richarddd

There's an old legal aphorism that goes, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."

Here, UA was in violation of its own contract of carriage, didn't have any legitimate reason to call law enforcement, could have easily fixed its problem by offering higher VDB amounts and most likely could have avoided the situation with better planning.

WorldLux

There are other reason to refuse transportation (e.g. being barefoot or UA having to reserve seats after being required to do so by the military or government)

[Moderator edit; see reasons below.]

Rdenney

Yes, based on my experience with tort cases, he'll sue both as conamed defendants and let them fight it out as to how to divide the liability. I'm expecting cross actions between United and the DOA. United will claim they called for CPD and got DOA security guards instead, and DOA will claim that United misrepresented the situation and their own CofC.

justhere

I am not defending what UA did, just pointing out that the logic tree used in their decision to put the crew on that plane revolved around inconveniencing as few customers as possible. Some were going to get inconvenienced no matter what under their plan, it was a question of how many. If minimizing the number of inconvenienced customers is congruent with benefiting UA's bottom line, then so be it.
Presumably you can answer that as you work in UA Ops as you know exactly what went on. How do you know they "intentionally messed up"? It's very possible that I missed it somewhere as i haven't read every post nor every news article but has it been proven that the crew could have gotten on a different flight? It would seem that if the crew could have then so could a passenger. So UA could have told passengers that they would get an $800 voucher and be on an AA (or whomever) flight in an hour or so. Again, not defending UA just pointing out that without the benefit of hindsight, the decision was most likely made to inconvenience as few customers as possible.
What proof do you have that there were other viable options that would impact less customers? I readily admit I might have missed it so if you have it, by all means point me in that direction. If UA could have put the crew on another carrier's flight, then they could also have put their passengers on that flight. Has it been confirmed that other airlines' flights had seats available?

STS-134

The fact that someone was reported to have said he or she would volunteer for $1600 means that there was another option that would have caused less inconvenience to those removed.

GUWonder

You're confirming what I stated in the post of mine which you quoted. At ORD, witnesses noted that he initially volunteered to be bumped but then declined the VDB arrangements once he was informed that it would mean not taking any flights until the middle of the next day. In other words he was looking for a VDB payout from the beginning but turned down VDB once he found out how lousy the airline was going to be about it. And given VDB meant a Sunday night stay at ORD with way many cots put out for cancellation-hit passengers, who knows how bad the hotel arrangements would be.

dvlsadvc8

I believe, as disgusting as you find it, people should comply with law enforcement? His case could have been persued in an alternate venue, without incident (just like the three passengers who deplaned earlier).

I have previously worked in the airline industry, not UA, but this could have happened with any of the commercial carriers. So, in fact I do have insight to how this unpleasant process unfolds. [Unduly personalized text edited by Moderator.]

PaulInTheSky

Hate to say that 'I told you so', but that's one of my recommendations for UA's change of crew scheduling and booking policy. A good direction by UA to try to fix the issue.

Baze

I have not seen it but does the new UA crew booking policy cover their contracted regionals? If not then it does nothing for this situation as this incident was on a regional.

STS-134

If a law enforcement officer tells you to strip naked and dance in the street or else you'll be arrested, you'd comply? What if a LEO tells you (and all of the other <insert race here> people in a restaurant) that you all need to leave the restaurant, because the owner has ordered all <insert race here> people out of the restaurant? There are lawful orders and unlawful orders and you do not have to comply with unlawful orders.

prestonh

I guess you need a brush up in contracts. The CofC does indeed create certain rights between parties, very much in contrast to your opinion, the biggest one is that according to case law once Dr. Dao set foot on the plane and off the jetway he was fully boarded and in possession of his paid for and granted by UA through contract seat. There was nothing in the contract UA could have done short of removal with cause that UA could have done to take the seat from him at that point per their contract.

The fact that UA used a non-police security force to physically regain possession of that seat and assault Dr. Dao in the process really smacks horribly in the face of resolving contract disputes. [Moderator edit; see note below.]

lazard

Wrong. Dr. comes out a winner. Easiest payday in his life.

no1cub17

They did. United had about 2 million chances to de-escalate the situation and failed to do so. That's on them.

MSPeconomist

I'm starting to think that a big part of the problem is that IDBs are regulated. When the government mandates what the airline must pay as compensation, they're going to be unwilling to pay more, at least if they're shortsighted and don't look at the bigger picture of the good will that can be gained by trying hard to do a VDB instead. In fact, even if the VDB would cost the same or less on average, given the breakage rate of vouchers denominated in UA$s, GAs can have a tendency to choose to do IDBs because they're perceived to be easier and faster, even though the airline might prefer VDBs at approximately the same cost in order to make their IDB statistics look better.

If there were no regulation regarding IDBs beyond just the rule that they're not permitted, airlines would be forced to do VDBs at the market price, whatever they can negotiate in order to convince the necessary number of passengers to accept the VDB offer.

This seems much better than a system in which the government tried to set the price at long and irregular intervals in a way that is almost independent of the circumstances and value to people of the flights, namely using only a crude three step measure of the length of the delay and then a formula requiring payment at a multiple of the fare the individual paid for the particular segment up to a fairly low amount. Yet if not getting the one segment prevents you from getting to your destination, it would make more sense to use the entire fare for the ticket or at least for the direction in question.

In fact, when IDBs are capped at $1350, one could imagine situations, such for flights to/from the Super Bowl, where the airline has an incentive to continue to sell almost unlimited numbers of tickets at high fares and to IDB even more people than the number of seats on the aircraft. For example, if the carrier knows that IDB is capped at $1350 for a seventy seat flight, but there are a hundred people willing to pay $2000 per one way ticket in addition to seventy who have already paid $1500, the airline can maximize profits by selling all one hundred additional tickets at $2000, giving IDBs to an arbitrary list (it doesn't matter who in this example) of one hundred passengers at $1350 each, and rebooking the hundred over the following days. The airline keeps all of the fares paid, pays the IDBs, and can raise its profit for every passenger who purchases a ticket.

If we change the example to have the seventy initially purchase sufficiently cheap tickets, they'll be the first in line to be selected by the airline for the IDB providing that their fare for the segment is less than $1350/4. Otherwise, again it doesn't matter to the airline who gets the IDBs, at least from the perspective of costs and revenues associated with the flight. Longer term, the carrier is likely to want to treat CIPs well, so that FFers, those with high fare classes, and premium cabin passengers tend to be immune from being selected for IDBs.

If the airline can sell a thousand tickets at $2000 instead of only a hundred, again they make even more money on the flight, although now we have even more IDBed customers who must wait many days for their new flight. So it can pay to oversell the flight by a factor of more than ten times the number of seats on the aircraft.

At some point this probably (IANAL) becomes fraud, but it would cost an individual passenger more to pursue the airline in court than the amount they would be likely to receive, short of a class action case, unless the customer in question had purchased an extremely expensive nonrefundable package for the game. The airline, of course, would try to convince them that there is no realistic remedy and perhaps toss a one year UA$500 voucher, worth US$125 on average due to breakage, to them in exchange for an agreement not to sue. In the meantime, the customer has missed what might be a once in a lifetime Super Bowl experience.

MSPeconomist

Link please?