The Law Enforcement Officer Thread

The problem is that when you do that and Z number of people don't board the plane, it means you could've sold Z more tickets. And everyone could've paid their tickets Z/X cheaper.

Overbooking is a practice that's existed for a long time, and there's legit reasons to do it - it happens all the time. Usually it's dealt with professionally. This wasn't the case.

edited 11th Apr '17 9:53:08 AM by Ghilz

Normally this shit is handled before boarding. And the Time article's interviewee pointed out a bunch of ways United could have handled the issue without the cops. United fucked up.

Disgusted, but not surprised

Bull, this one is all on United. Their overbooking is a foolish policy that is bound to cause problems, not handling that fact that there were too many people for the plane before everyone boarded was idiotic, trying to sort out the overbooking by asking for random volunteers and selecting random people instead of doing some sort of priority ranking is stupid, (the guy they beat the crap out of is a doctor who had patients waiting for him for when he got back home, which is why he didn't want to get off) and the means with which they handled this was awful.

United deserves every bit of the crap that it gets for this.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

Plus, again, even IF the guy is in the wrong, they are in an industry used to dealing with abyssimal customer satisfaction. There's no reason for them to be incapable of dealing with a difficult client peacefully. A guy on his chair who isn't a threat to anyone does not warrant violence.

And remember, this wasn't a case where overbooking lead to a conflict between two ticket holders. They booked fully, and then decided that four people had to fuck off because the company wanted to fly out 4 employees as well. You know, instead of putting them on the next flight, because customers have few rights in this environment so screw them.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

It would have been better (and cheaper, and better for their bottom line) to just book them on a rival airline at last-minute booking rates.

Ahh, hindsight.

It gets better. People are digging into the man's past and finding a criminal record to justify that he "deserved" to be kicked off the plane and not to feel sorry for him. Total smear campaign, and what he may or may not have done in the past is completely irrelevant to this incident. Sick.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm sure this desire to dig into his past is not racism-related at all.

edited 11th Apr '17 12:18:07 PM by speedyboris

Empty seats don't loose money, they've still been paid for and thus make money. Now they don't make double money, but that's not the same as loosing money.

What other industry is allowed to sell a product twice on the basis that someone will probably not want their one?

This all ignores the fact that there was no overbooking, United wanted the seats for themselves, so it's more the equivalent of selling a product to someone then deciding that they actually want to keep it for themselves after giving it to the person who bought it, instead of buying it back they decided to just take the product back by force.

I'm curious though, is double booking a practise in other counties, I don't think I've heard of it outside of the US?

edited 11th Apr '17 12:52:53 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Who's doing this? I'm not surprised that it would be done, there's a rather nasty habit the American public has of going out of their ways to delegitimize anyone on the receiving end of a miscarriage of justice. Why isn't a question I have the answer to yet.

edited 11th Apr '17 12:51:47 PM by Krieger22

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Don't know about problem, but Canada's tackling it: Canada to tackle overbooking on flights
Short answer: It makes people (who aren't directly injured) uncomfortable.

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

x2 An anonymous source alerted the AP and it spread from there.

"He wasn't hurting anyone" doesn't mean he gets a carte blanche to do whatever he wants. His refusal to leave the aircraft meant that the flight was not able to depart. He was told to leave the aircraft by people who have the authority to decide he should not be on the aircraft. He refused to leave. He was removed. Seems legit to me.

Because those four employees needed to be on the flight in order to crew flights they were scheduled for at the flight's destination. The choice was "remove four people from the plane so employees can have those seats" or "cancel entire flights because crew isn't where they need to be, inconveniencing far more than four people".

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Native; Again could have been handled without having to kick anyone off the plane as suggested and pointed out several times over. No matter how you slice it United fucked up big time.

Who watches the watchmen?

It's an airport. Put them on another flight that you haven't already fully boarded. There's plenty to choose from. They clearly had the time to deboard everyone and clean up the mess from what I have previously read, so time isn't the pressing issue here.

EDIT: Also, it doesn't fill me with a great deal of confidence that one of the longest-established airlines in the business can't manage their flight schedules well enough to get their own aircrews onto the planes without kicking paid passengers off of the planes.

edited 11th Apr '17 1:43:24 PM by AFP

I very much doubt that United knew exactly what they were doing and went forward with it anyway just for shits and giggles. In a perfect world, the situation never would have gotten to the point it did. But shit happens and it did get to that point. So now someone needs to leave the plane. How would you resolve the situation?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Either in this thread or the aviation thread, the consensus seemed to be: "If you can't possibly avoid trying to put too many people on the plane already, keep raising the offer until someone takes it or just book the traveling crew on another flight."

