings and several hundred “nil” reports, connect the dots, and turn the inherently dry information into page-turning writing.
His Pulitzer is well deserved.
MCA1
@RobertB: Even that could be avoided with a little creative thinking by the airline. “Hey, pilot in Evansville: we screwed up. We’ll have an uber at your house at 5:00 A.M. You’re flying from Louisville tomorrow morning.” Alternatively, put the standby crew in a van and drive them there – you can push the morning flight by an hour to comply with the sleep rules if you have to. Obviously better than this result. The problem wasn’t only that United imposed the cost of not having its second crew on that flight onto customers, it’s that it didn’t accurately consider how to minimize the cost of not having its second crew on that plane – it just assumed “cancelled flight from Louisville” was the only possible outcome.
Might take some pressure on the unions, I guess. Just limit the number of times this can happen to an individual crewmember or something.
Ruckus
@bowtiejack:
You do understand that the corps have to pay for the arbitrations that they require, don’t you? And that they get to pick the company that does the arbitrations? And that the arbitrations take place where and when they corp decides is good? And that if you lose you can still sue them?
Yeah it’s a fucked system, all one sided, not fair in any fucking way and the percentage of customers who lose is astounding.
You might also want to know that I’ve taken Toyota to arbitration for a crappy car they refused to fix, and lost. No, lost is the wrong word. Screwed, Fucked, those words are much closer to the truth. It has resulted in me making the decision to never even considering purchasing anything from them ever again in my life. That’s the only plus I got from this experience.
Corner Stone
The Pinkertons have always existed to protect private enterprise and property.
Iowa Old Lady
@donnah: On the United flight we took to Europe, the steerage seats were pushed closer together than on a domestic flight to make room for the fancy, lie flat seats (which we had to walk past to get to our seats). They charged for beer and wine with dinner, and ran out of food for breakfast. And the video system was broken.
TriassicSands
@geg6:
I don’t think a blanket refusal to give up one’s seat makes any sense.
I’ve given up my seat when the alternative flight still got me where I was going when I needed to be there. Knowing that someone has to give up a seat (or seats) — like it or not the law allows airlines to bump passengers — I realized that being on the scheduled flight may have been a lot more important to someone else than it was to me.
People have to make their own decisions as to the importance of being on a particular flight. I think it is incumbent on the airline to find a way to identify as many willing passengers as are needed. If an airline adheres strictly to the minimum compensation the law requires them to offer, they suck, plain and simple, and I’d avoid flying on that carrier in the future if at all possible.
By giving up my seat, my intention is not to help the airline, rather I’m helping a fellow passenger.
aimai
@joel hanes: They could have paid to put them on another carrier’s flight, for christ’s sake.
Adam L Silverman
New video is emerging.
Part 1:
Part 2:
MattF
@Mnemosyne: There’s also the problem of ‘removing’ someone from the cramped and crowded space inside an aircraft, in order to enforce a corporate business policy. IMO, the police could have said ‘nope’.
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne: It’s a joke.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Corner Stone:
…because of her EMAILZ.
Mnemosyne
@Elmo:
It might actually do some good if you wrote/emailed and complained about this. If they’re that obsequious with their high-mileage passengers, it would probably freak them out for you to say you’re reconsidering using them based on this bullshit.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone: Compared to the rest of our worthless fucking media, yes he deserves it.
After the glorious revolution purges the bulk of the media, people like him will be needed to rebuild it. /half-snark, apparently because some people need a guide now.
Aleta
@joel hanes: Apparently United doesn’t exchange courtesy rides for employees with other airlines (a past practice). God forbid that they follow any practice that might deny them the most pennies they can get at every given moment.
I want to know, in their priorities for who to deplane (seat cost, traveling single, no connecting flight were mentioned) is citizenship status or birthplace in there too now? (Statistically less likely to seek redress?)
Also, has United dispensed with allowing an employee on the scene to make a discretionary decision? (He says he’s a doctor, so just move on.) Did the pilot or other upper employees OK this, or has the power been removed from them, in favor of following arbitrary management procedure? (Saving time = money, so decision made?)
I don’t know about this guy, but our rural areas now depend on doctors and EMTs (who were doctors elsewhere) from other countries. Now they must rightfully fear stupid TSA and immigration employees, and anyone with ‘US security’ written on a cap.
Corner Stone
I hope that gentleman gets a literal pallet of cash bundle delivered to his doorstep.
germy
They wouldn’t try this crap in First Class.
Tazj
@catclub: Thanks, I didn’t know that. I also agree that people shouldn’t feel obligated to give up their seat unless they are compensated fairly.
Patricia Kayden
@Ridnik Chrome: And why are the police getting involved in airport disputes? If this passenger paid for his ticket, why was he ordered off the plane? I hope he gets millions in his lawsuit.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
I can’t watch, but that seems to match up with the sequence of events in the WaPo story.
My question is, did no one bother to call First Aid? Who left a guy unsupervised and unmonitored after a head injury, to the point that he was able to get back on the plane unnoticed?
