United airlines brutally removes passenger after overbooking flight

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
801

Last phrase I generally agree. But again without the long version, the idea that airlines would ever have to offer very high sums, relative the ballpark of the price of tickets and hotel rooms and such, is completely baseless. It’s again like the theoretical possibility all the subatomic particles in the plane’s wings and the air line up so the plane falls out of the sky. It’s just not going to happen in reality.

But back to our agreement, the fact that regulators would write into the rules low absolute $ (and non-inflation adjusted) amounts an airline can limit itself to shows how govt regs, though laws too, can indeed be written by completely economically illiterate people. That’s not just political spin though sometimes politicized, it’s a fact. There is in fact no more reason to think airlines would ever have to pay orders of magnitude more than the $1,350 limit than to think the govt has to put a limit on ticket prices or else they’d rise orders of magnitude. And there’s lots more competition among several dozen passengers for a payout to get off than there is among a handful of airlines.

802

Changing the logistics of transporting air crews surely has to be simpler than going with frequent summary cancellations.

I kind of know the answer to this, but: why is reserving a few seats per flight for possible crew transfer and/or standby flyers so widely considered crazy talk? I know it cuts profits some, but surely doesn’t totally cripple profits. And its not like those profits can’t be made up elsewhere. Are we talking about ticket prices positively doubling under such a scheme, or more like a 5% increase?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I hardly fly at all, so I can throw this idea out and know I won’t have to bear any pain from it. But still … it’s so, so reasonable on the surface. Why is there no reasonable way possible to build a little slack in the reservation/booking/air crew transport system? Why does the operation have to run that lean? Why can’t the operational priorities change a little?

803

And I laugh at them, and their dreams of $11,000, as I walk off the plane with my actual $2000.

804

Thank you. I was wondering what I was missing in Dewey’s comments.

805

Bumping passengers due to overbooking is rare. Bumping passengers due to a need to transport flight crew is really rare. Presumably a law preventing them from denying boarding to passengers would apply in both cases.

806

Might be worth noting that chartering a private jet to fly those crew members down would likely be less than $10k, so no way are they going to pay a passenger $1 million to get out of a seat.

More likely, they’d book those crew on another airline’s flight. Even less cost for that. And already something the industry does.

807

Again, the idea there would be summary cancellation is based on the notion that compensation for being voluntarily bumped would ever rise to some very high level. But it simply would not. That’s a clearly wrong idea even at a level like $11k, and again totally bizarre at a level like $1mil. The median person overall makes not much more than 100 a day. Factor in all the adjustments for slightly higher income demographic on planes, multiple people having to leave together if one does, the premium needed over the raw opportunity cost of a day…it’s just not ever going to reach even multiple $k’s to get the few % of people on the plane with the lowest opportunity costs to take the money and run. Again even if some people are so naive as to think ‘no limit’ presages a windfall, enough people have the native sense or experience to know that won’t happen, and as k9 says will walk off smiling with a nice little win while others dream of big windfalls that will never happen.

Some things are complicated, this problem isn’t. If airlines simply commit themselves to auction until the price rises enough for people to volunteer, this kind of incident will never happen, and the effect on overall airline economics will be negligible. The only reason they don’t all do this is figuring they can do it for $800 or whatever, by enlisting govt force under a smokescreen of ‘lives at stake’ (what a crock). $800 is better than $2k or whatever the 99%-tile max would be. Unless it blows up into a PR debacle. That’s where stupidity comes in, which explains lots of things.

808

Google Maps tells me that you can drive from O’Hare to the airport in Louisville in about five hours, so United could also have just put them in the back of a cab and sent them down. In short, the way they handled this was astonishingly inept and damaging to their company. It will probably be a case study in management classes.

809

How rare, and how has this situation been handled before?

810

Wow.

I think I’ll tell my Congresscritters to write into the law that when the airlines ask for volunteers to take a later flight, that if they’re offering vouchers, they have to read all the conditions applying to the vouchers over the plane’s PA system, and before a passenger’s agreement to be bumped is final, they must sign a list of those conditions, acknowledging that they’ve read it.

Because I can see how people would jump at a $500 voucher, and then find out that its real value to them was $0.

811

I doubt their collective agreement allows for five hours of cab transportation.

This incident will be forgotten in a few short weeks. United did absolutely nothing wrong. The security officer could have handled it a bit better MAYBE.

812

Interesting back-up info from flyertalk.com’s forum (in spoiler box due to length). Explains a lot about how the airline got their backs so hard into the corner with the air crew transport:

[spoiler]Even if we don’t get to know from the airline or unofficial info from those involved what happened exactly, we can make inferences from public info. Not sure if somebody else has posted this yet but this is what I found.

• This happened on Sunday 4/9.

• On 4/9, Flight UA4600 from DEN to Louisville was delayed 130 minutes, arriving at 12:31 AM Monday instead of 10:21 PM Sunday, having left at 8:04 PM instead of 5:40 PM. This was on an Embraer 145 aircraft with registration N14153 and operated by Trans States Airlines.

• That would mean that the UA4600 crew would not be allowed to show up for their next flight before 10:31 AM Monday, so probably not allowed to fly before 11:30 AM or so considering the mandatory rest time as well as the flight planning and preparation time in advance of departure.

