Based on UAL's Contract of Carriage, they violated their own rules. This flight wasn't "OVERSOLD," because the four employees were NON-REV. They didn't buy a ticket, thus they weren't "sold" anything!

Oh, those pesky little rules.

Plus, as I mentioned above, the removed pax had already boarded, so by definition his boarding couldn't be denied, as it already took place.

Culture, tonyhap, culture. That response IS what their training tells them to do. Your comment about "civilised" response strikes a chord. Read some of the literature about differing police response tactics around the world. Japan v/s the USA is a good start.

tonyhap Looking at this from across the Eastern side of the Pond, American Police training does not seem to include 'second thoughts' or 'shall we just step back a moment' thoughts. :hmm:

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

Also do we know if any of the deadheading crews were pilots or were they just flight attendants?

On another forum a United pilot said that in their clause they do have the right to bump a passenger if they need to get somewhere to work but he wasn’t so sure flight attendants had the same clause.

Hems

They weren't non reving, thats when you hope there's open seats to Hawaii for you and your family. They were DH'ing on business. There are differences.

It was UA's fault for failing to raise the financial incentive for "volunteering to deboard" enough to manage the situation peaceably, and indeed voluntarily by the pax.

They allowed it to progress past that point, to forcible removal of a passenger selected at random who didn't want to volunteer, presumably because the compensation wasn't high enough to offset his personal/professional needs for taking that flight. This led to what anyone outside the airline industry will see as unprovoked physical assault on a paying passenger. The fact that nobody else was taking the $800 offer didn't give the airlines permission to start forcibly removing people by means of proxy (the airport police).

Whatever you think of that logic, or the various regs involved, it's how the entire world outside the airline industry is seeing this right now.

I do think it would be helpful to see exactly how the conflict escalated, but at this point it's irrelevant. One or more people at UA made some very bad decisions here.

In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, I doubt UA will "suffer" much at all. This will be forgotten by tomorrow night at the latest replaced by Ms Kardashian's ass or something similarly extraordinarily important, and no, I don't work for UA (although, in the interest of full disclosure, I did use to fly for the "regional partner" in question).

Airlines have done much worse things...

Absolutely correct

Clearly you're not denying that violence occurred?
1) UA wanted his seat, he attempted to force them to honor their contract to fly him home.
2) UA called the CPD to extricate him from the plane against his will.
3) The passenger was beaten and injured in the process.
Any time you call the police, the odds are that someone is going to get f-ed up. It is what they do, because cops are hammers and non cops are nails. Therefore every situation is treated as a "problem/nail"...in the US at least. Once the CPD was called, the outcome was predictable. If the passenger had been a young black man, the outcome would have been much worse. This situation should have been resolved before anyone was boarded.

West Coast

With respect... United's own collective agreements refer to "deadheading" as "non revenue, positive space". So Hems terminology is correct.

Griz

Positive space and must ride are terms Hems should be familiar with. He claims to be retired airline, in a debate such as this, an airline pilot, a Captain at that would be aware of nuances. His post was absent any, on par with what would be expected from someone familiar with the term but not what it meant to an airline pilot.

Given his claim, I hold him to a higher level of understanding.

Certainly Amadis of Gaul
However, in the previous referred to 2008 affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars it is reported (and cited):

Yah, nothing else happened in 2008 did it?

Among others, the mistaken belief UA was going back into bankruptcy based on an old article. Stocks plunged.

Correlation = causation? Maybe, maybe not, I'm not a stock market expert...

Nope. UA is being called in front the Transportation Committee, as are the CPD cops. Congress didn't like those visuals.

That's not entirely true, is it? Nobody is being called in front of anyone yet, so far only one member of said committee has requested a hearing. Guess we'll see if and when said hearing happens.

You shouldn't be in a service industry if you don't understand the power of negative publicity. Hopefully some of the GAs and uniformed thugs involved will be exploring new career opportunities soon.

And a month ago refusing to board two females because they were wearing leggings? Even Delta tweeted that they were welcome on any their flights.

450K miles on UAL since the 1950s and I'll never fly them again. There if fundamental flaw in UAL's culture since the merger with Continental. Even their coffee is now undrinkable.

We seem to have already forgotten that this was a Republic Airlines flight, and the incident could have happened as easily on one of Republic's other codeshares with American or Delta.

Thanks B1. I work for another carrier where I enjoy a pretty decent upper middle income lifestyle. Haven't had to screw over any pax today, but the day is young.