• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

United Airlines violently drags a doctor off a plane so employee could take his seat

Why do you fly United?

Results are only viewable after voting.
Status
Not open for further replies.
S

Shadow Puppetry

Member
Geez.

Eventually, when her daughter asked to use the bathroom, Rafieyan says she was able to get up and report the groping to one of the flight attendants, who didn’t seem surprised. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry. We felt really bad putting him next to you, but there was nothing we could do. He was doing the same kind of stuff to the other flight attendant.’”
 
F

Flo_Evans

Member
Steve Youngblood said:
I really think the phrasing "overbooking" is muddying the waters quite a bit here. Maybe by some airline definition that's what happened? But what happened here was that after regular customers were boarded and seated, 4 employees needed to board the flight for logistical reasons so that they could work a different flight.

This wasn't a situation of "oops, there was a computer error and we sold 5 more tickets then seats."

One dumb thing I was just thinking about was sort of wondering why they don't have something like, I don't know, 5 seats always set aside for emergency situations. I apologize in advance for being a doofus when it comes to understanding the various safety regulations at play here that might prevent this, but I'm just thinking about chairs off the beaten path not in the main passenger areas that meet the minimum requirements to allow a passenger to sit in.
Click to expand...

they do, they are called jump seats. Tiny little fold down seats in the service area. Crew will often use them for takeoff and landing if there are no empty seats.
 
B

Buckle

Member
Alex_Mexico said:
I find very sad that this topic surpassed 50 pages already but yesterday's San Bernadino one where people got shot and killed I cant even fin in the front page of GAF.

This thread deserves the attention, sure. But the level of desensitized Americans have become at gun violence scares me.
Click to expand...
One of the first things I thought when the united story start blowing up is I wish we (as a country) gave this much of a shit about shootings that occur like clockwork rather than just going "oh, its that time again".

The outrage from this has been a pretty pleasant surprise.
 
B

BronsonLee

Member
Shadow Puppetry said:
Geez.

Eventually, when her daughter asked to use the bathroom, Rafieyan says she was able to get up and report the groping to one of the flight attendants, who didn’t seem surprised. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry. We felt really bad putting him next to you, but there was nothing we could do. He was doing the same kind of stuff to the other flight attendant.’”
Click to expand...

WHAT THE FUCK
 
S

Steve Youngblood

Member
Flo_Evans said:
they do, they are called jump seats. Tiny little fold down seats in the service area. Crew will often use them for takeoff and landing if there are no empty seats.
Click to expand...

Right. But those are for the crew on the current flight. I mean just adding a few more in case of emergency for scenarios like this where you've got several employees who need to board a flight that's completely booked.
 
T

Tovarisc

Member
U8CDEfA.png

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/852237912628441088

Doing the groundwork for lawsuit.
 
P

PandaShake

Member
GG-Duo said:
Has anyone posted this yet?

United Passenger “Removal”: A Reporting and Management Fail

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-removal-reporting-management-fail.html
Click to expand...

Good read so far. I've been thinking that UA got double shafted. In public, many still think it's overbooking and overbooking memes are much easier to spread and quite hilarious. In court, since it's not a mishandling of a common overbooking problem but additional levels of incompetence by UA in assignment of crew that's not common, the doctor and supposed elite lawyer is going to make bank.
 
C

Chumley

Banned
Steve Youngblood said:
I don't know. This doesn't strike me as a particularly complex problem to address. I think particularly once seated, you have to basically first acknowledge that you need a solid reason to throw a person off of a plane. Have they committed some actionable offense? Do they present a risk to public safety? Something along those lines. "Whoops we have employees that need to be somewhere else" doesn't really cut it in terms of being able to force someone off a plane.

Now, perhaps it really is very, very important that these employees board this plane. Is it worth inconveniencing hundreds of other passengers on a different flight if it's going to be cancelled unless these four employees are allowed to board this one? Maybe not. But I think the only solution here is that you're going to have to loosen the purse strings more in terms of trying to coerce someone to volunteer. It's really quite ludicrous to think that the only solution they had in terms of how to deal with such a situation is to basically eeny, meeny, miny, moe someone off the plane.
Click to expand...

If it was so important, they should have offered more money. Go up to $2000 or $3000 and people would have been jumping at the chance. To stop at $800 and then decide a multi million dollar lawsuit is a preferable consequence is, well, massively stupid.

