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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @12:02AM
> I've never quite understood the general aversion to the TSA, and I'm a very frequent flyer, like almost weekly
So far all the response have been knee-jerk because FREEDOM! type answers.
But that kind of argument is just preaching to the choir and it seems like you are not in the choir so I will try to convince you why you should join the choir.
There are quite a few problems with the TSA, but most directly applicable to you as a flier are two-fold:
(1) low standards for training which results in arbitrary decisions
(2) low levels of accountability which means little recourse for people affected by #1
Your experience with the TSA is the common experience. If they screwed up so often that even just a significant minority of people were adversely affected the outcry would be crazy.
But that is no comfort for the people who do experience a screw-up. And because they can be so arbitrary each trip to the airport is a gamble that something random won't escalate into a hassle for you today. That sense of powerlessness in the face of unaccountable and capricious authority is demoralizing.
BTW, PreCheck is not what it seems. At $85 for five years its obviously an insufficient background check, getting fingerprinted can cost $50 on its own. Its really about reducing risk to the TSA from people with political clout - i.e. people rich enough to fly on a regular basis. PreCheck reduces the chance that they will be hassled so badly that they call their senator. In fact all members of congress are enrolled in PreCheck themselves so they are unlikely to ever personally experience the mistreatment that the plebs risk when they fly.
PreCheck is kind of a gamble on the TSA's part. They have never once apprehended a person who was then convicted on terrorism charges. Literally not once in the entire history of the agency. So letting people board with only a cursory security check does not really increase the chance of an attack but it does significantly decrease the chance of the TSA having to answer to congress (aka the people who control their budget).