Keep offering more money until someone decides that it's worth it to trade in their seat? Declare "fuck it" and book a car for the aircrew? Declare "fuck it" and book the crew on another flight?

Worst come to worst cancel the flight the crew were meant to be on and use this as a learning experience for having proper redundancies for when crew aren't in the right place.

edited 11th Apr '17 2:13:26 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Reddit comment from someone who claims to have been on the flight in question

edited 11th Apr '17 2:42:23 PM by rmctagg09

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Medical care. Although there, it's more the matter of selling the product ten times to every customer on the grounds that nine out of ten customers probably aren't going to pay for it anyways.

Mmm, smell that unregulated capitalism.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Turns out United Airlines might have forgotten to include the bit where they give themselves the right to remove someone from the plane due to overbooking in their contract of carriage.

Also Banking, that's basically how money loans work.

edited 11th Apr '17 3:41:54 PM by Ghilz

Regarding booking the crew on another flight: let's not assume that United is just being deliberately vindictive, here, and kicking paying passengers off of flights (which costs United money, after all) just for the hell of it. Presumably no other flights were available. As I said earlier, those four employees were needed for another flight. So now you're left with "do we inconvenience four people by making them take a later flight, or do we inconvenience an entire plane worth of people by not getting flight crew there on time and being forced to cancel that flight"?

Re: raising the offer, should the airline just get into a bidding war with passengers and see how long will someone wait before accepting it? Remember that we're not talking about a one-off event, here, we're talking about something that happens regularly, and policy needs to reflect that. Should the airline be required to simply keep increasing their offer until someone accepts, with no cap? Should the airline be liable for a million dollars in compensation if that's what it takes to get someone to volunteer to give up their seat? If there is a cap, then what do you do if you reach the cap and there's still no one accepting the offer?

Raising the offer up to a given cap and then randomly selecting people to be bumped from the flight seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Coincidentally, that's exactly what the policy is.

More to the point for the LEO thread, regardless of the should-haves or could-haves of the situation, what actually happened was that the passenger in question received a lawful order to leave the plane and he refused, so he was compelled to do so. He resisted the attempted to compel him, so force was used. Ignoring the broader question of whether United was dumb in telling him to leave in the first place, do you guys feel that the basic sequence of events as I've outlined them is somehow illegitimate or unjust?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If this sort of thing happens regularly, it really sounds like they need to reconsider some of their internal travel policies.

And I agree that they should have bumped four people from the flight rather than cancel an entire other flight. The time to do that was before they let those four people onto the plane. After that? Yeah, bidding war. Keep raising the price until it's cheaper to send the crew another way. Or have standby crews in place in case of whatever unforeseen circumstances lead to them needing to book holyshitlastsecond travel for their four crewmembers.

EDIT: To answer your question, yes. Because they could have avoided the entire situation by not boarding the four passengers in the first place. If they fucked up so badly as to not realize they needed to transport these four crewmembers on this flight to keep their schedule until after they completed boarding, then yeah, they should have inconvenienced an entire flight of people and taken the ill will in stride, rather than what they actually did and inconvenience and distress an entire flight of people, taking even more ill will in the process.

EDIT 2: You know what I'm really curious about? With the delay and all the fuss this caused, did those four crew members make it to their scheduled flight on time?

edited 11th Apr '17 4:44:20 PM by AFP

As I said earlier: in a perfect world, yes, that's true. But people aren't perfect and shit happens, so saying "you lost your chance to fix this, nyeh nyeh nyeh~" is not a valid policy to have. You have X seats and X+4 passengers on the plane. Four people do not have seats and cannot fly safely. If you want to say that "once people are on the plane, they cannot be removed" then you've set yourself up for a catch 22 because you can't take off because you have extra people on the plane, and you can't remove the extra people because they're already on the plane.

You have to solve the dilemma somehow. You can't just sit that the gate for the rest of eternity, so removing the extra people is the only possible solution.

Alternatively: the passenger should have gotten off the plane when told, thereby inconveniencing only himself (an inconvenience for which he'd be compensated). United is not at fault for the passenger refusing to leave the plane.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The thing was, he made it clear it wasn't just inconviencing him: he had a surgery of patients lined up and waiting.

In short, upon finding they had selected a doctor, they should, perhaps, have found somebody with a less critical schedule impacting far fewer people if they couldn't make it on time.

Where they going to compensate his surgery and all his patients for him being late?

It's not like he was a house husband with maybe a cat to worry about.

edited 11th Apr '17 5:24:50 PM by Euodiachloris

Jovian; Again they had more than a few different options they could have done to avoid this completely and they chose the worst possible method. Nothing you have said changes that.

Who watches the watchmen?