This is what he looked like when they let him back on the plane:
Here’s a thing to try: everywhere you use the word “plane”, substitute the word “bus”. Everywhere you use the word “he”, substitute “she”.
Sometimes, policies are so wrong that disobedience is the only way to begin to effect change.
Are you trying to suggest that the gentlemen concerned is a analogous to Rosa Parks?
Or are you doing that scene from the denoument of the Matthew Mcconaughey movie about the rape and murder of a black child, “now imagine she’s white”?
Anyway, FWIW, the word “he” does not appear anywhere in my comment!
It’s happened to me at least twice within the past five years. Once I was flying on a Virgin America flight from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people on the plane. I find it kind of eerie, although there was certainly plenty of room.
More recently I flew a Delta connection, probably from Minneapolis to San Francisco, where there were only a few people in my entire section of coach.
It probably helps that I most frequently fly on Saturday. The airline vibe is entirely different when there are no (or almost no) business travelers.
That sort of happened to me once – except I was the only ticketed passenger on a plane that seated about 150. This was back in the '80’s and it was a Piedmont Airlines flight from Lexington KY to Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem NC.
But they didn’t cancel the flight. I’m guessing the plane needed to be in Winston-Salem.
Piedmont became part of USAir then USAirways and now It operates as American Eagle. And Smith Reynolds airport pretty much stopped passenger flights shortly after and is now a general aviation airport.
But my take on this is that everyone should know that air travel is risky if you have to keep a schedule. I have never been bumped although I’ve been on flights that bumped passengers. But air travel is fraught with delays, I’ve been on dozens of flights that were delayed more than 2 hours and two that were delayed overnight. I’ve been stranded on a runway for upwards of six hours (three times!) and I’ve been booked on flights that were canceled outright.
I get that he was a doctor and had to see patients. Yes it sucks when your doctor cancels an appointment but it happens. But if his schedule was that critical ( like if he was performing a heart transplant) maybe he should have flown in a day or two early. ( I do this myself in certain situations, like flying to another city to board a cruise ship).
And I’ve also bailed out completely and headed for the car rental counters when things started to get dicey because of weather.
And I’ve missed flights twice. One because my boyfriend was a stubborn idiot who preferred to use “alternative time” and I wasn’t familiar with the area so I believed him when he said the airport was 40 minutes away (that’s 2 hours and 15 minutes in actual time.)
And the other time I was going to meet family members for a week, they were going to rent a lake house. So I booked a flight to the airport nearest the lake but the house rental fell through and everyone else cancelled. So I ate the $250 ticket, that sucked but I wasn’t going to pay for a hotel in order to spend a week alone in an unremarkable city so I just didn’t show up for the flight. Now, if I could have gotten ANYTHING, even a twenty bucks refund for canceling I would’ve let the airline know.
So people do cancel, although missed connections are probably the biggest reason for no shows. Honestly, I don’t think the bump policies are a big enough issue to merit systemic reform. But the airlines have to remember the psychology involved- there’s a big difference between the airline saying " Flight canceled, everyone go away" and “Flight going but Ann Hedonia can’t go, go away Ann”. Even though the end result is the same -Ann not going - the second feels more personal and is more likely to provoke a response.
I don’t agree with the way the airline handled it. I’m watching the news right now and with all the " this man purchased a ticket and the airline refused to honor it slant, you’d think this guy was the only person that never made it to the destination city on time.
When the man refused to deplane they should’ve canceled the flight. Seriously
If it didn’t work as a bluff, it would’ve turned the optics completely around.
The doctor would be getting scorched on social media, assuming he made it out of the airport alive.
I’ve only flown three times in my adult life (twice pre-9/11 and once after). The only time any aspect of our flights/booking changed is that we were once bumped FROM coach TO first class (August 2000).
I’d heard of overbooking and I’d heard of auctioning for volunteers to deplane. I had never heard of lottery deplaning, and (of course) never pored over the fine print of a plane ticket.
