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0 pointsjoshuamorton9y ago0 comments

So, I'm a nonexpert, not going to source this, and am repeating hearsay. Salt this comment to taste, but:

While I won't dispute that the moment he refused to deplane, he violated the law (you're required to follow the instructions of flight crew), the request that he be removed was also a violation of UA policy from what I've seen.

Here's some things that I've read

- He had previously volunteered to deboard, until he learned that it would be such a long delay

- This was not a case of overbooking, the 4 people added to the flight were United Employees, not overbooked passengers.

- UA policy states that airline employees will be the first people bumped from a flight in the case that it is overbooked

- (According to someone on reddit, so extra salt:) All of the overbooking regulations have to do with seat assignments. You shouldn't get bumped once you're assigned a seat, much less seated, and doing so may be a breach of regulations by United.

If that's the case, then the crew were absolutely breaching UA policy when he was removed, and they may have been breaching federal regulations when they asked him to deplane. To be clear, that's no excuse for refusing to deplane (even if he knew he was in the right), but it's not as simple as "he was disruptive" if the request for him to leave was illegal.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

FabHK9y ago

Good points. Hadn't heard half of them.

As for the 4 employees - there is staff travel for personal reasons (ID travel, interline discount, heavily discounted, stand-by), where you have lower priority than paying pax. There is booked staff travel, where you have intermediate priority. But then there is travel for operational reasons (positioning), where you have higher priority, because if you don't get there, a whole planeload of pax (and more, due to knock-on effects) won't fly. So, the number of available seats was reduced, and insofar it was overbooking.

And certainly all this should have been sorted out before boarding, no doubt, and normally is. (Apparently only 6 in 100,000 pax or so are IDB, by the way.)

But imagine a seatbelt turns out to be broken, or the wind is so strong that they have to load more fuel and reduce weight, or whatever. Then there's a seat less, for operational reasons, and someone has to leave, even if they had boarded already.

vacri9y ago

> This was not a case of overbooking, the 4 people added to the flight were United Employees, not overbooked passengers.

If a plane has X seats, but the carrier has assigned X+4 bums for those seats, then it's a case of overbooking.

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