Elmo
@Mnemosyne: That is an excellent idea. I was actually sitting here feeling pretty guilty that I don’t want to give up my status, to start over with another airline that doesn’t use Dulles as a hub (so fewer convenient flights, more connections, etc). That will at least allow me to do a little something.
Thanks!
Mnemosyne
@Patricia Kayden:
I’m guessing — and this is only a guess — that the only thing the cops were told was that an unruly passenger was refusing to get off the plane, and they responded accordingly. They didn’t know the guy was “unruly” because he was being forced to give up his seat involuntarily.
I’m guessing that CPD is really pissed at United right now for putting them into this position.
randy khan
@Corner Stone:
That’s okay, you’re still wrong, too. (Insert appropriate emoticon here.)
scottinnj
@catclub: If I were JetBlue or Southwest, I would give this guy free flights for life (cost a pittance) and show this video, then show the guy smiling in a JetBlue seat. All it costs is giving this guy free flights. I’m not a creative director but I think this is pretty easy.
Patricia Kayden
@Adam L Silverman: Very disturbing that no one on the plane stood up for him. Scary.
Aleta
“He fell.” United and/or the police and/or those security men lying on a report right out of the gate. A standard practice now in this country, and it will be forgiven as soon as they say “We didn’t have all the facts at the beginning.”
When you don’t say ‘we don’t know yet’ at the start, you are a corrupt organization.
SiubhanDuinne
@TenguPhule:
Yes.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
When I flew a lot I first used Delta and then United. United had better schedules for me most of the time, and treated me OK. But that was over a decade ago and airlines change their character a lot these days. There are only so many places to cut and make money that the only place left is the customers. Not that they treated most customers all that well 10-30 yrs ago anyway. A plane is a bus with wings. Except that I’ve been treated far better on buses and trains these days. With the TSA/CBP. the airlines seemingly actively trying to piss off customers, the crowding, the minimal service, the prices, it’s a wonder more people don’t try to avoid them at all costs. It’s just not worth it, unless you have no other choice.
Corner Stone
@randy khan: “Not wrong. Not wrong. You’re the wrong!”
Corner Stone
@Patricia Kayden:
I hope he gets enough to buy the set of golf clubs the United CEO has to auction off after he is fired and sued into the fucking tarmac.
MCA1
@TriassicSands: First, let me say that I admire your humanity and perspective. I think I have two issues with that line of thinking, however:
– the percentage of times any individual flier market participant has meaningful “choice” in terms of having two similarly priced, similarly timed flights from separate airlines is nowhere near high enough that the strategy of just refusing to fly an airline that adheres only to the letter of the law on reimbursing bumped passengers is tenable for most travelers.
– it shouldn’t even be a consideration among passengers to “help” their fellow passengers in such a fashion as you’ve mentioned doing from time to time. We shouldn’t have to help each other vis-a-vis the airline we’ve collectively hired to get us somewhere together. The airlines are taking your laudable level of empathy and exploiting it.
randy khan
@Mnemosyne:
Your guess seems right to me. The police get minimal information and act on it. Now, it looks like they bungled it, but all they know is what they’re told.
randy khan
@Corner Stone:
LOL.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne:
Ha! CPD DGAF.
Dave
@catclub: And yet understood perfectly well when applied to out wealthy betters. Very strange. Flip side of this is how much this PR nightmare will rightly cost them.
Patricia Kayden
@Mnemosyne: Regardless of what the airlines told them, was it really necessary to drag that poor man through the aisle like that? Can someone please train the dang police to de-escalate nonviolent situations?
Cicada
@catclub: Do airlines even offer cash anymore? I’ve taken the offer a few times, and it’s always been given in airfare dollars. That’s with Delta, but I imagine it’s similar with other companies.
My favorite airline compensation: Being given food vouchers that were only good at airport restaurants – all of which were closed because the flight was a red eye.
Mnemosyne
@Steve in the ATL:
They do when they feel they can plausibly say their actions were someone else’s fault. In your opinion, could CPD sue United if the passenger sues CPD for excessive force? Enquiring minds want to know.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@catclub:
This – the offer was bullshit. I run a low overhead law practice. An unplanned day away would cost me more than $800 in revenue, regardless of how “connected” I tried to be.
United was bad, but CPD was complicit in what they did. What occurred was lousy policing, from initial dispatch to interview to arrest. At every step of the way, CPD had opportunities to say “we’re not Pinkertons, we’re not here to help you break unhappy customers. If they’re not behaving drunkenly, violently or ripping you off, you’ll have to resolve your differences with negotiation and money, as businesses do.”
Instead, CPD did their corporate masters’ bidding, as usual, to break an unhappy customer with a valid complaint.
rikyrah
Chicago News 04/10/2017, 04:04pm
Officer involved in dragging man off United flight now on leave
Social-media video of a man being dragged off a United Airlines flight Sunday evening is being viewed worldwide. | Twitter photo screen grab
Mitch Dudek, Fran Spielman and Jordan Owen
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An embarrassing viral video of a man being forcibly dragged off a United Airlines flight has resulted in an officer with the Chicago Department of Aviation police force being placed on leave.
