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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.
Previous: Days After United Settlement, Baggage Handler Locked in Cargo Hold on NC-to-DC Flight
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:45PM (21 children)
Free security audit of "www.united.com" :p
Unless this behavior costs the corporation dearly they will not give a shit and repeat it. So yeah boycott them and let them hang to dry.
Curious.. what would be your $$ price to volunteer your seat?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:11PM (7 children)
Frankly, I'm actually rather surprised that United didn't get any takers at $800 - that's the equivalent of a $4000/wk salary, tax fee, and they were throwing in room and board too, so even if it meant you had to take a sick day or make up some BS about missing the flight for your boss, surely there were a few business travellers or people visiting families, etc. who *could* have taken advantage. Come to think of it, if I were being forced to visit the in-laws, I might even be tempted to offer to pay them... :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:40PM (5 children)
It was a voucher for travel, not cash.
It was also what you needed to use to buy your ticket home.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:17PM
Ie worthless. No wonder the the "offer" were ignored..
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:18PM (3 children)
Still, inconvenience for no gain, and they actually expect that to work? Wow.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday April 12 2017, @07:18PM
Flights originating (and possibly landing) in EU have laws to protect consumers. Fancy that. If the flight is delayed due to something in the airline's control, there are required payments to the flyer. It's one amount for a delayed flight, and more for a cancelled flight. Payments are more for longer hauls than they are for shorter.
Of course, the airlines will still try to weasel out. British Airways is in the process of trying to screw my family out of €2400 due to a delay they say was out of their control, but oddly enough at the gate when our flight was cancelled it was due to not having crew available. There are processes to go through to have this mediated, and I just need to see the process through.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday April 12 2017, @08:19PM (1 child)
Maybe it's a US vs. EU carrier thing.
Every country has regulations for this sort of thing. But even in Europe, I'd urge caution. Several years back, I took a reputable European airline up on one of these things. My wife and I had a connecting flight, and at the connection point, they had an overbooking.
At this point, it was about 2pm, they were offering a free hotel and meal vouchers in a nice city, along with something like the equivalent of $1000 (total, for the both of us). So we figured we'd try it and spend an evening there; we were staying with a friend at our destination, so our plans were somewhat flexible. In the end, I'd say the hassle was barely worth it. Suffice it to say that we were abandoned not once but twice by airline agents who failed to give us all the stuff they promised. It took us well over 2 hours before they even processed the change, and then the guy abandoned us before giving us our vouchers. (It was 5pm, and in Europe, I'm sure regulations said he had to leave his job that instant.) We repeatedly had to wander around the airport trying to find someone who'd direct us to someone else who could help us.
And then the was the ordeal of getting our bags back. We were told that it would be no problem to do so when we made the initial change (we didn't have any change of clothes in carry-ons, etc.), but it was after 8:30pm before we finally got our bags. When this whole thing started at 3pm, they gave us a short-term voucher at the airport to "tide us over" while we waited, but it wasn't enough for a meal -- it was barely enough to pay for a coffee for each of us.
Then we found out the shuttle that was supposed to transport us to our hotel didn't exist. Then when we arrived at the hotel, we were told the meal vouchers we had been given weren't enough to actually afford anything on the hotel menu, so they had to create a special extra-cheap menu to serve us -- and it was all done in a way like the hotel staff were annoyed and disgusted at this. (It's not the airline's fault that the hotel treated us badly, except for the fact that they booked us at a place that couldn't provide meals for what the airline gave us.) We paid extra to actually get something reasonable to eat. In the morning, the hotel outright refused to accept vouchers for breakfast, so we paid ourselves... and again for a taxi back to the airport.
And I'm sure there were a few other things I'm forgetting, because by the time we finally got to the airport in the morning we were both incensed by how we had been treated and asked to speak to a manager -- who basically was completely unsympathetic and said we had no right to complain because we had received our compensation. I think we ended up spending over 25% of our "compensation" out of pocket just for basic stuff the airline said it would be covering like transportation and meals, not to mention approximately 8 hours of frustration arguing with people and wandering around trying to get basic stuff (like our bags). [Note that we were in a very "expensive" city, which was part of the reason we made sure they were offering transportation, etc. before we accepted the deal in the first place.]
