Last month ORD/DTW on a new E175, AA off loaded 8 passengers plus 20 bags due to a balance issue (front cargo hold was broken so all bags had to go into the rear cargo hold). No effort to match bags taken off with passengers taken off. So some passengers who were removed could have had their bags end up in DTW and passengers on the plane who made it to DTW could have had their bags still sitting at ORD. Some of the removed PAX were rebooked on DL so when they got to DTW, they were in a different terminal and had to bus it over to the AA terminal just to see if their bags arrived at all. This also caused more than an hour delay.

What really irked the PAX (at least those of us up front who were chatting with the flight crew and gate agents) is that this issue was known and the inbound crew reported it en route to ORD (from EWR I believe). It seems incredible, to me at least, that AA would board everyone onto the plane (it was a completely full flight) along with all bags knowing that they would have to remove both bags and passengers.