RenHoek

Look away.

Loren Pechtel

The cops didn't do anything, obviously what happened didn't reach the level of breaking the law.

tasnam

You know what I am offended by?




BORING MOVIES

flavorflav

If "The Atlantic" and James Fallows aren't mainstream media then I don't know what is.

"If you don't think your kids aren't watching content you'd rather they didn't while they visit halls120's house, you're fooling yourself."

/fixed

Setting aside halls120's undermining the parents of his daughter's friend, there's a reason we have just one TV - with no cable. Our son, age 5, watches 60-90 minutes a day, which is more than he probably should. (Lazy parents.) But what he does see is strictly PBS Kids, Netflix Just For Kids and our own DVDs.

I'm gathering from this thread that a lot of parents run households where the TV (or TVs) are on all day showing all kinds of programs to whoever happens to be in the room. (Kind of like airline lounges!) Our household is not one of them.

As a parent and a frequent flyer, it does not seem unreasonable to me to expect United to select out of all the films in the history of the world a film - remember, a film that will be "force fed" on screens that cannot be controlled or retracted - that is reviewed like this: "Women are something of an endangered sex in “Alex Cross”: one, half-dressed in black lingerie, dies after all her fingers are methodically snipped off. Another is similarly tortured to death; a third is shot straight through the chest."

Again, United seems to be the only business in America that thinks showing this film to captive customers constitutes "best practices." Who knows. Maybe I'll see "Kiss the Girls" next week while waiting with my kid at the dentist's office. When I complain, I'll get ripped for being a bad parent.

LASUA1K

Flights divert all the time without an arrest. Security isn't always about what did happen but what could've happened. You were not on the airplane so "obviously" you have no facts and cant judge the crew.

fastair

This may be true in this case (or not) but your underlying logic is faulty. I break the law speeding and doing California stops every day. Even if u told the police about it after the fact, I doubt they would do anything. That doesn't mean I didn't break the law. Lack of action by a law enforcement official not present for an offence (alleged) in no way confirms a law was not broken, just like in court a verdict of "not guilty" does not mean the judge/jury say the defendant is "innocent"

ButIsItArt

It's like reading an academic journal article written by someone like Stiglitz or Kahneman, where a claim is made of an interesting discovery about the most successful private equity firms, but all the important pieces of the argument are cited as, "Personal correspondence", and the usual descriptives are omitted.

bocastephen

Given the history of PMUA crews acting in a mentally unstable and irrational manner, often to the extreme (where I would consider filing a ASRS report against them), I'd have to assume this was yet another nutter-butter reaction from someone who needs a 30 day timeout from flying and a company ordered counseling session to determine their future fitness to act as pilot in command.

As to the movie, I haven't seen it and sounds beyond gross, but the world around us is for adults, not children - if an objectionable movie is playing on the screen, or perhaps on the private laptop of the passenger a row up or across the aisle, the correct response from the parent is to distract or otherwise occupy their child - not childproof the world by ordering other adults to modify their behavior.

spin88

What I find interesting is that James Fallows (who is about as MSM as you can get and is very well respected) who says he has millions of miles on UA and is GS is suddenly going off on their poor service.

Fallows in not the "cranky fliers" he is a well respected guy who is probably read by a few hundred thousand people. It is so bad that he is going off on UA.

I think its a bad sign of how far UA's service has fallen that no one in 185 posts has observed how much he dumps on how low UA has gone, we all just know its true. Yet his mostly well healed and well educated readers may not have flown UA recently, but they sure know about UA now.

I am as lose as it comes with my kids, but they are 5 and 9 and I don't want them watching a violent movie, and I can understand the mom raising the issue. Whether the FA did not communicate it well or the pilot was a jack-..., nothing in this incident, or the anti-UA posts that caused it to surface makes UA look good.

Ducati

But, most of us knew what happened with that blogger getting kicked off on a UA flight for nothing. So, forgive us if we feel that some UA pilots and FAs don't deserve to be employed.

Always Flyin

Big enough to result in a diversion and being offloaded.

Then you should fly US Airways more on domestic flights. They have no in-flight video entertainment,

You have absolutely no idea why the pilot diverted.

Inappropriate by your individual standards. You do not get to judge for the entire aircraft.

I don't want to be stuck watching The Sound of Music on every flight.

Since you haven't heard his side of the story, you have no idea so your comment is premature and inappropriate.

Firstly, since 9/11, pilots do not leave the cockpit to resolve disputes in the cabin. Period. Argue all you want, they don't and they won't. Nor should they.

Secondly, diversions can be made for more than just security threats. If you have an out-of-control passenger yelling and screaming and not listening to flight attendants, that flight should divert.

We don't know what happened here, but it did not have to be a security threat to justify a diversion.

There doesn't have to be an arrestable offense to justify a diversion.

The only fantasizing here is your presumption the diversion was inappropriate when you don't have all the facts. Since diversions do not happen all the time, that indicates to me that this was more than a minor disturbance.

Pilots do not divert unnecessarily. It is a big deal. Whether it was a security issue or not is not really the point. Whatever the disturbance was, this crew wanted that family off the flight.

It very well may not have been wise for UA to show that film, but I do know how the family reacted was inappropriate or the flight would not have been diverted and the family offloaded.

Good luck on that one.

Agree 100%.

Gee, don't bother to ascertain all the facts before casting judgment on a pilot reacting to what he was told by his crew.

Too bad you don't have any idea what actually occurred before making your decision that the diversion was ridiculous.

DCA writer

I kind of hate how the tenor of some of the comments in this thread has followed a template I see in a lot of discussions about Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft:

This company has a right to do X, therefore it was right to do X.

Also, Fallows is an excellent journalist with decades of experience--and a pilot's license he seems to put to regular use.

ButIsItArt

Yes, that's the point: why is he breaking this?

Always Flyin

I don't think that is the general tenor. I believe the general tenor is that we don't know what happened and therefore don't know if the response was prudent or not.

Perhaps so, but this piece is a hatchet job on UA (not that it doesn't deserve it). As to this particular episode, he presented a one-sided story, which certainly doesn't strike me as credible journalism.

spin88

he reached out to UA, did not get an answer (guess they were too busy?) When that happens, he can post/publish. He is very careful to say he can't independently confirm the story.

Note also this story came out of his more general posts about his unhappiness with UA, dispite being GS.

I've seen lots of hatchet jobs, this is not one of them.