“The incident on United flight 3411 was not in accordance with our standard operating procedure and the actions of the aviation security officer are obviously not condoned by the Department,” Aviation Department spokesperson Karen Pride wrote in an email to the Chicago Sun-Times. “That officer has been placed on leave effective today pending a thorough review of the situation.”
Pride said she doesn’t know whether the leave is paid or unpaid. Nor could she explain why only one aviation security officer is targeted for disciplinary action when several officers were at least tangentially involved in the incident.
Davebo
The issue is if your flying out of Chicago or Houston United is “almost” the only game in town. That the United States is down to just 3 major airlines is a travesty.
That and I have a lot of miles wrapped up in United, some carried forward from the good old Continental days (Continental was no Emirates, or Singapore Airlines but it was light years ahead of United).
randy khan
As an aside, my wife and I stopped flying United years ago after we had separate terrible experiences – hers on a trip to France and mine on a trip to the West Coast. We mostly fly Delta now and it’s generally much better. Even when things go wrong, they seem to want to try to do what they can for you. (It might help that I have some frequent flyer status, but it’s not like I’m Diamond.)
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Actually I think it is their business. The TSA does security, police do most everything else. Some places have airport police, such as LAX but many just pay for the city cops/county sheriff. I believe that law enforcement is required to remove any passenger that does not comply, I don’t believe they don’t have the authority to argue with the airline. And some of this may be due to FCC regulations because those cover a lot/everything in aviation. It isn’t all cut and dried. Now all that said United fucked up, putting crew ahead of paying passengers. And demanding that the man be removed.
I don’t know what I would have done either. When I flew for work I was on a schedule, but weather could make a hash of that so it wasn’t absolutely mandatory that I arrived at a certain time. I’d be very few people are that closely tied to an arrival time. But take your trip to FL. You had a very valid reason to be there by a certain time and you put extra time in your schedule to make that happen. Who doesn’t do that to some extent?
Mnemosyne
@Patricia Kayden:
I’m with you 100 percent. Right now, we’re training our cops to react with violent force any time they don’t get immediate obedience, and it is not working for any of us.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne:
I’m guessing half the CPD force is pissed they didn’t get a chance to shoot the guy.
Ksmiami
@scottinnj: At JetBlue – we will never beat up our passengers! Experience the difference” The taglines write themselves. UAL is in deep shit and they know it.
catclub
@Corner Stone:
So this is what you write when you are NOT saying anything negative about David Farenthold.
RobertB
@MCA1: This is definitely secondhand from me – IANA Transportation Law Expert. The internet experts were saying that sleeping in the seat of a car did not count, even if they were all passengers.
My take, steeped in total ignorance, is that they (United and other airlines) normally don’t get a perfect storm of pushback on this sort of thing. That they don’t roll all snake eyes by having cops drag a doctor off an airplane. Good luck getting the rules that allow this to happen changed now.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Aleta:
This is a question I have as well. I also want to know which reporter started the “he claimed to be a doctor” who had to see patients the next day. Has there been any indication that his statement was inaccurate? Why doesn’t the story read “he said he was a doctor who had patients to see.” The choice of “claimed” encourages an inference that the man isn’t a doctor. That pisses me off. Would an old white guy be described as having “claimed to be a doctor” do you suppose?
@Corner Stone: Me too. I hope it’s several pallets actually.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
I would NEVER give the CPD the benefit of the doubt.
EVER.
MattF
@RobertB: Thing is, rare events do happen, and they happen more often than you might expect. I know that sounds obviously wrong, but if you’re at the mercy of rare events, my free advice is ‘have a plan, just in case.’
catclub
@Cicada:
They don’t offer cash anymore to volunteers, but the minimum required compensation for being involuntarily bumped is cash, not vouchers – or it should be.
Uncle Cosmo
@Another Scott:
Looks like they needed a crew @SDF (L’ville) the next morning to fly a plane full of paying passengers. Probably the crew originally designated was at some other airport and (for whatever reason) wouldn’t be able to make it to SDF in time to get the minimum amount of rest/off time specified by FAA/union contract. (Maybe FAA rules or the contract with the pilot’s union mitigated against driving them–the extra 3-4 hours. ETA: See #89 supra.)
Sounds to me as if the nitwits at Untied (sic) only belatedly realized they needed to get that crew there (or the message never got to the gate crew in Chicago until the plane was already boarded).
Sounds to me as if Untied decided that $3200 (in semi-worthless “vouchers” probably) was as much as they were willing to pay to get that crew there. (I wonder if the bumped passengers got that payoff anyway, or if Untied [sic] said, You had your chance to cash in, now sayonara, suckers!)
I wonder how much they stood to lose if they had to cancel that morning flight out of SDF. My guess is, a whole lot more than $3200.
