I think it should be infinite, that is there should be no upper limit beyond which the airline can call in the police to beat someone. The worry about the rate getting to ‘ten million dollars and a 25% stake in the company’ is stupid, because all they would actually need to do in a case like this is pay a few grand for plane tickets on another carrier for their four employees, or activate another plane to carry them. Trying to paint this as ‘would ten million dollars be OK’ is dumb because they have easy alternatives that cost massively less than ten million dollars and also don’t involve beating an elderly man.
And to put these dollar figures in perspective, I would the absolute lowest limit for compensation that could even be remotely considered reasonable would be the hourly rate of United Airline’s highest paid employee. I looked up compensation for United Airline’s CEO and found a figure from 2014 of $11.3 million per year, which works out to $5650 per hour. So United Airlines own financial analysis says that it would be completely reasonable to pay each person $113,000 for a 20-hour delay, which is far more than they offered in the scenario. If the airline gets to benefit from the free market, so should the passengers when the airline screws up.
Which the corner store also actually cannot do. There’s no law AFAIK saying they can’t put up a sign saying that. Actually making it stick when sued is a different story. In that case it will depend on the circumstances of denying service.
Same here. ‘Magiver’ is simply proclaiming as an absolute something which is not. A court would determine the outcome of this contract dispute in terms of specifics like what denying ‘boarding’ means compared to somebody already on the plane, whether the airline properly offered compensation under the DOT rules, etc.
Too complicated to adjudicate on the fly? This is among the reasons it’s unwise to just call the cops and try to impose your will. Also stupid of the cops. They should have asked for an explanation and hearing the actual situation told the UA people ‘you have to find another way besides us physically removing this person’.
Again it’s obvious from a commercial standpoint, and UA is a commercial entity, they screwed this up. There is no denying that no matter how strongly some minority of people feel UA wasn’t at fault. Most people do, and that’s not good for business. The impact might not be as large as some critics of UA would hope, but it obviously dwarfs just upping the compensation till somebody says ‘yes’.
Also interesting the people with such extreme lack of belief in markets. A group of several dozen people who don’t know one another (or even who do!) would hold out together of $millions for one of them to get off the plane? Ahh, I don’t think so. The other stupid thing here is any limit by DOT in the rule, and/or no inflation adjustment. It’s hard to conceive of a situation where a few $k at the absolute extreme, real money not a ‘voucher’, wouldn’t solve virtually 100% of these problems, and generally less, generally they do get actual volunteers at $100’s. And no sane person can say UA has come out ahead of paying somebody a couple or few $k to avoid this.
I hate to be a skeptical dick here, and I think United did a lot of things wrong, but is there yet any confirmation the man was a doctor, or even what his name was?
ANYONE you’re going to bump is going to come up with a reason why it shouldn’t be them.
I agree with that. It’s going out on a limb to believe what some random person says in such a situation, and I don’t think it’s very relevant anyway. Same btw with him (and much of Chinese social media too I’ve heard) saying it’s because he was Chinese (which apparently he said).
The point IMO is the stupidity of setting up a situation where you, as an entity making money from retail trade with customers, in an age of instant communication, are going to sic the cops on one of your customers for doing nothing other than insisting you serve them after having paid, because you might have to offer (somebody else) more than $800 compensation to avoid that. That’s obviously stupid. The cops also acted stupidly. And I’m not saying this particular passenger didn’t act stupidly or saying he’s a doctor or going on about his needy patients: I’ve no idea if that’s really true. But it’s not a mutually exclusive thing.
A poster on the previous page rightly called me out for an early post I made to this thread. My post said that the police would surely win any lawsuit that the passenger brings for his treatment.
I’m not sure what the heck I was thinking when I typed that, but I meant that United Airlines would surely win any lawsuit brought against them.
I continue to maintain that a passenger has no legal or ethical standing to unilaterally determine that they are too important to abide by the rules of their ticket.
I think this is the kicker - does any know if this is a valid interpretation of the applicable rule? It doesn’t seem like dead-headers would be holding any form of ticket? Are they even considered Passengers - I’d imagine they might actually be some form of crew? In which case United seems to likely be in a world of hurt here.
But as I posted earlier, it may be United Airlines that didn’t follow the rules
If the four deadheads did not check in as a normal passenger would and in time, then under United’s own definition the flight was not “overbooked” and thus Rule 25 does not apply.
