""The passenger dragged from his seat aboard a Sunday night flight at O'Hare International Airport took the first step toward potential legal action against United Airlines or the city on Wednesday.

David Dao, who has retained a high-powered personal injury lawyer, asked the Cook County Circuit Court for an order requiring United and the city of Chicago to keep all video, cockpit recordings and other reports from the flight, along with the personnel files of the Aviation Department officers who pulled Dao from the plane.""

 

quoted  from the latest  news   from  oz,  looks like he looking  to get   in the millions  in lawsuit  against  the  airline

Interesting commentary on the whole situation with United:

https://thepilotwifelife.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/i-know-youre-mad-at-united-but-thoughts-from-a-pilot-wife-about-flight-3411/

5 hours ago, RedSpinnaker said:

What about a situation that during/after the boarding process and final load is calculated, the aircraft is overweight? Too much baggage, or additional fuel needs to be onloaded for wx, and the only options are deplane some pax, or cx the flight? If a pax is selected (however so) and they refuse, what's the recourse?

You deal with it using your interpersonal and customer relations skills: a combination of sufficient inducement in respect of compensation (which is the big issue here: I doubt that $800 and a hotel room is sufficient compensation to cover the doctor's loss of earnings/inconvenienced patients etc and thus he was not prepared to volunteer to give up his journey at that price), plus you make it clear that the flight is going nowhere until the situation is resolved. If necessary, deplane everybody and sort it out in the terminal.

There should never be a need to resort to physical violence or law enforcement to resolve this sort of situation.

Money talks. Let's call a spade a spade. It really does. At least for most people. So when an airline makes such an error, they should be offering a good cash alternative. You can bet your life that they would have no shortage of volunteers. Resorting to what happened, is disgraceful. There is never any need for physical violence. I really hope they are made to suffer.

it must be quite frightening to be beatern up for not giving up your seat,no matter what the rules say,is there a rule thats says you can be legally assulted or removed using force  if you refuse to comply with their request to give up your seat,wonder how much compensation the airline will have to pay to the guy,

Peter

I think a lot of the outrage is that the majority instantly identify with the relatively powerless individual manhandled needlessly by a faceless corporate entity. As usual in such cases, the fine print may be on the company's side, but decency and common sense definitely were not.

I think most people who saw that man being dragged off the plane like that, for that reason, could likely have predicted that this was not going to end well for the company, no matter what the paperwork said. The fact that the ceo, lost in the airless spaces where fine-print resides didn't realize what he had just stepped on until his nose was forcibly rubbed in it, shows a deep disconnect from everyday reality at the home office.

Fortunately, many spectators to the event instinctively made use of their ubiquitous digital witnesses to record the proceedings, ensuring (much to Government and corporate chagrin nowadays) that the incident did not become just another he-said, she-said, with bureaucracy winning by simple force majeure

Now United is being hit in the only place your average faceless corporation really, really cares about. In the wallet. Because in the end, it's not our privilege to fly with them, it's their privilege to have our patronage, and we have many other airline options more than eager to accommodate us if they forget that.

6 hours ago, RedSpinnaker said:

I don't think it's that easy. Call likely was a pax who was refusing to deboard the airplane at the crew's request (again, the failure of getting to this point aside). Is it law enforcement's responsibility to parse carriage contracts on scene? They were faced with a request to remove a non-compliant passenger from the airplane (and yes, they could have done this a number of better ways).

What about a situation that during/after the boarding process and final load is calculated, the aircraft is overweight? Too much baggage, or additional fuel needs to be onloaded for wx, and the only options are deplane some pax, or cx the flight? If a pax is selected (however so) and they refuse, what's the recourse? If law enforcement is called, do you expect them to determine that this is a safety of flight issue, and not a "civil" issue?

The fact of the matter is that in the US, in our post 9/11 society, once law enforcement is called for a non-compliant passenger, all bets for a reasonable resolution to the pax immediate satisfaction (or even what is "right") are out the window. It is most definitely not a perfect world, but it's what we have. Onboard the aircraft is not the location to make a stance to change it.

Again, UAL (and in some part the RAH crew) should have been able to handle this without calling the LEOs. If they weren't empowered to think outside the box and solve issues without immediately calling 911... then that's another management failure.

1. Yes, it is absolutely a police officer's responsibility to know when they have jurisdiction over something or not.  That is what it means to be a professional.  It is also the difference between a long career or a suspension, termination, lawsuit, or even criminal charge.

