This is more then 50% of the flights in the industry. These carriers existence is primarily to allow the majors to outsource flying on the cheap and to avoid paying mainline union rates.
UA has a scope clause that limits these outsourced flights to less hours than the mainline for jets with less than 70 seats.
The smallest plane in the mainline is Boeing 737-700 with 126 seats.
So this isn’t any revelation as the original story called it out as “United express flight 3411”
It is still the regional branch of United Continental Holdings just as the guy who connects your cable is still “Comcast” etc…
For some people, yes. Religious reasoning, desperation, on a whim, for the lulz - people are inherently self-interested and complex creatures.
Let’s say there’s an overbooked plane and they need to bump four passengers; if they don’t get enough volunteers they’re going to kick people off. They employ a variant of the “by an inch of candle” auction - basically “If we don’'t have enough volunteers in 1d10 minutes time, we boot people off and they get the absolute minimum compensation.”
They start at $500 and there’s no takers because it’s not enough. They go to $1000 and someone who’s travelling on a flexible schedule figures $1000 is what they’d make in a month from their arts & craft business so they take it. There’s now three people who need to get off the plane and the next one takes a $1250 offer because they’re at uni flying home to see their parents and $1250 will be very helpful for their studies. Two people left and bidding it ast $1500 but there’s an unknown amount of time left before the airline kicks two randoms off the plane and they get less than that $1500. Someone takes a $1750 offer because although it’s not ideal, if there’s a chance they’re going to get booted off the plane they want it to happen with money in their pocket, and someone else agrees to a $2000 offer for pretty much the same reason.
So yeah, theoretically they could get $1m - but they won’t.
What you are talking about is an efficient breach. Well the thing about efficient breach is that they don’t really work well with liquidated damages in a contract of adhesion. When reading these contracts, you read them in the manner least favorable to the drafting party and the contracts talk about the airline’s right to involuntarily bump a passenger before they have boarded (the right to deny boarding).
After they have boarded they are no longer within the 4 corners of the contract or the regulations that give the airline discretion to arbitrarily deny passage to a paid passenger. Ejecting passengers that are already seated on a plane cannot be done at the caprice of the flight crew.
author of these articles is a law professor at Georgetown
And while there is some question whether denial of boarding can happen after boarding and seating of passengers, it is clear that this ought to have been taken care of before boarding.
Efficient breach depends on the value being placed on the breach by the non-breaching party. If getting bumped from the plane is worth more than $800 to every single passenger on the plane and that is pretty much the statutory payout for bumping a paying passenger from that flight then we do not have an efficient breach, we just have a breach.
To make Smapti happy since he is never going to acknowledge the severe flaws in the logic of his theory just say the airline caps the offers at $5,000. That would be enough to ensure someone will always accept. Period.
But the problem really isn’t that they don’t offer enough as it is now. Once they already boarded everyone, removing passengers was simply not an option. Whether it meant these employees missed their flight and an entire flight would be cancelled in another city because of it, or buying them seats on another airline at full price, or chartering them a private plane or helicopter, or whatever - deboarding already seated passengers was simply not an option they should have even considered in a million years.
That poor decision is going to cost them dearly. While people here are still arguing on their behalf they have moved into full damage control mode having realized they made a grave error.
After reading United’s contract for tickets, I think I may be changing my mind.
The contract, as another poster noted, refers to United’s ability to deny boarding to a person for various reasons. Among them is overbooking, which is defined in a particular way in the contract, but suffice it to say that it is plausible that the deadheading crew could have been counted as overbookers, depending on the precise facts of the case which we clearly don’t have on this particular detail.
But there is no definition in the contract for the term “boarding,” curiously. It is left ambiguous as to whether boarding consists of simply being allowed to set foot on the plane, taking one’s seat, or being in one’s seat when the door to the aircraft is closed in preparation for pushing off from the gate.
Since there’s no technical definition for the purposes of the contract, I think it’s reasonably clear that crazy Dr. Dao boarded the aircraft, and the deadheading flight had not. Having exhausted the available seating, the crew was SOL unless people volunteered to deboard the plane.
So what’s the lesson in this for me? That reading the contract is far more informative and convincing than reading people’s outrage about things.
The authority of a flight crew is pretty broad but they are not unlimited. And the regs say they have to be able to justify their actions or be subject to penalty.
So, for example, the crew can’t order you to murder the person sitting next to you in cold blood. You’d be justified in refusing to follow such an order.
However, this situation was nowhere near that level. I fail to see how Dr. Dao saying “no, I won’t get off the airplane” was a “severe” threat to “the lives of his fellow passengers and crew”. I have trouble seeing it as even a mild threat. And being a pilot myself I’m inclined to lean towards favoring the flight crew. In this case, thought, I think the airline/employees/police were way out of line. The response was way out of proportion to the “threat” presented.
Even if what you say here is correct, and I doubt it is (seriously, “hundred of thousands of times a year”? :dubious:) there will always be someone with enough sense to realize the only way to make this situation work to their advantage is to take the deal long before it gets to a million $$$. Greed is funny that way.
You have made it abundantly clear you are not that person. Too bad for you. And your imaginary planeload of sufficiently stubborn people.
