You want PR nightmare? Cuz this is how you get PR nightmare.

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  Add comments
Apr 102017
 

So, a United Airlines flight was overbooked, and they needed to stuff four more UA employees on the flight so they could be where they needed to be. This is an irritating and unavoidable fact of the current system. One could obviously argue that overbooking should be banned, but for now, it’s still a thing. Anyway, United offered the passengers bribes to take a later flight, but they weren’t able to get enough volunteers. So, they boarded the plane anyway and *then* decided to randomly select some poor saps to yank off the plane. Well, one guy didn’t want to go. So what did United do? They called the cops. Which, strictly speaking, is the legal course… once they told the passenger that he was no longer on that flight, and he refused to leave, he was technically trespassing. But what did the cops do? They beat him so bad he was yakking up blood and they had to take *everyone* off the plane in order to clean up the mess.

Yeah. I’m thinking what we have here is an insta-millionaire in the making. The situation is, one one level, entirely of United’s making…. *they* are the ones who overbooked the flight. And anyone who has flown in the last, oh, sixteen or so years knows it’s an excruciating nightmare; you just want to get it over with, so it’s understandable that the passenger didn’t want to get pulled off a flight he was already seated on. But we’re in an era when every other passenger will be filming anything unusual on  plane… and a passenger beaten so badly he’s literally begging for death while spewing blood all over? Yeah, that’s what’s called “bad optics.” Crack open that checkbook and start scribbling zeros.

One is left to wonder just what would have happened if other passengers had leaped to this guys defense. Now, *maybe* he was being a jackass, and initiated physical combat with the government employees who gave him a pounding. *Maybe* he had this coming. But you know… *maybe* you shouldn’t have violent thugs as minor functionaries for the Feds, and *maybe* airlines shouldn’t overbook. If it comes to a lawsuit and goes to court, and if it turns out that this was just a guy who wanted to go home (he apparently claimed he was a doctor who had patients to see), then I’d recommend this settlement: find out how much United Airlines saves annually by overbooking rather than underbooking. Then double it, and demand that. And then demand an equal amount from the law enforcement agency that did the actual thrashing.

So not only is *this* guy turned off United Airlines, so is probably everyone who was on that plane. I know I sure s hell wouldn’t want to pay money to a company who could at the drop of a hat make me a trespasser, then set goons upon me. Hell, this is why I don’t fly anymore. I’d much rather drive 1500 miles than fly it.

All that said, imagine another competing airline sees this story, and they decide to reverse course on the last couple decades in aviation trends. Instead of less legroom, they reduce the number of seats and give you more. Instead of overbooking, they intentionally underbook, then make the last empty seats available at a discount in the last few minutes. And then they run a series of TV ads showing this incident in glorious technicolor, saying “Don’t fly United, cuz this might happen. Fly with us! We’re more comfortable and hardly ever beat paying customers into bloody pulps in front of small children going on vacation.” Seems like that’d be a winning ad campaign.

 Posted by at 4:29 pm