Posted on 04/13/2017 11:44:28 PM PDT by SteveH
Like all airlines, United has a very specific (and lengthy!) contract for carriage outlining the contractual relationship between the airline and the passenger. It includes a familiar set of provisions for when a passenger may be denied boarding (Rule 25: “Denied Boarding Compensation”).
When a flight is oversold, UA can deny boarding to some passengers, who then receive compensation under specific guidelines. However, Dao was not denied boarding. He was granted boarding and then involuntarily removed from the airplane. What does the contract say about that?
It turns out that the contract has a specific rule regarding “Refusal of Transport” (Rule 21), which lays out the conditions under which a passenger can be removed and refused transport on the aircraft. This includes situations where passengers act in a “disorderly, offensive, abusive, or violent” manner, refuse to comply with the smoking policy, are barefoot or “not properly clothed,” as well as many other situations.
There is absolutely no provision for deplaning a seated passenger because the flight is oversold.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
They offered as much as $800 to deplane with two takers. No other takers. The third person left when demanded to leave.
On another site, Reddit I think, a witness on the plane said another couple offered to leave for $1600 each and the stewardess laughed at them.
Bet United wished this only cost them an extra $3200 now....
placemarker
This Dr. Dao guy is not necessarily on solid legal ground on the second point even if he was absolutely right on the first one. If you get arrested for drunk driving and you know you haven't had an alcoholic beverage in months, you may be ultimately vindicated but it doesn't mean it's a good idea -- or even legal -- to resist arrest on the side of the road.
UAL was probably precluded from doing that by sleep rules.
IMHO it seems likely that this whole thing was caused by some overenthusiastic upper management zeal to chisel a few extra nickels off of each passenger mile by making successively more draconian and successively more impractical changes in the UAL operating procedures— in this case, to how crew gets shuttled from one location to another in advance of when and where they are needed on a flight. If the crew flight preparatory transfer is not accomplished on time, UAL is out a big chunk of money for delaying all the passengers on the commercial flight that gets delayed by not having a crew ready. (This perhaps happens often but passengers don’t get told— instead, it is blamed on equipment failure.) Someone is trying to fix a screwup. If they get the crew to the gate on time, they can bump people by offering vouchers. The crew arrived late so they were not able to bump people until after boarding (common definition). The ground crew starts to go off the rails by interpreting boarding differently than the ticket. Instead of offering more money (against another cost-saving procedure, perhaps), they arrogantly re-interpret the ticket contract term in a manner more favorable to UAL, and proceed to ask the airport authority to kick the passengers off. That is also an alleged violation of their policy (since they allegedly should have waited for police), so one can begin to get an idea of the anti-passenger mindset that the ground crew seems to have been in. ultimately it seems to have been a legal failure and training failure as well as a management failure. It seems to have been a ticking legal timebomb and Dr Dao has the misfortune to set it off.
Then United should have left seats open, or gotten them there earlier.
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That’s one of the unanswered questions at this time as far as I know.
When did United know the Republic Express Crew was coming? Was it after
they had fininshed normal boarding or did they know sometime earlier?
Dao was non-violent so in theory there was no need for him to be harmed. Who did Dao harm? If he harmed no one, then the airport security escalated force.
I’d be inclined to give United some leeway in the way they prioritize crew members over passengers. There is absolutely no financial or customer service advantage for United to bump paying customers in favor of non-paying crew members, so I would have to assume that their method of transporting crew members is written into some kind of labor agreement.
Let’s see how that works if you come home and find a stranger in your living room who promptly sits down in the middle of the floor and refuses to cooperate when the police arrive.
The electric company where I live put my house on a single line, coming from the street.
Anytime there's a thunderstorm, the neighborhood gets knocked out.
I see all of my neighbor's lights go on, but for my lights to go on the electric company has to come out and send a man up a pole to replace a fuse.
So I call the electric company, ask for their legal department, and I say, "We all pay the same bill, but they get better treatment because you have designed a system that discriminates against me."
