TheOneX wrote: Legality of it doesn't really matter to me. It was their own incompetence that created this situation. United should have had a better plan for getting their employees to where they needed to be. Either have those seats reserved for those employees beforehand, or if it is an emergency bounce the customers before they board the plane. Once they are on the plane they have no excuse to throw someone off. At that point they should be either finding some other way to get their employees there, such as buying tickets from another airline, finding a replacement crew, or accepting that they screwed up and face the legal consequences like an adult. I have very little doubt those legal consequences would be minor compared to this PR disaster.
Having a pilot in the family for the last 30 years has given me some perspective on this. Americans want their air travel to be comfortable, fast and cheap. These goals are incompatible with each other.
An airline sending a half empty plane is losing money on that flight. Overbooking is never going to stop because the reality is that if they didn't overbook flights, most of them would fly with empty seats. It's silly to model that way. Hotels don't do it, busy restaurants don't do it - most industries who take reservations only books 1:1, simply because human nature doesn't change. (I don't believe this is true for sporting events, concerts, etc., though.)
It is entirely possible that the airline already scoped out another flight, but if this flight was the earliest, they were required by law to get them on the earliest possible flight, which was likely the flight that was just leaving. I don't know all the circumstances, but it's entirely possible that this crew was needed at the last minute, due to another crew already in KY not being able to fly. (Perhaps the pilot on the original crew got sick.) These things happen. I don't have special insight, I don't believe all the little details were disclosed.
So, that said, yes, it was a brutal removal, but (and this is the biggie,) passengers do not have any right to stay on the plane no matter what. If you force their hand, they aren't going to say, "Oh, okay, you really mean it. We'll let you stay." If they do that one time, now it's policy and anyone could get away with it. That gives all passengers the ability to completely fuck up air travel for thousands of people. That's the alternative, so they had to show force.
United had a legal duty to not delay their flight out of KY, so they had to get their crew there. That's all there is to it.
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