2. Like already stated, if you need people to not go, then you bid up the offers until you have enough takers.  Failing that, as the captain, you control the parking brake.  You don't have to go until people do volunteer to get off.  You can pull bags off the plane, even though the airlines rather pull people before bags.  You can defuel and replan.  Yes, I'm getting pretty extreme, but it seems that is what you are pressing for.  But you see, there are always more than one way to skin this cat.

3. Unfortunately, I'm not going to get sucked into a discussion about security on an open forum, so I will just let whatever notions you have about it stand as the last word here.

4. Yes.

1 hour ago, SirBismuth said:

Interesting commentary on the whole situation with United:

https://thepilotwifelife.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/i-know-youre-mad-at-united-but-thoughts-from-a-pilot-wife-about-flight-3411/

Imagine that, some one with sense and reason. Indeed well written article that most foaming at the mouth will never read or will totally scoff at.

15 minutes ago, VeryBumpy said:

Imagine that, some one with sense and reason. Indeed well written article that most foaming at the mouth will never read or will totally scoff at.

To me, the article is mostly a red herring if you keep firmly in mind what precipitated the whole incident. This did not start with the passenger. This began with the decision to forcefully remove paid, seated people from the flight, and the poor judgement behind that; and ended with the customer service train wreck that ensued from there.

If you punch somebody in the face, unlike in that article, the narrative does not begin from when you are hit back.

Some, who are (tacitly or explicitly) defending United's actions here seem obsessed with rules and authority. But sometimes it's the outcome that matters.  No sane human who has watched the events that took place could think this was handled appropriately - regardless of the corporation's policies.

What I personally think has been handled almost as poorly as the physical treatment of a 69 year old paying passenger, is the attitude and arrogance of the CEO, Oscar Munoz.  At the outset all he was interested in doing was holding his position that the passenger was to blame here.  But people have seen the scene with their own eyes - you cannot tell millions of people that saw the actions of his company that they're wrong to be shocked by it, and that "everything was handled properly".   With a falling share price and continuing PR disaster he's now changed his tune and claims he's "shocked" by what happened and that it must never happen again.   There seems little sincerety, considering his original position and statements.

I think United have something of an internal corporate culture of superiority and authority going on - customers seem an inconvenient irritation to them, as they go about their business. Such corporate cultural traits tend to come from the top.    I am sure they will learn lessons and things will change at the Airline.   One thing is for sure, in my opinion though - Munoz must go.

53 minutes ago, VeryBumpy said:

Indeed well written article that most foaming at the mouth will never read or will totally scoff at.

...but largely nonsense, from both a legal and a customer relations point of view.

In fact, it illustrates the problem perfectly: there's a lot of focus on what the small print says, or whether UAL were technically within their rights to do what they did. Unfortunately, in this situation, whether UAL are technically in the right is totally irrelevant.

Airlines are in the customer service business. If you start allowing your customers to be roughed up because you cock up, and/or are not imaginative enough, and/or do not have a system in place that allows your employees on the ground to make sensible decisions in order to avert that situation, then in the modern world where everybody has a smartphone and a Twitter account, you will get burnt. The highest court in the land is the Court of Public Opinion, and they have made their judgement quite plain on this matter. For what it's worth, all the indications from the lawyers commenting on this case are that the actual courts are very unlikely to side with United either should it get to that point.

There are many examples of things in aviation where you can be technically in the right, but it doesn't always make it a sensible course of action to follow. To take a very small example, in the UK military airfields are surrounded by things called MATZ (Military Air Traffic Zones). They are generally located outside controlled airspace and whilst it is mandatory for military pilots to make contact with ATC before entering a MATZ, civilian pilots are not bound by those rules and can quite legally fly through without speaking to anybody.

However, that airspace is there to protect the military traffic using the aerodrome, which may be fast moving and/or manoeuvring unpredictably. If in the course of flying through a MATZ without speaking to anybody you get hit by something fast and pointy flown by a dashing young man with a handlebar moustache, you may well be in the right but you will still be dead.

This sort of incident is similar from a customer service point of view. United may or may not be within their rights (I suspect this is unlikely, given that the customer was not "denied boarding" -- he had already boarded, and there is no clear basis in law for deplaning someone against their will purely for the airline's convenience -- this much has now been admitted by the CEO), but even if we assume they are -- as I said earlier: just because you can do something, technically, doesn't always make it the right thing to do. In this case, clearly this is not the way in which the average airline passenger expects their airline to treat them when they have paid several hundred units of currency in order to be transported from A to B.

Again - almost anything, from offering a larger cash incentive for volunteers right up to chartering the gentleman his own private A380 to get him to his destination would have been cheaper than the financial and reputational damage that this debacle has caused the company, and it will only get worse as more and more stories of UA's poor customer service come to the fore as a result.