At a minimum, that MD oughta sue Untied (sic) for every penny they saved by having that crew at SDF, plus whatever costs he entailed by not being in Louisville that evening, plus hospital costs, plus pain & suffereing. All of that times three. Even if 2/3 has to go to a charity.
I’d heard numerous horror stories about Untied (sic). Now under no circumstances will I fly with their shitty airline. And I’m going to let them know it. A massive boycott that trashes their bottom line & gets the CEO turned out on his butt sounds about right, doncha think?
Roger Moore
@TriassicSands:
Every once in a while there’s an offer that’s too good to pass up. My example was flying a one stop from Burbank to Chicago. The airline- United, IIRC- had overbooked. They offered to put me on a taxi to LAX, where I would get on a non-stop flight that would actually arrive earlier than my originally scheduled flight. I probably would have taken the offer even if they hadn’t sweetened the deal with a few hundred dollars in travel vouchers.
delk
I guess there were no girls in leggings.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Hmm. Now that’s making me wonder if the other cops were regular CPD and that’s why they’re not on leave, or at least why the Department of Aviation doesn’t know their status.
And, again, I’m still dumbfounded that they knocked the guy out, didn’t administer first aid, and didn’t monitor him so he was able to STAGGER BACK ONTO THE FLIGHT. What the fuq happened there?!?!
Iowa Old Lady
When I look back on the United flight that really ticked me off, every irritation was due to something within the airline’s policy or control. It wasn’t weather. It was their decision on maintenance, or amount of food on board or how to nickel, and dime international passengers.
Patricia Kayden
@Walker: So why take anyone off the plane then? If there are no takers, there are no takers and you deal with your mistake of overbooking the plane.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho: That’s something that bothered me about the reporting too(I saw this on the local news last night); it shouldn’t be too hard to determine that he’s a doctor, whether he had to see patients or not would be more difficult.
Aleta
@Mnemosyne: I did hear the protests in the beginning video. But that and the other (admittedly) short videos that were linked in the Buzzfeed article (of when he’d returned) show witnesses unable to stop what was happening to a bleeding disoriented man. I’m not criticizing their fear, instead the police and TSA policies that I believe are intended to subdue us psychologically and physically, and will harm all races and all classes as this continues.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: Well, good. Next up – the crew from that entire United flight.
Honestly, all other issues of legality, ethics, and morality aside – haven’t any of these Brave Boys in Blue grasped the essential point that, in the era of cell phone cameras, literally the whole world COULD be watching?? Don’t they have even the slightest notion of self-preservation? Like, “don’t do over-the-top shit when people have their cell phones pointed at you”?!
The probable result of all this, of course, is that cops and airlines will agree: not on protocols for improving customer service and passenger protection, but that everyone must turn over their cell phones for confiscation when they board an airplane. Sigh.
Peale
@Ruckus: I look at airlines in the US the way consumers started to view US auto companies in the 1970s. They really aren’t concerned about the quality of their products and are actively showing contempt for their customers. The customer experience is lousy across the board. It now even bleeds into the high paying business class customers. The airlines can complain all they want about those “government subsidized” airlines from the mideast stealing their customers. But those airlines treat their customers much better. A lot better. It is noticeable to anyone who has flown with them. That whole “new laptop bombs so no laptops on flights from Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai” bullshit is about harassing US business class customers off those airlines and back to US carriers for flights to Asia. You see how passengers respond to good service – they leave when they find it. Emirates Air doesn’t have to charge $1,000 less per ticket any longer to get customers to fly to India any longer. Those customers don’t want to fly United, American or Delta to be treated like meat cargo. But the US airline industry response has been to harass customers on other airlines rather than try to win those customers back.
Baud
If the passenger were Arab instead of Asian, I’m not sure the outrage would be as widespread outside of liberalandia.
RobertB
@MattF: Oh, I agree. My wife (who does Disaster Recovery) told me about her company buying an option to hire a plane from Netjets, so they could fly personnel, backup tapes, etc, on very short notice. This was like $10K or something a year, just in case they needed to get to the nearest DR data center in a big hurry. Granted, this was pre-cloud days, but still a good idea. I bet United wishes they had a private jet an hour away now.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Well, that’s some good news, I guess. All the cops should be punished though for letting things get that far.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
It’s the only thing that will work. Money is the social juice, the business juice, and the legal juice. Very few of us have enough of that juice on our own to make any difference but a bunch of us together do.
ThresherK
I haven’t been on a plane since 2000. This isn’t gonna make me rush to do it.
seaboogie
@Elmo: I’ve had good experiences with Delta, and the last point in the article about being nice is so true!
On an AA flight from Vancouver to Cincinnati, we connected in Chicago to a small commuter plane to Cincinnati, and we were out on the taxiway waiting to take off, 40th in line, because President Clinton was in town, and AF1 and all that jazz. After an hour, the flight was cancelled, so we returned to the gate. Talking to a fellow passenger, we learned that Cincinnati was a secondary hub for Delta, so my colleague went off to collect our luggage and I went to the Delta gate.