• On Monday 4/10 there were UA flights scheduled out of Louisville on Embraer 145 aircraft at 6:05 AM, 7:30 AM, 9:20 AM, 2:45 PM and 3:45 PM Eastern. All operated by Trans States Airlines.

• Most likely the crew of UA4600 on Sunday was scheduled to operate the 9:20 AM flight on Monday, because even with their delay they would have been allowed to operate the later ones, and if they had been on schedule they would not have been allowed to operate the earlier ones.

• For a crew to operate the 9:20 AM flight on Monday they would have had to be in Louisville at 10:20 PM or so.

• The flight of the incident in the news, UA3411, was scheduled to leave ORD at 5:40 PM Central and arrive at 8:02 PM Eastern, though it actually arrived at 10:01 PM.

• The incoming delayed flight, UA4600, was not coming from cascaded delays from earlier flights, because the aircraft N14153 got to Denver on time as UA4680 having arrived from Grand Junction at 4:53 PM Mountain, and all earlier flights for this aircraft were on time as well. So no way for the airline to predict early enough that UA4600 would get delayed so much.

• UA3411 was scheduled to depart at 5:40 Central, 4:40 Eastern: 9 minutes after UA4680 landed at Denver (4:49 Mountain so 5:49 Central).

• However, UA3411 estimated departure was changed at 5:32 Central (4:32 Mountain, so 17 minutes before UA4680 landing). It was changed to 6:00 PM instead of 5:40. Afterwards the estimated departure time was pushed more and more many times.

• There was another Chicago-Louisville flight on AA a bit later than UA3411 (6:40-8:54 PM).

• Though there were delays at DEN around the scheduled time for the departure of UA4600, there were also many flights on time and the majority of delays were short, so unlikely that there was bad enough weather to massively delay all flights.
So if I’d had to bet on the sequence of events on the operations side I’d bet on this:

• UA4680 crew from Grand Junction to Denver found something wrong with the aircraft while en route

• They notified the airline en route so aircraft checks could be done before the next flight for this aircraft, UA4600 Denver-Louisville, and perhaps let the mechanics begin preparing for these checks before landing

• UA4600 was consequently delayed

• It became evident that the UA4600 crew would not be able to operate the Louisville-Denver 9:20 flight the next day

• An ERJ145 crew from Trans States Airlines that could operate that 9:20 flight from Louisville (UA4766 to DEN) was found to be available in Chicago

• With so little time to spare UA considered that sending this crew to Louisville on AA was more risky schedulewise than sending them on their own flight, or they might have considered it but the AA flight was full

• UA found that UA3411 was the only acceptable way to get an ERJ145 crew from Trans States Airlines to Louisville on time

• UA decided that inconveniencing 4 passengers from UA3411, who in case they had an urgent necessity to get to Louisville that same night could get there by road in 5 hours, would be less worse than inconveniencing up to 70 passengers or so from the 9:20 flight to Denver, making most of them lose their connections and having to rebook them on other flights, compensate, refund, etc. as well as cascading the delay to the rest of the flights this aircraft had to do on the day, with the same consequences for every flight

• UA3411 was already boarding or boarded when the UA4600 delay was known and a decision was made, and the aircraft was held so the crew they found for the 9:20 flight could get to it

• Then happened what we all know from the news

• UA3411 departed with a delay caused both by waiting for the UA4766 replacement crew and the incident, but arrived on time for them to get the mandated rest

• On Monday, UA4766 left for Denver on time at 9:20 with the crew that came in on UA3411
Apologies if this seems confusing but the story involves different crews, flights and aircraft with simultaneous events in different time zones. Hope it makes sense from an operations point of view that if events went this way the operational decision to take 4 passengers out and put 4 crew in instead was reasonable and correct not only in economic terms of the costs involved in the alternatives but in order to minimize impact on passengers as well; and also that the airline could not have known, in advance of the UA3411 boarding, that they would need to reposition crew there last minute.

Sources - Flightradar24, FlightStats, ExpertFlyer, FlightAware [/spoiler]

813

The lines are long and timing is a factor-At what point do you hold this auction, what is the maximum amount of time that should be allowed, and what do you do after that period has ended?

814

I don’t think you know how time works.

815

Too late – United has already publicly stated otherwise. IMHO, this gets into the whole “You can do it, you have the right to do it, but should you do it?” concept. When two ethical systems conflict, you do “nothing wrong” and still do something incredibly wrong.

816

Well, thank you for demonstrating my point. I appreciate. :slight_smile:

817

How’s this for a reasonable law tweaking the process:

The airlines can no longer offer vouchers, but would be legally obligated to offer cash (or functional equivalent, e.g. debit card) in exchange for leaving a flight? Frequent flyers know highly-restricted vouchers are kind of a bad deal. Cash would be a much greater incentive.

818

That all seems like a fairly reasonable/plausible explanation for how this situation could have developed, and why UA chose the course of action it did.

I have to wonder how awkward the flight was when the four dead-heading crewmembers boarded and sat in the vacated seats. Five hours of dirty looks from everyone else in the cabin…

819

The flight is 1h 15m (well, 50m really but with taxiing etc…)

820

Filter it any way you want, if it makes you feel better.