Furthermore there is no definition for boarding so the passenger could argue he had already boarded - indeed United’s website would imply this. How can you deny a person from performing an action they’ve already performed with your approval?
Was the passenger not abiding by the rules of their ticket, or was United Airlines? As I understand it, they’re supposed to handle an overbooking situation during boarding, and the UA employees would need tickets at boarding time to be considered passengers. From what I’ve heard, forcing someone off the plane after they’ve boarded to make space for someone who doesn’t have a ticket is not actually abiding by the rules of the ticket.
I’m pretty confident that in something I read this a.m. (most likely in Chicago Trib - paper edition) United denied that this was an overbooking situation, or that this flight had been oversold. But the legal minutiae are unlikely to change how anyone here feels about this incident.
Here’s one aspect I find troubling - the unequal bargaining position of the 2 parties. Sure, the passenger acted poorly. But it strikes me as somehow wrong to hold an individual to the same standard of knowing his rights, the law, and the fine print on the ticket, as the corporation who wrote that language, lobbied Congress/FAA for the laws, and who had access to legal counsel and other resources before choosing to act.
What are the costs to this individual - even if mere inconvenience, compared to the drop in a bucket United would incur from pursuing alternatives?
You own a business and have a customer that refuses to leave after you have asked them. You call the cops. They come and ask him to leave. He says no and the cops shrug their shoulders and say “find another way to remove him”. I’m guessing that’s not going to be an acceptable outcome to you.
All of this is ultimately irrelevant. Even if United is 100% violating their policy, that doesn’t justify someone refusing to follow a lawful order from a cop.
You’re another of those stating some absolute, in your mind, of the airline’s right which isn’t necessarily the case in these specific circumstances.
And while it’s also possible UA might win a lawsuit, I’m not making the same mistake as I believe you are in my own amateur lawyering and saying they absolutely couldn’t, do you really think this guy isn’t going to get a settlement many times the amount it would have take for somebody else to raise their hand and get off actually voluntarily?
That’s pretty clear, he will.
And again in general a system where there’s a limited auction to get volunteers then the police remove people and bat them around if necessary, is a simply a stupid system. Just have an actual auction. Somebody will say yes, and there’s no way the price would be what you end up paying out of court after having people beaten (even if partly their fault).
But as with others on this line of argument, you assume the 100% validity of the commercial case of the business owner. You also, I don’t know deliberately or because you’re not that good at analogies, fuzzy things up comparing somebody who refuses to ‘leave’ my physical premises in general with a business where the service a person has already paid for is itself contingent on the person being in the place you want the cops to remove them from. You’ve also generalized away the issue of simply offering somebody else more money to not be served instead, the very apparent ‘another way’ in this particular case. So all in all you haven’t made much of a point, with due respect.
No, I don’t assume or fuzzy up anything. Everything you bring up is irrelevant to the situation:
Doesn’t matter if you are 100% right or 100% wrong. It’s your business and you have the right to ask anyone you don’t want there to leave. If you are wrong, it is a civil matter, and the recourse to your customer is a law suit.
Doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t make a difference why you want them gone. It’s your business and you have the right to decide who is there.
That United would win a lawsuit is, IMHO, a statement on the merits of the case. Whether United may want to settle a lawsuit is a question of the intent of United, which I cannot judge; to the same extent that I cannot judge the intent of the passenger in his interest in bringing a lawsuit.
The system of thinking that one party to a contract ought to be obligated to pay out uncapped sums to the other parties of the contract to exercise a provision of that contract is also senseless.
There’s probably no perfect analogy here, but I view your proposal in the same vein as a bartender needing to bribe patrons to leave after last call, instead of being allowed the right to compel them to leave after asking nicely several times.
But this is clearly not the case, that generally and absolutely, in real life. That’s the basic and obvious flaw in such a simplistic line of argument. And repeating it many times as in ‘everything else is irrelevant’ isn’t going to make it true.
But it clearly is the case. Generally and absolutely, in real life, every business owner may call the police and they will come and remove forcibly, if necessary, a customer who has been asked to leave.
More information about the gentleman has come out. He is Vietnamese-American and is a doctor of internal medicine.
My WAG, I wonder if his experiences with security forces in Vietnam influenced his actions on the plane? He may have seen first hand how authoritian security forces operate. Damn shame he encountered that same reality in the US.
This heavy handed approach shames us all. Imho
There’s better ways to handle this then beating the crap out of someone.