Anyhow, we tried to argue, but we needed to catch a flight, and finally we just decided it wasn't worth it to try to fight more. It was one of the most stressful and crazy periods of ~18 hours that I've ever had in my life.
I'm sure others have had more pleasant experiences. But I personally will think hard before ever accepting such a "deal" again.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:26PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @12:11AM
> I'm actually rather surprised that United didn't get any takers at $800 - that's the equivalent of a $4000/wk salary,
No its not, its the equivalent of $800.
They weren't going to pay for a whole week. You might as well say "that's the equivalent of a $200,000/yr salary" or "that's the equivalent of 9 million dollar in lifetime earnings."
None of those are all that relevant to the situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:55PM
If it were $800 in REAL MONEY, I would do it. However, having done this kinda crap before... its not. Its $800 in United Dollars. They can be redeemed for ONE (round-trip) flight (after a $75 each way booking fee). They must be redeemed within 12 months. I functionally have no loyalty - intense loyalty to lowest price and convenient flight times. Because of the limitations on the ticket redemption, I have let approximately $1200 in Airline Dollars "expire". Letting them expire was preferable to spending $150 to book a flight that might cost $170 on Southwest. As an example, a flight to DC on Friday from my airport (MCO) is currently $84. It is less when cashing in (piffy) loyalty points earned during work travel.
Functionally, the "$$" they give away is worthless.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:28PM (2 children)
"Curious.. what would be your $$ price to volunteer your seat?"
Depends on the situation. Let's forget that I won't fly anymore because TSA and security theater. I DID fly before 9/11/01.
I'm just taking some time off, headed for the beaches in Bermuda. Missing my flight puts me into Bermuda a few hours late. No big deal - $400 will probably make me happy.
Or, I'm on my way to work - if I don't get to (meeting, training, military obligation, court) then I'm in big trouble. I probably can't be bought off, unless they are talking some pretty big bucks. In some of those situations, I may just bow to the inevitable, miss my whatever, and take as much money as I can squeeze out of them.
Or, I'm on my way home to see my dying dad or grandma for the last time. Any suggestion that I get off the plane will be met with a big "FUCK YOU BUDDY!"
Every case needs to be considered on it's own merits. See my suggestion for the equivalent of Space-A, way back on page three. If I accept a space available discounted ticket, knowing that I have last priority on the flight, THEN the airline has a moral authority to boot me. If I'm flying on a full-price ticket that I've booked weeks in advance, the airline has no moral authority to boot me. Legal, maybe, but certainly no moral authority.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:50PM (1 child)
Indeed. We don't know the particulars of the doctor's job; he could have been scheduled to talk to people with runny noses, or to perform multiple urgent life saving surgeries.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @06:22PM
In the latter case I smell big lawsuit.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:37PM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:10PM (1 child)
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
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.
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Wednesday April 12 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)
Depends totally upon how tight my schedule is upon arrival at my destination. If I was a doctor and had patients counting on me to be at the office the next day AND I found out there would not be another flight to my destination until the next day, I'd deplane IF they paid me enough to go pay a charter flight to get me home, which would probably be at least a mid 4 figures, but then if it was United, they'd just force me off the plane and beat me to a pulp if I resisted... IF I ever fly again (seriously doubtful) it sure the HELL won't be on United....
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @07:52PM
Have them force you of and then sue them to oblivion while a PR agent does whatever the lawyer missed?
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday April 12 2017, @08:14PM (3 children)
It had better be cash in hand and not some voucher for travel on their shitty airline. Beyond that it would be dependent on where I was stuck and since I only fly for work I would have to be coming back as policy says we cannot volunteer to give up our seat for outbound travel to a customer site. If I am flying back and get stuck in Pairs, Vienna, London, Vegas, Amsterdam, Sydney, or Tokyo and get put up in a hotel overnight I would probably take the first cash offer they had, if on the other hand I am stuck in Detroit or some other hell hole it would be well above a grand.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 12 2017, @08:20PM (2 children)
Detroit is so bad that there's no good hotel or any nice neighborhood anywhere ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @10:21PM
Not unless you go out to Southfield or Dearborn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:16AM
Detroit Metro airport is between Detroit and Ann Arbor, not much nearby, but plenty of nice places if you go either way (N of Detroit is normal US suburbs).