I have a friend who travels quite regularly to the States. A few months ago, he was considering a weekend away in New York having found some cheap tickets on a UAL flight. He decided to go to Spain on Easyjet instead, because he'd heard such awful things about United's customer service -- overbooking, lost bags, on board service etc -- that he decided he just wasn't prepared to risk it for such a short trip. That was before all of this blew up -- I'm sure he wasn't alone then, and he definitely won't be alone now. CNN were running a piece the other night about the reaction in China -- one of UAL's biggest (and fastest-growing) markets. Suffice to say, people there aren't very impressed.

Think about the best customer experiences you've had. They're probably with companies where the person you dealt with was empowered with the flexibility to give you a discount, refund your purchase, replace your defective item, upgrade you etc etc without having to go through layer after layer of process or trying to catch you out and dodge their liability by hiding behind the small print. Ultimately, and particularly in the 21st century, these are the businesses (look at Amazon, for example) that are winning. Whether you're running an airline, a restaurant or a greengrocer's, if you start taking your customers for granted (such as the "taking an airline seat is a privilege" attitude), sooner or later you will discover that your customers start choosing alternative options, like travelling by train, bus or car or on another airline that doesn't threaten its first-class passengers with handcuffs, or forcibly remove 69-year-old doctors from their seats simply because someone was too stubborn or inflexible to come up with an alternative plan for positioning some crewmembers.

9 hours ago, Alan_A said:

I understand the point you're making, but if we were both in the room with United and trying to give them advice, I would have disagreed with you.  Here's why.  The outside world isn't going to see distinctions between United and Chicago Aviation Police, they're going to see the whole thing as United's problem.  And the outside world isn't wrong - Chicago Aviation Police is there because United asked them to be there.  And while the passenger's reaction isn't ideal, the bigger point is that he's basically minding his own business until United comes along to roust him out of his seat.  So the stress starts with United.  If you refund him and then ban him, it's going to look like you're passing the buck for a situation you created.  You lose the public relations battle right there.  Better to take full blame, compensate him heavily and fall on your sword.

I disagree. The public's attention span is short, this will blow over and become completely forgotten after the next social media outrage.

Sure UAL stock will take a dip for a bit, but people will still vote with their wallets. If they're faced with a ticket that's cheaper than a competitive carrier, I don't think the video will weigh heavily against the opportunity to save money.

21 minutes ago, RedSpinnaker said:

I disagree. The public's attention span is short, this will blow over and become completely forgotten after the next social media outrage.

Not if it becomes a meme, which it's well on the way to becoming. That's pretty much an indelible hit to your corporate brand.

10 hours ago, KevinAu said:

By intervening and ordering him off the aircraft, the police overstepped their authority.  A properly trained police officer would have recognized this as a 'civil matter' and politely stepped back from action, even if requested by the gate agent.  This was not a safety of flight matter, he was not threatening, verbally or physically, any other person, he was not intoxicated, he was only refusing to vacate a seat which he had bought from United.  Denying boarding is one thing, and the power for the airline to do that is fairly liberal, to include the wearing of leggings.  Removing a person who is already rightfully seated is an entirely different thing, which requires a higher threshold to be crossed.  Mainly for reasons of safety, criminal activity, intoxication, etc., not for merely giving the seat to someone else for whatever reason.

Yes, those of us who are smarter would have complied with the officer's order, lawful or not, and sort it out later.  However, keep in mind that customers come from all walks, from all sorts of backgrounds, life experiences, customs, and intelligence since the airlines sell tickets to anybody without question.  Applying yoir own expectations of how one should behave onto a customer is therefore foolish.  While the gate agent and the officers were *professionals* within their professional environment.  One should expect that they would have been capable of falling back on the training they should have received, the rules that they should have known, and exercise some judgement and common sense to resolve the situation that would not have resulted in such a magnificently bad outcome for the company.

I stopped reading after you mentioned leggings. Once again, Ignorance in avsim. Go do some research on standby travel at airlines compared to revenue passengers. THEN try to make a worthwhile parallel.

24 minutes ago, RedSpinnaker said:

I disagree. The public's attention span is short, this will blow over and become completely forgotten after the next social media outrage.

Sure UAL stock will take a dip for a bit, but people will still vote with their wallets. If they're faced with a ticket that's cheaper than a competitive carrier, I don't think the video will weigh heavily against the opportunity to save money.

I agree. Once all these "boycotters" realize that UAL gets them a non stop flight, is cheaper or is more convenient, they'll fold. THEN they will be talking out of both sides of their mouth acting like they hate United.

Typical USA society. Blah blah blah and have an opinion, then do absolutely nothing to fix a problem which one tells everyone they are outraged by.