Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire United Airlines in heap of trouble

A dear friend is currently on her way with her new husband to Australia. They got 2 round trip tickets anywhere and $3200 for giving up their seats and taking the next flight on their honeymoon trip last fall. When I was young and money was everything I gave up my seats a time or two but as I get older the immediacy of getting somewhere is primarily due to not knowing if I'll be alive when I get there.

Airlines cut a bunch of routes after their last economic downturn and have opted for the fine print that allows them to do this rather than put on more flights. The downside of course is that virtually every flight is overbooked now.

That's good!!

The UA contract clearly said they could remove any passenger for any reason, should they? No, not in my opinion. But it is in writing.
Watching that sniveling pussy scream like a stuck pig was pathetic, and nobody is talking about that...giving the wimp a complete pass after that pathetic display.

They should have done some real damage to the slimy lawsuit-seeker. When they told him to get his ass up, he should have gotten up. The rest is justified unless he was physically unable to rise.
When he ran back onto the plane? Criminal trespass charges...

Flying on the airlines used to be a wonderful experience.
Check out this video of a cross-country flight in 1959, and compare to today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_u-pWghgM0,

But flying was rather expensive. Most normal people did most of their travel on trains, buses, or automobile.

Then the idea of deregulation took hold, so competition and free market forces would make airline travel much less expensive, and affordable to the masses. That is what brought us to the conditions we experience today.

A few facts to keep in mind:
Most people book the cheapest flight to their destination. That put the airlines in the position to scrape for every penny possible, which is why we get treated like cattle.

Airline seats are an instantly perishable product. The minute the door closes and the plane pushes back, an empty seat is lost revenue forever. Due to intense competition on many routes, just a few empty seats represent the entire profit that flight might have made.

There are no-shows for every flight. Passengers with reservations get caught in traffic. They oversleep. They get in accidents. They get sick. The are stuck in meetings they can't get out of. And in the past, many business travelers would make reservations on more than one flight because they didn't know which one they would be able to catch.

It is a sad fact that if the airlines were not allowed to overbook, some flights would take off half-empty, most would be 10-15% empty, and everybody's tickets would cost a lot more.

With their computer systems, the airlines know what the expected no-show rate is for every single flight, for every single day of the week. They attempt to overbook to fill every seat (necessary for competitive ticket prices, and hope for a slim profit). Weather and other factors often throw these predictions out the window.

At the last minute, standby passengers, if available, are used to fill the last empty seats. If a few extra passengers with reservations show up, then incentives are offered to get volunteers to give up their seats. This usually works well.

The incentives offered are primarily airline ticket credit vouchers. These cost the airline very little, when you think about it, because those vouchers will eventually be used to fill a seat that likely would have gone empty, otherwise.

In Phoenix one day a flight I was on became seriously overbooked. They needed 12 volunteers. They kept raising the amount offered and got all the way up to $1200 in order to get enough volunteers. Some volunteers had accepted at the $400 level, but every volunteer got the same $1200 in travel vouchers, and guaranteed seats on the next flight. Everyone was happy.

That is what United should have done in this case. I suspect that the agent was only allowed to go up to $800, due to some short-sighted management policy. This United case involved their commuter subsidiary, I believe, rather then mainline United. I think the mainline personnel would have handled the problem with more "money" being offered.

So those facts are what have brought us to where we are today, in regards to airline travel. The personal treatment is terrible, but the fact that we can get on a $100 million dollar airplane, going 500 miles an hour, and go from one coast of our continent to the other in 5 hours, for less than the cost of our latest rifle purchase is really rather incredible.

I once rode in an airline seat next to a businessman traveling at his company's expense. He was returning from an eight-day trip, he said. As we were on approach to land at San Fransisco he pulled out his parking lot stub from his shirt pocket. He started laughing. I asked him what was so funny.

He stated that he had been running late when he arrived at the SFO airport eight days before, so he had parked his car in the short-term parking garage in order not to miss his flight. He said he was laughing because he realized it was going to cost more to get his car out of short-term parking than his whole round-trip, cross-country airline ticket had cost. Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?

I've got over 24,000 hrs. flying time.....but I won't ride on those big bastards! Lots of their pilots don't have enough 'gray' in their hair!!

That deal is nothing but a flea on the elephants back. I put a lot of blame for travel issues on the passengers. Expecting that one can travel cross country on 10-minute margins is a bit much. Our grand parents did it. People died and were born on the way, and no one sued if they hit the Rockies in the fall and were a year late.

If ones presence is all that important to the world, leave the day before. Also, if one is an adult, buck up and act like one. He could have lawyered up, probably for no gain, without throwing a childlike screaming/kicking fit. Some 100lb stewardess should have slapped a little sense into that guy.
Even if the guy picks up a million, that's probably 15 seconds of UA's operating time.