I really want to know what those two security guards were even thinking. How those fucking idiots ever got a job anywhere is astonishing.
 
M

Mr. X

Member
Tovarisc said:
United won't use police to remove overbooked passengers - CEO

United Airlines will no longer use law enforcement officers to remove passengers from overbooked flights after global outrage erupted over a video showing a passenger dragged from one of its planes in Chicago.

"We're not going to put a law enforcement official... to remove a booked, paid, seated passenger," United Continental Holdings Inc Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz told ABC News on Wednesday morning. "We can't do that."

Munoz said the incident on Sunday resulted from a "system failure" that prevented employees from using "common sense" in the situation and that Dr. David Dao, whom security officers pulled by his hands from the cabin before takeoff, was not at fault.

An online petition calling for Munoz to step down as CEO had more than 45,000 signatures on Wednesday morning, but he told ABC that he had no plans to resign over the incident.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ual-passenger-idUSKBN17E1GN
Click to expand...
Basically saying officiers are overkill, can't be expected to not power trip.
 
F

FinaruDensetsu

Member
iapetus said:
Even the fucking CEO of the company isn't defending United any more. I don't even understand what the United defence force thinks it's defending any more...
Click to expand...

I think at this point anyone still left defending UA is really just defending their pride because they can't simply admit they're wrong or change their stance.
 
F

FinaruDensetsu

Member
Thebeardofknowledge said:
What does everyone think he will settle for ?
Click to expand...

It's going to have to be in the millions i believe. He's gonna get paid by both the police and UA.

I doubt his physical injuries are really all that bad. His damages will mostly come from pain and suffering from a mental aspect and the false statements made by UA in those emails that were published to the public by leakers within his own company.

But there's really no calculation for these kinds of things. But obviously with the publicity and general negative opinion towards UA, a jury would absolutely hammer UA when it came to awarding punitives. So UA will offer a lot to keep it from ever getting there. I think we've all seen those movies where the jury awards a fairly nominal restitution award and then tens or hundreds of millions in punitives. The rationale here would be that one of the largest airlines in the US would only be punished if they had to pay millions.
 
F

FinaruDensetsu

Member
The Broken Ska Record said:
Settle? Nah, I can see this going to court.
Click to expand...

Well if UA doesn't lowball again like they did with the $800 I think it'll get settled.

These kinds of cases are incredibly unpredictable and UA would appeal any kind of huge award from a jury on the basis that it is excessive.

They could delay paying Dr. Dao and his attorneys (who undoubtedly took this on a contingency) for years and years.
 
K

Korey

Member
FinaruDensetsu said:
Well if UA doesn't lowball again like they did with the $800 I think it'll get settled.

These kinds of cases are incredibly unpredictable and UA would appeal any kind of huge award from a jury on the basis that it is excessive.

They could delay paying Dr. Dao and his attorneys (who undoubtedly took this on a contingency) for years and years.
Click to expand...
They'll offer to settle for $400, then $800, then beat him up for not settling.
 
R

Randy Monk

Member
Frankfurter said:
That's pretty much the final nail in the coffin. He is as calm as you could possibly be.
Click to expand...

Are you saying the Chicago Police press statement is lying?

"At approximately 6:00 p.m., A 69-year-old male Asian airline passenger became irate after he was asked to disembark from a flight that was oversold. The passenger in question began yelling to voice his displeasure at which point Aviation Police were summoned. Aviation Officers arrived on scene attempted to carry the individual off of the flight when he fell. His head subsequently struck an armrest causing injuries to his face. The man was taken to Lutheran General Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Ongoing investigation."
 
I

iapetus

Scary Euro Man
Commanche Raisin Toast said:
Contradicts, at very least, all of the shitty comments from UA employees in their Facebook group right? They were saying he was going nuts before the police even came in.
Click to expand...

All the video proves is that there was a point at which he was not belligerent. He may still have been going nuts before the police arrived.

(I don't believe that he was, but this video doesn't disprove that claim...)
 
Hari Seldon

Hari Seldon

Member
Randy Monk said:
Are you saying the Chicago Police press statement is lying?

"At approximately 6:00 p.m., A 69-year-old male Asian airline passenger became irate after he was asked to disembark from a flight that was oversold. The passenger in question began yelling to voice his displeasure at which point Aviation Police were summoned. Aviation Officers arrived on scene attempted to carry the individual off of the flight when he fell. His head subsequently struck an armrest causing injuries to his face. The man was taken to Lutheran General Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Ongoing investigation."
Click to expand...

