According to Chicago newspapers, it was Chicago Dept of Aviation officers who injured Dr Dao. Two more were suspended yesterday.
Here is a Q and A for folks like me.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-united-chicago-aviation-police-met-20170413-story.html
It says the aviation officers must be state certified police?
At least one Chicago news writer can’t figure out why Chicago city police issued a statement.
BusDriver- Dr. Dao is only allowed to practice 1 day a week at this clinic where he is supervised. That is after a 10 year old conviction where he wasn’t allowed to practice until fairly recently, as far as I can tell from the reports. Again- that is no excuse for beating him up, but the fact that he was crucial to the life of his patients is greatly exaggerated.
That’s because the underlying reason for United to bump passengers seems very sketchy from the get-go not only from a customer service perspective, but also legally as several legal commentators have stated once someone has been boarded by virtue of them taking a seat, they can only be bumped off for specifically stipulated reasons under specific rules in that situation…and getting flight crew to their destinations or higher priority passengers aren’t covered.
If the underlying reasons for calling security is sketchy, then the ones calling them in are responsible for any negative fallout which may result.
I would not be surprised that the next time this happens at United (smaller aircraft, essential flight crew need to get onboard), that they just cancel the flight. Not the follow on flight from the destination, but the one from the base. They offer as much as they are allowed to, there aren’t enough takers, they deplane the passengers and cancel the flight. Then they fly it to the destination as a ferry flight, with only flight crew (and maybe nonrevs) onboard. Careful what you wish for, nobody is involuntarily bumped, just cancelled.
Or they deplane and only readmit those who were not bumped. That way they don’t have the chance of this fiasco.
Well I am sure if United feels they did nothing wrong in how they handled the situation and what they did in regard to their policy of removing paying passengers from their planes to give the seats to their employees is due to federal laws under which they operate - then they will surely welcome Dr. Dao’s lawsuit and will easily win in court.
And that mentality was very similar to that of a defendant in a civil suit and his attorney in a civil case I got to sit in on as part of my job as IT guy in a law firm representing the plaintiff.
Well…up until the judge/jury ruled against the defendant, gave the plaintiff more than what was asked for, and loudly scolded the defendant for his stubborn attitude in light of his weak/practically non-existent case, and excoriated the attorney for his cluelessness in court.
Even as a non-attorney, I could tell from the public court documents and from the arguments presented the defendant had no leg to stand on and yet, he and his lawyer acted as if they were the ones holding aces in their sleeves.
Don’t be ridiculous. This has as much chance of going to trial as the Disney alligator case. The guy gets some bucks. Good for him. Hope it was worth it!
From post #1, how is that even allowed and passengers allowed to be treated like that?
Sure, procedures may change related to overbooked flights like the one in Dr Dao’s case, but it doesn’t touch bumping for higher ranked passengers.
@cobrat, I was being sarcastic.
The last thing United wants to do is end up in court. They will pay plaintiff big bucks to get a settlement.
Cancelling the flight and reaccommodating (or refunding) all of those passengers could very well be more expensive than whatever offer it would take to get enough volunteers to give up their seats to accommodate the flight crew that must get on to service a flight originating at the other airport.
Of course, since airlines sometimes choose an option that is more expensive (in either or both money or lost goodwill) when a less expensive option exists, it would not be surprising that they would do this.
There’s a lot of folks who hope United’s Management continues to be clueless enough to stubbornly insist on a trial so there is an opportunity for them to be legally “re-accomodated” bigtime by the judge/jury.
busdriver11 wrote:
“I would not be surprised that the next time this happens at United (smaller aircraft, essential flight crew need to get onboard), that they just cancel the flight. Not the follow on flight from the destination, but the one from the base. They offer as much as they are allowed to, there aren’t enough takers, they deplane the passengers and cancel the flight. Then they fly it to the destination as a ferry flight, with only flight crew (and maybe nonrevs) onboard. Careful what you wish for, nobody is involuntarily bumped, just cancelled.”
That wouid just create another PR disaster for the airline as all the passengers wouid know that the flight was cancelled because no one volunteered to be re-accommodated.
“This doctor behaved like an idiot and practices 1 day a week at a clinic due to his prior drug conviction”
This is the fundamental way the law and order types respond to police or authority brutality, it was justified because the victim had a criminal record, the victim once smoked pot, the victim had been bankrupt, etc, it is the old 'if Dinsdale nailed my head to the floor,why, he must have had good reason, anything old Dinsey told me was good enough for me"
“Yeah, well, customers aren’t always right. I spend a lot of time in my legal practice dealing with horrible things customers do in our stores, like sexually harass or assault minor employees, threaten our employees with guns, etc. And these are mainly in very safe, rural areas!”