A lot of people in thread who fly frequently seem to believe that the risk of being deplaned is a totally foreseeable risk of flying … totally common knowledge and that no one should be taken the least bit aback should it happen to them personally. I disagree – I doubt that more than 1 in 500 American adults are aware that once you buy a ticket and get on a plane, there’s still a non-zero risk that you could be deplaned by lottery.
If they’re asking me, the risk of deplaning should be detailed on the ticket in much the same way Surgeon General’s warnings are prominently displayed on cigarettes. No hiding behind the fine print. It’s something that, fairly, airlines should put much further forward in people’s minds.
Furthermore: I don’t really care that it’s a one-in-a-kazillion risk, or that one could fly twice a week for 50 years and never even witness a deplaning by lottery. Perception routinely throttles reality, and it does so once again concerning this matter.
For the record, they didn’t let him back on the plane, right? He ran back on and was then again removed, no?
Sent from my adequate mobile device using Tapatalk.
Should this be true any time a customer has a contract dispute with a business? What if, say, I refuse to leave a store because they won’t give me a refund I think I’m entitled to under store policy? Should the police just ignore it because they don’t resolve contract disputes?
Or they could have done it the military way. Pilot: “We aren’t leaving the gate until this doctor gets off the plane! I’m going into the cockpit and the attendants are going to look the other way, so no matter what happens, we didn’t see nothing, but we’re not moving until he’s gone!”
So maybe this guy did a good deed by bringing the problem to the attention of the public.
Those were the days. I can remember taking a redeye widebody from LA to Chicago and once airborne, most of the few passengers on board chose one of the 5-row center seat groups, raised the armrests, and made each into a bed.
Then this?
What problem? That some people are children and can’t be bothered to act like an adult when things don’t go their way?
Airlines are a lot better at managing the number of seats on a flight than they used to be. That means not as many empty flights, but also not as much overbooking. Denial of boarding is actually down, even though more people fly and there are fewer empty seats.
This is the argument I’m missing something on. The seat has been paid for whether or not someone shows up to plant their butt in it. Sure the person who missed their flight can reschedule for a later flight, but it’s not going to be gratis. There is still a fee to rebook. Sure, it’s not usually as much as the original booking, but I can’t imagine the airline is going to be hurt too bad considering they gouged some other poor sucker double or triple for having to book their flight the day before rather than two weeks in advance.
Also note that this part seems to have not been mentioned on the thread yet.
While I am still not saying that the passenger was in the right the fact that they resorted to this level in order to solve their poor scheduling on flight crews pretty much removes me from the UA customer base.
Not that I fly much any more but that is mostly due to the poor treatment and unreliability of the industry. I would far rather drive 1000 miles and know I can keep schedules than deal with being a piece of meat.
I can drive from Seattle to the Bay Area in 15 hours of travel time. With an hour on public transportation, 2 hours recommended before a flight and the risk of being bumped or them losing my luggage it is crazy that this drive seems to be less of a hassle these days.
Plus I don’t have to deal with a junky rental car when I get there.
I use to fly 2-3 times a week in the 90’s and the industry has gone down hill and it doesn’t help that at 6’2" I have to suffer physical pain and discomfort with my knees physically touching the seat in front of me these days.
But it’s okay, because you had a contract saying you could do that.
[quote=“Riemann, post:252, topic:784171”]
Then this?
[/QUOTE]I know that’s a fictional movie scene, but I saw something exactly like that IRL, and it wasn’t the EMs taking the matter into their own hands, but the NCOs, which shows how corrupted things can get under some circumstances.
Well, that puts a little kink in the “Nothing to see here, totally acceptable” camp.
Surely dead heading is needed for when scheduling emergencies are a problem.
A pilot or crew gets sick or has a family emergency. It happens. Raise seat prices for everyone $1-$3 on every flight to accommodate such situations so that a few seats can be left open for such an emergency when a crew must be transferred because of something that is unforeseen.
If these seats aren’t taken by needed crew moves, a standby person can fill it.