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posted by on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the customer-relations dept.

NPR reports

Passengers on a United Express flight from Chicago to Louisville, Ky., were horrified when a man was forcibly removed--violently wrenched from his seat and physically dragged down the aisle. [...] Videos of the scene have prompted calls to boycott United Airlines.

[...] The Chicago Department of Aviation [...] says the actions of the security officers were "not condoned by the Department" and that one individual has been placed on leave pending a review.

[...] Passengers had already boarded on Sunday evening [April 10] at O'Hare International Airport when United asked for volunteers to take another flight the next day to make room for four United staff members who needed seats.

The airline offered $400 and a free hotel, passenger Audra D. Bridges told the Louisville Courier-Journal. When no one volunteered, the offer was doubled to $800. When there were still no bites, the airline selected four passengers to leave the flight--including the man in the video and his wife.

"They told him he had been selected randomly to be taken off the flight", Bridges said.

[...] The man said he was a doctor and that he "needed to work at the hospital the next day", passenger Jayse D. Anspach said.

[...] Both Bridges and Anspach posted videos of three security officers, who appear to be wearing the uniforms of Chicago aviation police, wrenching the man out of his seat, prompting wails. His face appeared to strike an armrest. Then they dragged his limp body down the aisle.

Footage shows the man was bleeding from the mouth as they dragged him away. His glasses were askew and his shirt was riding up over his belly.

"It looked like he was knocked out, because he went limp and quiet and they dragged him out of the plane like a rag doll", Anspach wrote.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:37PM (2 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:37PM (#492917)

    Traveling alone, I volunteered once for $400 and a four-hour-later flight, meaning landing at midnight in Chicago in January (they ended up not needing to bump me).

    Traveling with kids, that would take a really BIG chunk of cash...

    United did abandon us one time, flying us halfway around the world with an infant, despite knowing the they had cancelled the connecting flight, and the ones the previous and next day (filling the airport with people looking for a solution). They called "Act of God" because of a typhoon, and didn't even offer a hotel room or anything. JAL saved that day by being human beings...
    I do often pay more money to avoid those United bastards, and will never forget.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:10PM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:10PM (#493344) Journal

    United did abandon us one time, flying us halfway around the world with an infant, despite knowing the they had cancelled the connecting flight, and the ones the previous and next day (filling the airport with people looking for a solution). They called "Act of God" because of a typhoon, and didn't even offer a hotel room or anything. JAL saved that day by being human beings...

    That's all? Shit, I flew from the US to London a few years back on American Airlines...that was a goddamn disaster. They filled the plane for the flight back, taxied out to the runway, started spinning up the engines...and then noticed the hydraulics were leaking. So they made us sit there on the runway for five or six hours while they tried to patch it up with duct tape and bubblegum or something, before finally giving up and cancelling the flight entirely. They did "compensate" us with one free night in an admittedly pretty nice hotel. But they didn't manage to book us on a return flight until a full WEEK later.

    IMO, Airlines aren't worth dealing with unless you're crossing oceans. And even then it seems their goal is to be just marginally faster than a goddamn cruise ship.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:56PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:56PM (#493561)

      It's not unexpectedly being stuck on an island, with incompatible phone systems, with a weird distaste for plastic payments, 4 hours away from the destination, in a terminal full of people eager to take the first seat for the destination, with potentially 48 hours before the next flight, that aggravated us the most.

      It's the 8-month infant, with supplies limited by intercontinental travel, and the fact ANY of the people who checked our final destination could have warned us we would get stuck with our baby and zero assistance, rather than send us on a dead-end 12-hour flight.
      United was also the only airline to cancel three days of flights, packing the terminal with people, when others only cancelled the day the typhoon struck.

      The people at JAL decided to add an extra 747 the next day, bumped us up the waiting list as soon as they saw the baby, and provided wonderful service both on the ground and on the plane... What a concept.