Originally Posted by
framer
I imagine United has the equivalent of an 'Airline Duty Manager' for that port. If so, they have not managed the on load of the crew and offload of the pax well.
If the paxing crew presenting at the gate was a surprise to the gate staff / duty manager then that is poor communication within the Airline. Either way staffing levels and poor training will be at the root of it. A calm, well trained, experienced person in authority at the gate would have prevented this escalating to the point where security was required.
Ensuring that staff are calm, well trained and experienced requires mature executive management decisions that value those traits.
Does executive management recognise and value these unquantifiable traits? If not, there is the root cause of the problem and the cost is now slightly more 'quantifiable '.
Not true. An Airport Duty Manager may well have been told of the urgent need to offload a passenger and put a crew member on at the last minute when boarding is completed. At several airline's I've worked at aircraft have been held to wait for a crew member having just been advised that someone has gone unexpectedly sick at another port and other crew might be out of hours if the replacement doesn't fly on that flight. I'm sure we've offloaded commercial passengers more than once to accommodate... very, very rarely but it has happened. Usually it's just been a case of holding the aircraft past departure time until the crew member came running up the concourse to get on board. We don't know all the circumstances and suggesting that the Airport Duty Manager had not planned well is probably not the case. At one airline I worked at, we had a crew member open a bottle of champagne on board and a piece of the metal surround broke off and shot up and struck him in the eye, the aircraft diverted and was delayed while a crew member getting to a flight about to depart for that destination was accommodated. Crew DO trump commercial pax because not having the crew member travel may inconvenience hundreds instead of one person who is offloaded. Conditions of carriage state clearly and always have that the carrier undertakes to provide the carriage but reserves the right at its absolute discretion to delay, divert, re-route the flight or flights or change the equipment or the carrier(s) involved. None of this excuses the behavior and the manner in which the removal was conducted... have to say though, if I was in the same situation I may ask why and if they insisted I would get off the aeroplane as they requested and argue it out with the manager, I wouldn't refuse to get off the aircraft. However, I would also not condone that sort of force being used which was obviously completely over the top