Seems most of life in Oregon is on the west side (5+ hrs away). I live in the east side. With the potential for fog, snow, land/snow slides, blown tires, bridge out, mechanical breakdown, or just something of interest, I head over the day before for every committee session or flight.


Time to buy.

Crash two planes in a day and then it's really time to get in. Remember the BP oil spill?

Would have been ever funnier if the "sniveling ass" had been a buff, 6'4" 280 pound dude, or a single parent who was traveling with his/her two pre-teens. ("I'm sorry kids, Dad will be right along on the morning flight!")

I agree and it turns out there is more to this guy than meets the eye, 98 drug charges and soliciting gay sex from patients.

http://www.lex18.com/story/35123225...ntified-as-troubled-elizabethtown-doctor

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4401980/Dr-dragged-United-swapped-drugs-secret-gay-sex.html

Major, major screwup by United, it's gonna cost them millions, maybe billions in lost revenue before it's over. All because some half-wit gate agent decided to flex her muscle & show some guy who's the boss. I fully realize it's within their legal right to have him removed & all the authoritarians will chime in and say he disobeyed a cop so he deserved the death penalty, but the reality is he was where he was supposed to be, bothering no one & united brought this schitstorm on themselves by their stupidity. These dumbasses still haven't figured out that everyone has a video camera in their cell phone nowadays & you can't get away with claiming the guy made everything up & we "dindu nuffin" anymore.

At a minimum the United CEO, the gate agent, & the cop all need to be fired & some major groveling needs to be done by United. Hiding behind the BS of "it's in the contract & he disobeyed a cop" doesn't work, just because you CAN legally do something it doesn't mean you SHOULD. What a bunch of morons!

I suspect a lot of passengers would have been even more upset if UA had brought in a negotiator and spent 3 hours trying to talk some sense into the guy.

When someone is holding up 300 other people, get his ass out of the way.

Or if someone who wasn't an idiot was in charge, they could have just kept offering more money until someone took the offer.

Just because something is written in a "contract" doesn't mean that it's legal. It's only legal until it's not. United is going to suffer but I wish it was Delta this happened to.

Hmmm...that sucks. I didn't know that.

The whole deal is a bad situation, but it does indeed sound like United followed protocol. The TSA and/or Chicago PD...I think they're the ones who will have some serious expenses that will come out of this.

The Dr. sounds like quite the butt love'n, drugged up POS, and a complete pussy at the same time but assuming the videos show the truth, it doesn't make up for the beating he got. One account said that the Dr. took a swing at a cop though, which changes the situation if true.

One thing's for sure, the viral nature of the video has people everywhere jumping to conclusions, and United will be temporarily harmed from the whole deal, due to image alone.

So, for those who think they should get off. If you were headed to Africa on a once in a lifetime safari how would you feel if they asked you to get off and wait until a later flight?

As I understand it, United was trying to make room for some of their own employees. Hardly an emergency situation or one which justifies inconveniencing a paying passenger to the degree which they chose to do.

Don't know about others, but when I am on a trip that REQUIRES me to be somewhere, I schedule to get there the day before. To much can happen, like this, or just in the weather/mechanical realm. It's saved my butt twice, once an elk hunt in ID, once a cruise in Greek Islands.

In the long run, this won't hurt United in the slightest. Stock will go down a bit, but recover. Most people don't care what airline they fly on, they just use an agent or one of the online booking services to find the cheapest one and book it.

Flying cross country for a couple hundred bucks is a bargain. It has gotten much worse over the years, as airlines try to find a way to make a profit.

The only "at fault" here is the airline policy. A flight attendant/gate person simply cannot overrule/ignore a policy.

They followed it and called the cops.

The guy's a 69 year old 120 lb (my guess) asian guy and he had balls enough to tell them "no" and stick to it. That more than most here who would have pissed themselves and complied when three enforcers got in their face.

Their is no way to spin this by saying "we were just following the rules", that's trying to pass the buck and remove any element of common sense from the equation. There are multiple ways this could have been handled which wouldn't have resulted in this outcome which is going to cost United a lot more than the doctor in the long run.

United's stock was down 4% as of last count, that's $700 million dollars of shareholder value. Is that worth not spending an extra $2000 to buy some vacationer out of his seat, putting him up in a hotel for the night and giving him a first class ticket the next day? All this could have been avoided so easily for not the stupidity of one person, the gate agent, that escalated a non-situation into an international news story. In early reports it referred to the gate agent as "she". Given that it's Chicago I can guess her demographic and how it all played out. Gate agent gets on the plane, tells the asian guy he needs to go, he says no, I've got to get home and she spools to warp factor 9 because she's been "disrespected". She decided she'll show him who's boss, the cops are called in and this ensues. Stupidity follows because of one person's permanent chip on her shoulder.