A) The “plan” for how to remove a passenger did not include armed thugs and youtube. Yes that happened, but it wasn’t an inevitable step 6 on the passenger removal checklist.
B) The occurrence of the police getting violent with a passenger and it getting on youtube hadn’t happened before in industry history and was not something the policy writers, or the line workers trying to implement the policy, might reasonably have foreseen that day.
C) Even if the plan for angry passenger disagreement resolution includes a step “call cops if necessary”, at that point the “plan” loses all control and the cops do whatever the heck their policies, procedures, and whims dictate. The airline can’t control, and hence can’t be strictly liable for, the specifics of what happens next. (Aside: The police department certainly is responsible for what happens next based on whatever it’s employees did vs. should have done.)
As such, your proposed choice of “What would be he down side of this option, compared to the downside of having armed thugs haul screaming bleeding passengers off flights in front of YouTube cameras?” didn’t exist in the prospective.
Which it seemed to me was what you were saying; that United and everybody else should have known this would lead directly and inevitably to a police beating so they shouldn’t have even started down that road to ask anyone off the plane for any reason.
Upon reading your next post above I think perhaps I misread you. You really meant: “going forward why not plan to send crew some other way? It’s about the same cost as paying bumping compensation and a lot better PR.” If that’s what you meant, I apologize for misunderstanding you. And you raise a good point.
Good question. Speaking just to pilots, not flight attendants. …
The Federal regs are arcane in the extreme, but the extremely 1040EZ short version is that if you’re someplace doing something for the employer, that’s “duty”. If you’re at home, a hotel, or traveling between those places and the workplace, that’s not duty.
Duty is duty is duty. Whether flying, riding as a passenger (deadheading in the argot) or sitting around an airport killing time. That’s all equally duty. The standard maximum workday (on-duty) is 14 hours, followed by 10 hours minimum off-duty. Which adds to 24 so the cycle can be repeated day in and day out.
The basis for this is physiological research that shows that after 16 hours awake, the standard human is as functionally impaired as somebody awake for a just couple hours but with a blood alcohol level (BAC) of 0.05.
You’re right that flying the jet is harder work than passengering on the same jet. One might even get a nap while riding.
That’s why there are separate smaller limits for hours spent actually driving the jet. Typically 9 hours per duty shift for work done in the normal times of day and reducing to 8 hours for work performed wholly or partly on late night or graveyard shift.
The big scheduling challenge when things go wrong is that we’re already planning ordinary workdays of 12 and 13 hours. That’s bog standard normal. So there’s not much slack left in the rules to accommodate major delays. Or, ref some suggestions upthread, to try to charter a bus or a light airplane or bizjet to move the crew other than on the airlines’ own high-speed high-volume transportation network.
It must be a nightmare of logistics for an airline when things don’t go according to schedule. You may have crew or aircraft out of position at any time, which can end-up like dominoes. I can understand why they would try very hard to get someone to give up their seat to accommodate a crew that needs to be somewhere at at specific time, with limited other easy options.
As has already been speculated - they just need to reflect the value of that situation to them by providing stronger incentives for people already booked on the flight to give up their seat. There are limits, but I am sure if they kept upping the $$ and offered other incentives they would have managed to find 4 willing participants. And as has been pointed out, that would have been much cheaper than the situation they have now.
I’ve experienced the sort of thing that can happen when you have staffing over a large area. I can’t imagine having to staff over the whole country. I’ve had things like a person supposed to work 8am-6pm with client A call the emergency pager at 5am to say she has been throwing up and can’t work. So I wait until 6am to start calling for subs, because someone who gets called at five will not agree due to being pissed. At 6:45, I get a call back from staff person X, who is trained to work with client A, but can’t get there until 9am. I find another person Y who is trained and doesn’t really want to do it, but will go in for one hour. I then have to get ahold of the payroll person to get authorized to pay her for two hours because it’s not worth her drive time and gas money if she can’t get paid for two hours. In an emergency, it gets approved. The alternative would be for me to do it, but aside from the fact that I need to be available for real emergencies (like if a client has to go to the ER, or needs a medication refill), I live too far away to get there on the dot of 8am, and staff person Y is closer.
I’m sure airlines have situations where flight attendant A is supposed to cover flight 1, and is already in city of flight 1, but wakes uppuking in the middle of the night. Flight attendant B is cleared to cover it, but is in another city. No problem; there’s a flight she can take that will get her there in plenty of time. Flight is overbooked, but so what? Well, then that flight becomes the rare flight where every single passenger shows up. That’s what.
That’s how you end up with a flight attendant showing up at the last minute and expecting a seat.
I’m sure flight attendants have an important job, but I’d be perfectly understanding if I had to miss drink service due to my flight being an attendant short.
Yeah, and the real Miracle on the Hudson was that Sully not only successfully ditched the plane, but personally escorted each and every passenger off.:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Now, I am not a lawyer but if I was a lawyer for United I might argue that if the airline needs a seat for a purpose other than passenger transport then the number of available seats on the plane is reduced and the flight then meets the contract definition of overbooked - they have sold more tickets than available seats. I’ve seen the same thing happen when they have to switch planes and the only available plane has fewer seats.
I’ve also seen passengers bumped because a flight was overweight, not oversold. I’ve seen this happen a lot, usually on flights to a major skiing or golfing destination. They actually bump people because of the weight of all the golf clubs. And I’ve seen it happen after boarding, now that I think about it.
Now I’m not going to defend the people that beat up that guy, but I don’t get the outrage over the actual bumping. I don’t consider myself any sort of a frequent traveler but stuff happens when you travel by air. When I really really HAD have to be somewhere I give myself an extra day.
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I’ve also noticed, in the last couple of years, a huge increase in delays due to crew delays. Now this might be coincidence since I usually only fly 2-3 times a year (but I’m old so that adds up to lots of flight experience in a lifetime.)
But I wonder if there’s another reason, like maybe changes in crew regulations. I know there was a lot of attention to crew hours after pilot fatigue was blamed for a regional jet crash.
