If we concede the necessity to invest an airline captain with certain powers analogous to those of a ship's captain because of the overriding necessity to maintain order at sea or in the air, to have one person only in control of the ship, and because of the impossibility of summoning the police or other representatives of administrators of justice, we must also consider that there must be some limits on the arbitrary application of that authority.
I for one am disinclined to invest in people trained to manipulate the controls of an airplane with authority to maintain political correctness. That is quite a different matter from authority to maintain physical order and public safety. I see the episode, as described, to be a regrettable example of the modern tendency to enshrine subjective reactions to imagined or real boorish behavior as somehow triggering the right to invoke the criminal law. In this case, the article asserts the man was ejected because "he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman." There is no assertion that his behavior was disruptive to the other passengers and certainly no assertion that it posed a danger to the flight.
I would be very uncomfortable knowing that flight captains in America, as opposed to Brazil, are possessed of unappealable legal authority to behave arbitrarily. Airlines are common carriers who are licensed by the federal government to operate in public airways and as such they are not entirely private enterprises but at least quasi public enterprises engaged in interstate commerce. They are therefore constitutionally liable to be licensed and regulated by the federal government. We would not tolerate an airline captain who evicted a passenger because he was African-American. The law would promptly impose sanctions on airline pilot and the carrier. In other words, we impose limits on the authority of airline captains in these situations.
Based on the limited facts adduced in this article, I think the airline captain exceeded her reasonable powers.