Delta bought our AA tickets, and we settled in for what turned out to be a very long wait because there was big weather in Atlanta, so inbound flights were seriously delayed. The gate agents were so patient and tireless, so we went to one of the delis in the gate area and bought a big bag full of Snapples, and handed them out to the gate agents. A couple of hours later, an agent came up to us and asked for our tickets and returned with an upgrade to first class on a big plane.
THEN, when we got on the plane, the first class flight attendant asked if we needed to call anybody about the change in our travel plans. We were all “nope”, we’re good. And he was all “Are you SURE you don’t want to call anybody, for any reason?” My colleague decided to call her boyfriend who was in Montreal, and the flight attendant whipped out a pass and swiped it on the airphone in the seat in front of us. Colleague talked to her BF from before we took off until we landed in Cincinnati, for free! (He was drunk, and wouldn’t shut up).
It is a nice memory…
Corner Stone
@catclub: Hmmm. It seems I have been fairly caught in my own web of vitriol. Masticate me quickly, I beg of you.
TriassicSands
@MCA1:
It’s quite simple. I’d rather help another person than hurt the airline. The airline is going to bump passengers no matter what I do. If I could keep someone who needs (or maybe just thinks they need) to get somewhere on that flight from being bumped and I still get where I’m going on a schedule that works for me, I don’t see that as a sacrifice and I certainly don’t see myself as being exploited by the airline, which sucks no matter what I do.
It’s also worth considering United (in this case) employees. I’m sure they (or most of them) dread having to bump passengers. If my volunteering to take a later flight helps a fellow passenger and keeps a United employee from the unpleasantness of bumping a passenger, again, I don’t see a downside.
It seems like you’re viewing this as a zero-sum game between you and the airline. Screw the airline. Other lives are involved. Imagine how much better the current situation would have played out if someone had been willing to be bumped instead of the injured passenger.
MattF
@seaboogie: My flights lately have been with Southwest. Generally good experiences given the overall awfulness of air travel. The Southwest agents and crews were all competent and helpful.
Chris Fisher
@germy: This is why I always fly Kick You in the Balls Airline.
Yeah, it sucks, but it’s relatively cheap and at least I know what to expect.
Baud
I’ve never taken an airline offer to bump my flight. Thought about it many times. One of these days when I’m less in a hurry to get where I’m going…
Corner Stone
@seaboogie:
Why you gotta bring race into it?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: The wife and I took a voluntary bump on Southwest when we were flying from Vegas to Burbank, we ended up on the next flight and had our next airfare to Vegas paid for and an extra hour to have drinks in the bar(this was back in my drinkin’ days).
Ruckus
@Patricia Kayden:
Well it is a problem that has to be solved before the flight takes off as there are only so many seats on a plane and everyone has to be in one to fly. The real issue is overbooking in the first place. And in this case they didn’t actually overbook, they wanted to use the seats for United employees. They used the term, called it overbooking but really this was their fuck up, either not accounting for the crew or having a situation and fucking customers for it. Someone up thread said it would cost United probably a lot more to make that plane wait but that’s not and shouldn’t be the problem of the person with a paid seat.
seaboogie
@Corner Stone: Nah – it was a bunch of former drunks – they ran out of ginger ale after the first 5 rows….
efgoldman
@Another Scott:
No they’re not. For the big three, too many of their routes are monopolies or nearly so.
trollhattan
@ThresherK:
Just Hawaii for me, and only because the drive is a killer.
Mnemosyne
I know I keep harping on this, but it’s the part that bothers me the most and nobody seems to have an answer: so the police knock a passenger unconscious and drag him off the plane and NO ONE gets him first aid? Nobody is monitoring the guy with a head injury? Did they just dump him in a corner somewhere?
Aleta
@Ruckus: I think so too. In the immediate future, loss of money is the force that might slow destruction by the Tr administration and decrease the cable news commentary in support of their actions.
Brachiator
This horrible incident is the picture I have in my mind now whenever I hear someone talk about how they voted for Trump because they wanted a president who would run the country like a business.
We’re America, and Trump is about to drag us down the aisle.
Corner Stone
@seaboogie:
The horror…the horror…
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
Depends on where you’re flying. G and I often fly Virgin America to Chicago from LA and we’ve always been happy with their service.
Ruckus
@Peale:
Oh I agree whole heartedly. As I’ve said at BJ before I used to fly for work, and a lot. Hertz told me that I was in the upper 5% of renters and treated me accordingly. I was on the road more than 50% of the year. That’s how often I flew. Now I rarely got treated like shit but this was also over 12 yrs ago and the airlines in the US have changed to be even more like every other corporation. It’s all fuck the customers, they will come back. And in the case of airlines they may be right. So many places you have very little choice about who to fly with, unless you don’t mind flying half the country in the wrong direction and making 3 connections to get somewhere. The flip side is it used to be rare to fly to a destination on one airline and return on another. Now that’s quite common. So there is less certainty on the airlines part that they will make money on having your butt in their seat.