The proposal that was put forward is that, instead of being able to involuntarily bump passengers, airlines should be forced to just offer more and more money with no theoretical upper limit until “the market” decides what being bumped is worth.
According to the Economist, over half a million flyers were bumped in 2016.
Thus, hundreds of thousands.
Greed entices people to not hold out for more money?
Exactly. There’s enough “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” people out there. Unless there is active collusion, it’s never gonna get to this point. Even if I know that United, say, gave passengers $10K last week to give up their seat, if the bidding gets to a level where it’s worth my while, say $2K, I’d rather take the sure $2K than hope that all the other passengers are going to refrain from accepting a bid at a lower level, AND that I’m going to beat all the other passengers and getting in a bid JUST below their lower threshold. I’d rather take the $2K, hang out at the bar, and go home a couple hours or a day later than be pissed that I blew my shot at an extra couple grand to do nothing but sit on my ass for a few hours/sleep at a hotel.
I agree that the actions of United were piss poor business practices, but I would believe that it had the right to use reasonable force to eject a passenger it wished to remove from its property, contract or not.
Let’s pretend that there was no written contracts involved, but you were travelling across country and we came to an agreement that you could stay in a room in my house for $50. You pay in advance. You show up, get all of your stuff unpacked, and are lying on the bed watching Amazon Prime TV.
I knock on the door and tell you that you will have to leave. For the purpose of this hypo, I tell you anything from a plausibly good reason (My mother is coming to town and needs a place to stay) to a horrible reason (good god you are ugly and I’ve decided I don’t want you uglying up my house. Ugly!)
Any or all of these reasons for asking you to leave my house may make me an asshole. Any or all of them will get you breach of contract damages in court for at least $50 and almost certainly more.
But at the end of the day, you must leave my house and pursue your remedies in court. If you sit/stand/lie there stubbornly refusing to leave, then I or my agent can use reasonable force necessary to remove you.
Does anyone disagree with that assessment of the law?
Actually that isn’t entirely correct. Analogies are always dangerous that way. In some states landlord/innkeeper laws might prevent you from being able to legally evict the person in that hypothetical situation.
But that technicality aside, there is nothing wrong with your point because you used the term “reasonable force.” Dragging a man bloodied and battered through the aisle of an airliner because some employees needed the seats or the airline would lose money wasn’t reasonable under the circumstances. Thus the public outrage, the airline’s apology, and the suspension of the police officer involved.
Hundreds of thousands are undoubtedly bumped annually. At the gate. Before boarding.
Thus no “auction” required. Simply, “Sorry Mr/Ms Smapti, this flight is overbooked. Here’s a voucher for $300 and a coupon for a free coffee at Starbucks. We will need to put you on a later flight.” Something like this is what happens hundreds of thousands of times a year.
The ugly scene that took place AFTER people boarded the plane? In my experience, bumping people at that point is rare.
There have been various comments here and elsewhere stating that this ultimately won’t affect United’s bottom line because people will just choose the cheapest fare and most convenient flight times regardless. Not true. People vote with their dollars all the time, and given airlines’ tight margins, even a relatively small and/or partial boycott could do serious damage.
I flat-out refused to consider any of the cheap and convenient United flights when my mom and I booked tickets to Europe a few months ago. Why? Because United just sucks in so many ways And now here is another way that they suck.
Our 2 tickets are small change…but small change can really add up.
You’re right if the person is renting space in your home. However, a commercial aircraft is not a private home.
If you rent me an apartment, then want to evict me before the contract has finished, and without me breaking the terms of the contract, good luck with that.
If I get into taxi, and ask the driver to take me somewhere, and the driver says, “Get out now, because I can see another passenger, and he always tips generously” – I suspect that local taxi regulations prevent that sort of nonsense. (An taxis and commercial aircraft are both controlled by government regulation, even if they aren’t the same regulation.)
From a legal point of view, United made two serious errors. The “contract of adhesion”, which you have to agree to without any chance of negotiating the terms, is going to be strictly interpreted in favour of the passenger, which means that these errors are likely to affect the outcome.
First, the plane was not “overbooked”. It was only after the passengers had been accepted by United onto the flight that they found they needed 4 seats for extra passengers. (And it doesn’t really matter whether those extra passengers were United employees.)
Secondly, they were not “denying boarding” to Dr Dao. They had allowed him to board, so it was too late to “deny boarding”. If they wanted those 4 seats they had to offer sufficient inducement to 4 passengers who had already boarded.
The brutal way Dr Dao was treated was just the icing on the cake. Just ordering him to leave put United in breach of contract and liable for considerable damages.
And over 90 percent of these people were VOLUNTARILY bumped after choosing to accept the airlines’ offer of flight coupons or other incentives. They didn’t even wait until the offer got up to the legally-mandated maximum.
Sort of puts a crimp in your theory that people will continue to hold out indefinitely, doesn’t it?
I wonder how many people will boycott United…and then end up buying a ticket on “Delta” or “American” that ends up on the same regional airline, which as far as I can tell shares at least as big a portion of the blame as United does. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with United getting more heat, since that’s one of the risks when you let someone else use your brand. But it’s weird that I haven’t heard a peep about boycotting the actual company that was involved in so much of this.
