In case I wasn’t being clear, airlines do not have “the ability to call in cops to settle a civil dispute without adjudication”. I don’t think the police (and even the cabin crew) realized that it was a civil dispute.
“Let’s call the airport!”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?”
Everyone: “Let’s call the airport police!”
In fact, we’re so clear on that that the CEO of United Airlines has accepted full responsibility for what occurred.
i dont have a problem with not blindly complying with the air crews “orders”, if you want to question their “orders” do so: authority schmauthority.
my problem with giving Dao a complete pass by saying that he didnt do anything wrong by standing up for his rights is that i dont see that that was what he did.
he didnt have a problem with the three others who left before him - he didnt say that they had a right to stay.
he didnt say that he had a right to stay
he said that his priority to stay was higher than others because he was a doctor. that he “needed” to get where he was going more than others.
he said they should take someone else off the plane, not him.
he has since claimed that he felt he was singled out because he’s chinese and because of the whole travel ban and all. and while i dont know what was going through his mind at the time. it seems to me to be an afterthought.
so to those of you who are holding Dao up as a hero, that he stood up for his rights and all of our rights. . .that may be where he ended up, but thats not where he wanted to go. the police dragged him to his martyrdom.
mc
Perhaps the crew members that were trying to hitch a ride at the last minute should have stayed behind.
thats a good point, but what the hell does it have to do with what i said?
mc
I have no idea what you’re saying; who is holding him up as a hero? We just think he was mistreated.
History is full of accidental civil rights leaders who were not trying to be heros, but instead, were just trying to get home.
The fact that the airline somehow thought this was acceptable is flabbergasting from a business standpoint, let alone a public-relations standpoint.
United lost a billion dollars in stock value alone – not counting potential lost business.
It bears repeating that the crew members could have Ubered to their destination for a few hundred dollars, as someone on another site worked out in a few minutes. Or gotten there another way. Any mid-level manager worth a damn could have solved this problem without the need to deplane ANY paying passenger, and damned well should have. But that would have placed the onus of changing arrangements onto United instead of the paying public, and United could invoke force to save itself some nominal labor.
Or, y’know, just turned up to at the gate before the plane had been fully boarded? How seriously entitled, do you have to feel, to do otherwise?
It’s hard to get away from the fact that every employee involved here thought it perfectly reasonable to jerk a paying customer out of a seat, for staff that need accommodating, but couldn’t be arsed to turn up before the plane was already filled! What does that say about your corporate culture?
If the airlines are permitted to do this they should have to pull seat numbers randomly from a hat that includes every seat on the plane, including first class! I don’t think they should be allowed to only jerk around the people in the cheap seats! And if it can’t be done randomly, to any passenger, then it shouldn’t be permitted at all! Pay someone to get off the plane regardless of cost instead!
Do you have a cite for this or are you just reading his mind? I don’t recall him standing up for other passengers (including his wife, I think), but I also don’t remember him throwing the other passengers under the bus.
I think this happened during the event not afterwards. Passengers recall him playing the race card.
Once again, I don’t think anyone thinks he is Rosa parks but he stood up when no one else did. Whether out of desperation or sheer orneriness, it doesn’t matter, he won something for all of us.
My understanding is that they only turned up at the last minute because of the sudden need for a flight crew to be in Louisville to cover another crew, one that had reached the end of the period in which they could work.
I’m picturing people with those silly round-the-neck pillows, swaying back and forth with their carry-ons and laptops, singing We Shall Overcome.
A sudden need? They couldn’t tell or didn’t know that the clock was running out on that crew in St. Louis and so couldn’t have given the replacement crew another half-hour of notice?
Since there’s so much speculation going on, my speculation is that the flight crew couldn’t be bothered to drag their asses out of the lounge 30 minutes earlier
BINGO!
Because they didn’t have to!
It would be interesting to know what the timeline was like for the deadheading crew. Especially about 2 hours before the flight boarded.
Did anyone think to contact UAL? Certainly they have some corporate/direct numbers they could call to warn the gate agent. Was that ever done? Was the ball just dropped?
What would that be? I’m quite skeptical anything of substance will change.
For one thing, United will no longer remove a passenger once they’ve boarded and seated.
If I may put in my two cents…
Hopefully we got more out of this than a hefty does of RO.
Delta has raised what it is willing to pay to bump a passenger. Hopefully others will follow suit.
Hopefully you will not be able to be kicked off after you are boarded and seated.
I suspect bouncing by deadheaders will still happen. It should just be ‘Must Fly’ deadheaders though. I think that’s what the CoC currently states, but who knows what ‘must fly’ really means.
Things of substance have already changed, though I guess we can quibble on “of substance”. Three airlines have already publicly changed either deboarding policies, deadheading policies, or both (United, American Airlines, and Delta).
And you can bet that airlines that have stayed mum so far won’t be recreating the David Dao snafu anytime soon. That particular series of actions is, de facto, totally off the table for deplaning a non-safety-concern passenger.