You are right. Makes no never mind, actually, except that this ‘doctor’ thing plays so strongly in the outrage and excuses.
The facts still remain that the entire cabin was advised of the airlines rights as published and they would have to ‘choose’ which passengers had to leave and be compensated.
If you think one person’s right to sit in a seat takes precedence over a whole other flight that crew was supposed to serve, then I don’t know what to tell you. Perhaps he could have explained the ‘urgency of is doctoral duties’ and made some progress. My read and viewing of everything says that he was on the phone to his lawyer when he refused police orders to vacate. What happened afterwards will most certainly be litigated to this man’s heart content and he will profit. But my read of his ‘speciality’ in medicine tells me it really had nothing to do with it.
OTOH, UAL may win the battle, but they surely lost the (PR) war.
I would say, once again, that a total and complete lack of planing on the part of the airline did not in any way justify their actions here.
The airlines action, while it may be in the fine print that they can haul you off the plane because they are total imbeciles who can not figure how to get their crews from point a to point b without hauling YOU out of the seat you have paid for and have already sat there two hours while they were playing playing tiddlywinks, was very very wrong.
Nothing else matters. Not who he was, not who he was on the phone with, not that the pilot was a minority female who had AIDS, nothing.
Buy the stewardesses a ticket on Greyhound, and deal with the union later.