The city of Chicago has a long history of honest and helpful public servants.
 
D

Dyle

Member
Randy Monk said:
Are you saying the Chicago Police press statement is lying?

"At approximately 6:00 p.m., A 69-year-old male Asian airline passenger became irate after he was asked to disembark from a flight that was oversold. The passenger in question began yelling to voice his displeasure at which point Aviation Police were summoned. Aviation Officers arrived on scene attempted to carry the individual off of the flight when he fell. His head subsequently struck an armrest causing injuries to his face. The man was taken to Lutheran General Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Ongoing investigation."
Click to expand...

If you actually read the article you linked, you'd find that there is good reason to question the statement CPD provided about an incident involving the Chicago Department of Aviation's security team. Again this incident did not involve CPD, and while CPD did put out a press release, it was not a proper press release and did not deal with their officers. So yes, there is serious evidence to believe that the official reports of this incident are not entirely reliable.

Chicago Tribune Reporter Eric Zorn said:
It was just the kind of statement you'd have expected to read from police 10 years ago, back before such altercations were routinely captured on smartphone video and discrepancies between official versions of stories and the accounts of citizen witnesses could be brushed aside as he-said-she-said.

But now we can see for ourselves. No, the man was not yelling prior to being wrestled from his seat. No, his facial injuries were not caused because he "fell." He began yelling after the officers attacked and manhandled him.

It was a curious statement because it seemed almost deliberately to recall the most troubling incident in recent CPD history — the killing of Laquan McDonald in October 2014, in which multiple officers' accounts of McDonald's actions just before he was shot differed starkly from the dashboard camera video of the incident.
After seeing numerous iterations of the statement on social media and a report including it from a reputable news outlet, I sent a copy to CPD's chief spokesman Anthony Guglielmi and asked, "Is this for real?"

His answer — "CPD didn't release an official statement on it. We were not involved. Dept. of Aviation has everything you will need" — was not exactly a denial, though it prompted me to remove, out of caution, a retweet of the statement from my Twitter feed.

After a few more email rounds and a long phone call with Guglielmi, what I was able to glean was that, at 10 p.m. Sunday, about four hours after the incident, an unnamed spokesman at CPD generated an official-sounding yet technically unofficial summary of the incident in order to help out a reporter or reporters at news outlets Guglielmi would not identify.
Click to expand...
 
S

Skatterd

Member
Dyle said:
If you actually read the article you linked, you'd find that there is good reason to question the statement CPD provided about an incident involving the Chicago Department of Aviation's security team. Again this incident did not involve CPD, and while CPD did put out a press release, it was not a proper press release and did not deal with their officers. So yes, there is serious evidence to believe that the official reports of this incident are not entirely reliable.
Click to expand...

Agreed, CPD and Department of Aviation are 2 different things, people should learn the difference.
 
C

Commanche Raisin Toast

Member
iapetus said:
All the video proves is that there was a point at which he was not belligerent. He may still have been going nuts before the police arrived.

(I don't believe that he was, but this video doesn't disprove that claim...)
Click to expand...

True, he could have calmed down between the initial request and the beginning of the video.
 
T

teruterubozu

Member
iapetus said:
All the video proves is that there was a point at which he was not belligerent. He may still have been going nuts before the police arrived.

(I don't believe that he was, but this video doesn't disprove that claim...)
Click to expand...

Perhaps. But anything like this can sway the jury. United is fucked.
 
petran79

petran79

Banned
Eidan said:
WaPo just posted what will likely be my go-to op-ed whenever the next inevitable victim smear campaign begins.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-card-b:homepage/story&utm_term=.5d6ec6a8489c
Click to expand...

One female colleague told me that the airport security scanner would constantly beep, despite her having placed any metallic object on the counter.
Then a security staff asked her if she didnt feel well.
As it turned out she was having her period and had high percentage of iron inside her body.

They know everything!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

So Long Redbox
19
1K
Bridges replied
EA to lay off 5% of workforce, or about 670 employees
News 2
91
7K
CamHostage replied
  • Locked
[TNYT] Brazil Blocks X After Musk Ignores Court Orders
Social News Community 2
69
4K
ManaByte replied
Intel is considering splitting off it's foundry business
Business Hardware
33
2K
marquimvfs replied
Delta flight attendant tackles would-be hijacker, zip-ties his wrists: video
News
16
2K
BouncyFrag replied
Top Bottom