Many of them have of course brought this upon themselves by treating us like cattle but they are, if not actually conservatives, like them, in that everything is a zero sum game and you are the enemy. Name any two large corps that are not like this today.
Just One More Canuck
@Uncle Cosmo: And what if one of his patients in Louisville that he was unable to see developed medical complications (or worse) as a result of his being unable to see them
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
Yeah, but they’ve also learned that they’re unlikely to suffer real consequences for it. It’s enough of an annoyance that they can get themselves all worked up with righteous indignation on wingnut blogs about how horrible it is that so many people are cop-haters, but not enough to actually worry them into behaving better.
bupalos
Several parts of this I find a little curious, one especially is a lot of people seeing this as a problem with United. We wish. This is a problem with corporations and the corporate state. They’re all constantly trying to find the line of how much they can squeeze and how much control they have and where they can drop the veil and where they can’t. Which corporation happened to trip over the line on which day seems fairly irrelevant. While I find this incident predictably disgusting, it’s also kind of small potatoes.
If this little personal protest was anything that actually threatened more than the most marginal of margins, I’m sure that guy would be in a lot worse shape (probably on a path to his grave) through legal harassment for his unlawful refusal to obey the corporation and its police force.
Ruckus
@seaboogie:
I once got bumped to first class, on United at O’Hare because I was pleasant and accommodating to the clerk that stood there and took shit about canceled planes from the 30 or so people in front of me, all due to weather, while trying to rebook all of us.
Chris
@Peale:
It’s almost as if major government involvement makes for a better corporation than when the only thing it’s worried about is how to squeeze the maximum amount of profits out of you.
Tazj
@Tazj: I should have said, no one should be obligated to give up their seat(airline’s problem) but if they do, they should be fairly compensated.
zhena gogolia
@Brachiator:
Yeah, my thoughts exactly.
BruceFromOhio
No tasers or chokeholds? No bullets?
@Brachiator:
And then kicking our sorry asses off the airplane, even though we already paid.
Now upping that $800 to a thou or more is going to look like a lost bet that could’ve saved millions. Not to mention mokes like me who can pick the airline I want to fly. Contrast this with Southwest and its recent PR score. Suddenly, United no longer has my business, imagine that.
To United’s credit, now it has a nice sharp blade to wave around at passengers when the next overbooking occurs: if you won’t get off for $800, we’ll drag you off for free.
Now THAT is some business savvy.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Well, VA was sold to Alaska Airlines recently. That may not be as big a problem for service, Alaska has always had a not that horrible rep about service, maybe it will continue. Maybe they won’t even rename it, they still have separate websites.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
There is an underlying problem here: Americans have overwhelmingly decided that price is the only thing that they care about when deciding who to fly with. That doesn’t excuse immoral decisions made by the individuals involved in dragging a man off of a flight, but it is the environment in which those decisions are made. Airlines that tried to provide better service to coach passengers at a higher price were eviscerated in the market. No one chose that option. All of the airlines had to cut service to the bone and still operate at almost non-existent margins in order to get customers. At this point, they absolutely depend upon first class passengers to survive; when you get on your flight, look at the relative size of the first class and coach cabins, and realize that more than 100% of the airlines’ profit margin is generated by the former.
Again, this doesn’t excuse the behavior seen in the videos, which is all choices made by individuals, but there is a strong element of You Get What You Pay For going on here. The American public is getting exactly what it wanted, even though it doesn’t realize that.
Jazzman
I’ve often thought that the reason Japanese cars have become so reliable is that Japanese auto executives could not bear the loss of face that would ensue from being found to sell shoddy products. It’s glaringly apparent that US businessmen have no such sense of shame.
Fair Economist
@Davebo:
United didn’t use to be United either. The current arrogance and lousy service is primarily driven by the extreme monopolization. I’m visiting my mom next week, and my 3 choices are Delta, Delta, and Delta. Given that they’re a corporation, and so by definition heartless and only about the money, why *should* they care?
danielx
…down a flight of fifty stairs.@Miss Bianca:
The answer in all too many cases is that they don’t give a shit because damages in any ensuing lawsuits will be paid by the state, county, or locale in which they work, and the local police union will have their backs no matter what they do.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Mnemosyne:
I have always had good experiences on VA – I’ve gone (a little) out of my way to fly with them when I’ve had a choice. I’m pretty bummed that they are being subsumed by Alaska Airlines; Alaska’s OK, for an airline, but VA is much better.
Does Alaska still leave the little cards with the Bible verse on the tray tables? That always struck me as bizarre, even though the verse, as much as I can recall, was pretty innocuous.
Roger Moore
@Tazj:
I don’t think the idea that people deserve fair compensation is a question. The question is who gets to decide what level of compensation is fair.
smintheus
Back in the day I was forced to take United for too many flights. They regularly cancelled lightly booked flights, pretending to passengers that the plane had mechanical issues or some such excuse. Many’s the time I arrived 6-12 hours late because they decided to fold one lightly book flight into the next flight.
