Did anyone take a look at the flight involved? United 3411, Chicago, IL (ORD) to Louisville, KY (SDF). It’s a five hour and 22 minute drive. You know there were at least four people who weren’t connecting and had that as a final destination. Who at United wasn’t smart enough to stick some people in a Uber Black? Hell, they could have paid somebody $800 to get there a few hours late and had people lining up.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that the people you end up choosing are adults who knew there was a chance of this going in and so act like adults when you tell them that today’s their unlucky day.
If we have to start making decisions based on the assumption that we’re dealing with people with the emotional and intellectual maturity of children, we’re in for a bad time.
The airline should be asked to justify its actions, as should law enforcement. The authority of either is not unlimited. “How we reached that point” may or may not be relevant.
I’ve actually made that drive many times. It’s 5 hours under ideal conditions. That would mean never hitting traffic jams, good weather, minimal or no rest stops… It CAN be 5 hours, it is not always 5 hours.
I, for one, would rather not pay more for air travel. It’s hard enough for me to visit my family as it is.
No, they boarded crew that was needed for a flight out of the flight in question’s destination. For whatever reason (perhaps mechanical reasons or weather), the original plan for getting that crew where they needed to be fell through, so the airline had to choose between inconveniencing four people versus cancelling the flight that the crew-in-transit was supposed to be on and inconveniencing dozens to a couple hundred people.
Man sues cat has 3,240,000 results.
Or flying that crew on a charter. Or offering more.
or realizing there was a problem before allowing the passengers to board.
It’s also a national news story that has gotten nearly 200 comments on this board in a few hours, that has happened ten times a day for decades without anybody taking notice of it. Ten times a day. For decades.
Because they removed him BY FORCE not just denied boarding.
It’s part of the operational efficiency that makes air travel affordable for those of us with modest incomes.
Yes, sometimes it backfires–but those backfires happen so rarely, and their costs are so small, that on the whole it’s a net benefit.
Probably not. Airlines have incredibly complex crew management systems that are pretty damn good at optimizing aircrew flows. Including figuring out what is the best solution in unexpected situations, such as when the original plan to move a crew from Point A to Point B falls through due to weather or mechanical issues.
Then your opinion is almost certainly not rooted in reality.
Missed this bit of wildly-uninformed nonsense.
But: no, they’re not. When they bump passengers, they’re almost always legally obligated to refund them the cost of their ticket PLUS extra, unless they’re able to get them to their destination within an hour of the originally scheduled time.
Sure, so let’s hear from a lawyer if this guy can sue…
oh wait:
*One thing is abundantly clear already though; this as-yet-unidentified traveler has a heck of a lawsuit.
“It’s pretty outrageous,” said Jim Keindler an aviation lawyer with Kreindler & Kreindler in New York for 34 years… Kreindler has seen just about everything over the course of three and a half decades representing air travelers, so when I saw the video, I called to ask what he thought. “That’s a compelling suit,” he told me explaining, “For United to decide an employee’s presence is more important than a doctor seeing patients is pretty wild…But even if the passenger isn’t a doctor, Kreindler says the airline does not have the right to evict passengers without cause. “First of all its wrong, it’s their problem to get their people where they have to be to work, work from even if it means flying them on another carrier. They shouldn’t be forcibly removing people by lottery,” he said.”*
As three separate words you get a total of over 11,000,000 hits, which is a spectacular amount…if you don’t know how to look things up, because if you look up the phrase “man sues airline” it drops just slightly to 7220 hits.
Which still doesn’t mean jack shit unless you can find a single case that involving a person being deplaned under the boarding rules.
As has been gone over in this thread, you can sue pretty much anyone for anything.
That is, of course, nowhere near being a comparable situation.
Once you’ve bought food at the store, that food is yours, inalienably so.
You are not the owner of a seat on a plane. The airline is. They’re selling you permission to sit in it for a certain period of time, but it’s permission they’re entitled to revoke at any point so long as they refund what you paid for it.
Somewhere a Pepsi executive is breathing a sigh of relief.
Except there is a lawyer who is a expert in that field saying: "“That’s a *compelling *suit.”
Except not, because you know full well going in that that’s a possibility.
It’s not “fraud” if they literally tell you up front exactly what they’re doing.
Will you please leave those goalposts where they are? There isn’t anything in that about using boarding rules to deplane passengers, which is what you were talking about previously.