Originally Posted by DENviaLAX

Reading the article I'm a bit confused. It says they needed four people to give up their seats because the flight was overbooked. But it also says they needed the seats for a crew going to SDF to work a flight in the morning....then also called them standby. If they were going to work a flight, they wouldn't be standby, they'd be deadheading. The only thing that would make sense would be that something happened last minute with whatever crew was supposed to work whatever SDF flight Monday morning, and needed to get a replacement crew there on this flight. But that would also mean that the flight wasn't actually technically overbooked with revenue passengers, just that the best way to inconvenience the least amount of people was to bump four people off this flight and get the crew on vs have to cancel or severely delay flight out of SDF tomorrow. That's always a crappy situation, but ultimately makes sense to me.

I suppose it's extremely rare that an airline is unable to find volunteers out of 50+ people, especially given the high money offers. I personally didn't even know what the procedure was for involuntarily denying boarding, but I can definitely see how it can cause a lot of tension. Then again, the flight could've been just as easily canceled for any number of reasons, and the net result would've been the same (worse, technically) for that individual passenger, so I don't quite understand the extreme reaction on his part.

All that said, that video looks horrible. The security officer seemed to go way overboard on the amount of force acceptable in removing the man, who didn't even seem to be aggressive. And to me that is by far the worst part of the entire situation. Which really had nothing to do with United, as he's unaffiliated with them...but yet it'll just be another negative story attached to United's name.