Uncle Cosmo
@Roger Moore: One year I was booked on Useless Air BWI-PHL-LHR. The puddlejumper was coming up from the south when it was delayed by a line of thunderstorms to the point where no one connecting in Filet was gonna make the onward flight. Consternation ensued. One young German couple with not a lot of English was homeward bound from PHL; I managed enough Kraut to get them to follow me back to the ticket counter to see what could be done. For them, gar nichts until the next day. (Wie Schade!). But I lucked out: BA flew BWI-LHR nightly, so Useless just rebooked me onto the flight that I would’ve taken in the first place had it not been so pricey.
FTR the one (business) trip when I flew Untied (sic), to Boise ID, they lost my checked bag with all my fresh clothes. (This was almost 30 years ago; my entire carry-on was by corporate orders an early-model laptop, useless except for show at the meeting I was attending at Mountain Home AFB, 40 miles down the Interstate.) The Untied (sic) personnel at BOI compounded my ire by blithely telling me, Oh it’s not lost at all–we know exactly where it is.
Liar. I went into that meeting in my travel duds & told the rest of the crew to stay well upwind…At least it was there when I got back that afternoon. Bastards.
ETA: Also FTR that was just Act II of what turned out to be The Bidniz Trip From Hell. None of the planes crashed, but fucking near everything else went wrong…
Ruckus
@BruceFromOhio:
Hey! They got the off duty crew to the destination didn’t they?
You know that United will blame the cop, the cop will blame the bleeding guy, the city will blame United management, United management will blame the supervisor who called the cops, the bleeding guy will have to hire a pretty decent law firm at a rather large retainer (and pay for his own ER visit, which both the cops and United did shit to get him to, as Memns keeps pointing out), and the entire thing will blow over in 3 days. United will suffer a small bit but otherwise bullshit their way out, the cops will screw the guy they didn’t supervise worth a shit and be done with it, and we will move on to the next outrage. Because there will always be another outrage or twelve tomorrow and most of us have lives, such as they are.
grandpa john
@ThresherK: I haven’t been on one since `1964 and don’t feel as if I have missed a thing
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
This is blowing up all over Facebook, so I’m not so sure it’s going to vanish down the memory hole. That footage Adam linked to above of the passenger bleeding all over the cabin is pretty attention-grabbing.
smintheus
@Fair Economist: No, Continental was disastrous. My spouse and I spent 12 hours in Philly or Newark waiting for a short Continental connecting flight (from California). Every 20 minutes they announced that the plane was about to start boarding. There was no plane; they claimed it was being taxied over from another terminal. They were lying. They had no plane, and knew they wouldn’t have a plane for at least 10 hours. Passengers knew this because among us was an off-duty pilot, who told us that the crew had told him the truth. We didn’t take off until just before midnight, as the crew knew would happen. But Continental didn’t want to put us on another airline or refund our money.
The worst of it was that we had a dog in a carrier, drugged in CA for the long flight. He and the other animals were left in their carrier cages, out on the tarmac, all day in intense summer heat because Continental was committed to the fiction that a plane was about to arrive. The airline refused repeated requests from us to bring the dog in so we could walk him, even when massive lighting storms rolled through. They insisted that to do so would delay the flight when the (fictitious) plane arrived.
Continental were the scum of the earth.
Kathleen
@donnah: I didn’t know that. I think they’re coming to CVG.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
Have had my luggage lost on a non stop flight on a business trip. I worked in professional sports and had to wear a uniform at events. Custom embroidered uniforms I might add. You can guess where my uniforms were can’t you? Took 2 days for them to get my luggage to me. Have no idea what in the hell it got to see.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Oh I don’t disagree that it’s shit for United. I’m just saying that after the blame game runs itself out and we have another 12 bags of shit dumped on us by our wonderful executive/congressional branches or another corporation or law enforcement agency or all three the outrage de jour will run over this one and while all will not be well, much of it will be forgotten.
ETA On the other hand, I have been wrong once or twice in the past. I can’t remember when but it has happened.
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
That’s probably what I’ll miss most about those halcyon 8 months or so when the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress: it briefly felt like bad shit might actually get fixed if it was brought to Congress’s attention.
Now we’ll probably have Congress pass a bill authorizing cops to shoot people who refuse to get out of their airline seat whenever the airline tells them to.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Not sure about that, a lot of those congressassholes fly to and from somewhere to DC. Sure they’d never expect someone to make them move but even the fucking stupid ones might realize that gun fire inside a plane might just hit them.
seaboogie
@Ruckus: It pays to not be a jerk, starting with the fact that you can live with yourself for not being a jerk.
I also had a lost luggage situation wherin I had to fly out again the next afternoon after arriving home the previous evening. After standing in line behind the folks yelling at the lost luggage attendant (what a crappy job!), I just explained my sitch…would appreciate having my luggage delivered by noon so that I could do laundry and head out again on the same airline a few hours later. My luggage arrived chez moi before noon.