The lawyer thinks about it for a minute, then says, "Let me call you back."
Guess what? My power now goes on with everyone else's.
Dr. Dao got beaten up because United has sh!tty logistics which until now were protected by government thugs. Guarantee this: United's going to take a hard look at their logistics design.
Speculation: some UAL management policy might be pressuring ground crew to make economically short term beneficial but ultimately unsound decisions. It could take the form of an incentive or a penalty affecting the ground crew pay. If it is in writing then it would be more bad news for UAL upper management and the UAL CEO.
When the plane is next to the runway and the doors are open the ground crew is in and out. Have they boarded?
If someone stole your ticket and were seated in your seat and you came along and proved it was your ticket, have you or the person in your seat boarded?
I always assumed boarding was a process, not an event. On every flight I took there is a time when the doors are closed and one cannot access or deboard the plane. It is then that I understand the process has ended.
“If you get arrested for drunk driving and you know you haven’t had an alcoholic beverage in months, you may be ultimately vindicated but it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea — or even legal — to resist arrest on the side of the road.”
and how does your analogy fit the united passenger?
The uncomfortable part about freedom and rights is they also apply to people whom you dislike.
United is supposed to be in the business of flying paying passengers, not their own crew. Transporting their own crew without disrupting schedules of any paying passenger is or should be a part of the cost of doing business, not a priority over the needs of and contractual obligations to paying passengers.
If, at the instant that they KNEW they needed to get the four crew on board, they had notified the boarding agent to reserve room for them before passengers had boarded, then the issue would not have happened.
http://psychologydictionary.org/authority-complex/
What is AUTHORITY COMPLEX?
Written by Pam MS, NCSP | Fact checked by Psychology Dictionary staff
a pattern of emotionally charged concepts of authority in an individual that are partially or completely repressed. To satisfy an unconscious need for authority, a person projects power onto certain other people (see also projection) and experiences feelings of inferiority in the presence of these others. Therefore, reactions to authority often take the form of oversubmission, but may at times, take the form of dominance and hostility.
AUTHORITY COMPLEX: “A person with an authority complex represses his or her own needs for authority and projects them onto others.”
Apparently that does not apply to persons traveling in first class. A couple of reports on here tell of first class passengers, including those who have many frequent flyer miles, getting bumped for those "more worthy" of the seat, likely some Hollywood celebrity or politician.
Ashley Webster of Fox Business tells how he and his wife were pulled off a flight on Christmas Eve. The plane had already left the gate and came back to board a family of three. His luggage went to the destination and they woke up in a hotel room on Christmas morning with just the clothes on their back.
Yes, they'll probably change their contract of carriage to "We can throw you off anytime we want, for whatever reason we want, even if the plane is already in the air."
United Airlines is screwed because they flagrantly broke their own law and nearly beat one of their passengers to death after violently removing him from his seat and the plane AFTER had already boarded and was ALREADY SEATED, BEHAVING APPROPRIATELY AND QUIETLY MINDING HIS OWN BUSINESS.
They sicked the neanderthal cops on him, knocked him unconscious, broke his nose, knocked out two of his teath and humiliated him by dragging his unconscious body along the floor of the plane in full view of the remaining passengers! All because UAL overbooked the flight and had four non-paying UAL crew members "dead heading" so that they could serve as crew on flights leaving from the plane's next destination.
Simply put United Airlines royally "screwed the pooch" and are going to be rightfully sued to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and they are going to lose because UAL didn't abide by their own contractual laws.
As for the doctor's criminal past: it has no bearing whatsoever on the matter and is just UAL and its surrogates playing the usual "blame the victim" card.
In actuality what UAL criminally did to him, they could have done to ANYONE OF US. He was just the unlucky recipient because UAL chose his name instead of yours or mine had we been on that flight. That is why this crime is so egregious.
That is the issue for the jury to decide if the airline doesn't settle.
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