Why folks think yelling is going to get someone to go the extra mile for them is beyond my ken.
TenguPhule
@Chris:
Until people start pre-emptively defending themselves. Because sooner or later, faces are going to be recognized and someone who may or may not have a screw loose will decide simply “fuck this shit”. And then its going to go pear shaped.
seaboogie
@smintheus: For all of my “just try a little kindness” comments on this thread, if my late pooch was in that situation and repeated kind entreaties did not work, hmmm…I’d probably still be in jail right now for whatever actions I would have taken to get to my pup.
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
So they fit right in when United bought them.
Tazj
@Roger Moore: True. Most airlines believe a voucher should be enough while most people believe it’s a horrible inconvenience at best.
Roger Moore
@seaboogie:
They aren’t yelling because they think it’s going to get somebody to go the extra mile for them; they’re yelling because they’re angry about having a big pile of shit dumped on them.
MCA1
@RobertB: Oh, I know. I wasn’t suggesting that sleeping in a car could count towards the 8 hours rule. Just that there could be well-rested pilots sleeping at home 2 hours away from the departure airport who could be bothered to go to bed at 10 PM and be roused a little early for a flight, or that the departure time the next morning could be pushed a little bit to allow bused flight crew 8 hours in their hotel before heading to the airport in the morning.
But I agree, the airlines don’t count on this sort of perfect storm. As a lawyer, I think they should have known they would likely roll snake eyes at some point, though, and figured out a way to allow employees to be a bit more nimble when trying to get flight crew moved around.
MCA1
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Not a bad point. Sounds kind of like the election.
Although I do wonder how the numbers play out here, and how many first class tickets are actually being purchased to fill the profit margins. Business Class on most of the flights I take is usually at least half filled with upgraded status fliers (myself occasionally included).
Beyond those travelers, the cost pass-through fliers (company’s paying, client’s paying, whatever, it all gets absorbed and comes out in the wash – this is me on int’l flights) take up just about the rest of Business Class. No one actually pays for a ticket up there for themselves. In reality the airlines are reliant not on individual customers who plunk down for the extremely pricy tickets, but on corporate customers who either (a) fly their employees around enough that they get the status necessary to get upgraded all the time or (b) will pick up the tab for an executive on a longhaul from Kennedy to SFO or whatever because he/she might make a stink about it. Doesn’t make much difference in your overall point, but for the average Joe the competing customer for him isn’t Johnny Billionaire up there sipping champagne, it’s Ernst & Young or whoever spending a hundred million dollars a year on Delta tickets.
Mnemosyne
@MCA1:
I was just starting to think this: if you really wanted to make United shit their pants, get their corporate customers to start boycotting them.
monoglot
Um, United could have rented a car for the employees to drive to their destination in about 4 hours.
Would have cost a whole lot less than this is going to.
burnspbesq
@Corner Stone:
You really are a ondescending asshole, aren’t you.
Go suck a syphilitic dick.
smintheus
@Roger Moore: Yes, it was a match made in hell.
smintheus
@seaboogie: I eventually did insist; Continental demurred. I insisted more loudly and threateningly, and one of them finally brought our dog in for a brief walk to relieve himself. Then they started badgering me to bring the dog back asap because they were ‘about to board’. Most of the other passengers went along with their dictates however.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: It’s a rotating tagline you ignorant fuck. Catch a clue you fucking hump.
scottinnj
Pepsi: No one could create a worse public relations disaster than we did with the Jenner Girl
United Airlines: Hold my beer.
J R in WV
@Patricia Kayden:
The cops are armed, Patricia. The crowd yelled at the cops and the airline staff, what do you want, for people to be brutalized for attacking a police officer? Asking too much, me thinks.
I just spent 30 hours trapped at Hartsfield in Atlanta because of Delta management screwups Thursday and Friday. Flew home instead of on to my destination because the flights west were being canceled over and over, and the short hop home was scheduled on the board. So I’m pretty torked about airline management and total incompetence already.
I already knew United management was completely untrustworthy, but was actually surprised at how poorly Delta dealt with their brief shutdown, still paralyzed 40 hours later… And no support for the thousands of passengers trapped at their hub, and still flying hundreds of people into Atlanta that they KNEW they couldn’t provide ongoing flights to any of them.
It was a long stressful night for me, and I didn’t have kids or serious health problems, like the elderly woman who was traveling after losing her husband days before. Horrible.
Chad
The poor guy in the orange shirt is probably “goddamnit internet could you not.”
Chad
@germy: Recent troubles aside, I’ve found Delta to be pretty consistently good.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne:
No.
Arclite
I think the best we can hope for from the United incident is that some Dem introduces legislation to prevent airlines from overbooking (i.e. selling a product that does not exist) and the Repubs kill it or prevent a vote on it.
ChrisGrrr
@catclub: Thank you. Yes.
Another commenter with questionable motives to add to the virtual pie filter…