Very safe rural areas? Have you read anything about what rural areas are like these days, drug addiction, drug fueled crime, etc…
More importantly, do you know what the origin of ‘the customer is always right’ means/came about? The idea of the customer is always right is not that in fact they always are, that customers are always good or behave well and you have to take it if they do, the point of this is to assume the customer is a good customer and you don’t want to lose them, pure and simple, because a customer is a hard thing to get back once you have lost them. I don’t care if 75% of customers are a-holes, you don’t treat any customer like they are one of the 75% but the 25%. The attitude that justified bad behavior towards customers because some are bad news reminds me of the attitude of public unions, that when you complained about the rude, obnoxious behavior many people associate with their members, you get 'you don’t know what it is like to deal with the public, you don ‘t know how hard it is, how nasty people are’ as justification for treating other people like that, and that is why most people have the jaundiced view they do of public employees (and the public employees have paid for that, the way United will, it was not a small part behind privatizing public services and the efforts in places like Wisconsin to gut public employees and their power, they paid the price for defending the undefendable, it came back to bite them).
This boils down to ‘the customer be dammed’ on the part of United (look up the reference to the quote), and the reason this resonates @momofwildchild is that the airline industry as a whole acts like they are doing people a favor when they fly, they make it seem like they are to be supplicated to and if you don’t, well, heaven help you. When you are the passenger on an airline you are literally at your mercy, and in many cases the whole experience of flying reinforces that, you get surprised when someone is nice or really tries to help, and the airlines themselves time and again have shown contempt for the people flying. Everything done was wrong, from bumping passengers already seated (no one has explained how they suddently realized they absolutely needed 4 seats only after they boarded, especially since it looks like the employees didn’t need to be there that night), to not even trying to entice people to be bumped, like maybe offering more money and a first class upgrade and a hotel room, if it was so critical to get the employees to the other end, then the money should not have been an issue if they had to have it, instead they basically chose to force people off the flight using their power to do so, rather than entice them (I guess the airlines never heard that honey works better than vinegar when trying to make bad tasting medicine go down).
The attitude of the airline industry was summed up by some guy who used to head AMR, he said “Well, of course the procedures should be reviewed, it showed some issues there”( “Ya think, Dinozo?”). But then he was asked about congressional inquiry into this, and said “well, you know congress is reactive, and out of this will come some information, but they will come up with a bunch of regulations the industry will have to bear”. The person on the show was on their knees to the great pooh bah, of course, but I would love to point out to the schnook that the rules we now have when a customer gets bumped (compensation) and more importantly when customers are left on the runway or gate for hours and hours they are entitled to compensation, came from congress and the FAA, if up to the glorious airline industry they could do what they did in the good old days ie tell the customer “tough”.
I am not a lawyer, but I have dual masters degrees in management, and from a management viewpoint this is a disaster area, pure and simple, you study more than a few cases in management and you start to recognize signs of bad culture and organization pretty early. This wasn’t one mistake, it was a chain of them, and it wasn’t an accident, it is because the airline employees have no sense of what ‘the customer is always right’ is truly about.
The other big thing the head of United showed was he didn’t learn the lessons from the past and also doesn’t have his head in the 21st century. Even 15 years ago, United could stonewall and say “I stand behind our people, I believe they were trying to do their job and while it is unfortunate what happened to the passenger, he was the one who caused the trouble” and even if other people on the plane said differently, likely they would get enough people to say “yep, must have been that bad ole customer”. Problem is you are in the 21st century with social media and cell phone video and the CEO thought he could bluster his way out (if I was a management consultant to the company, and saw how Munoz reacted before ‘getting it right’, I would probably recommend they think about canning him, he now is tainted merchandise), it showed absolutely just how arrogant and blind the people running the show are. It took the CEO 3 statements, the first two basically denying this was a big deal and standing by his employees, when the fire was already out there and moron was pouring gasoline on it, as with Tylenol the only answer was “This whole incident was handled badly from start to finish and what happened to that passenger shouldn’t happen to anyone at any time, and as CEO of the company I take full responsibility for what happened and apologize to the passenger who was so badly treated, and promise that we will take the lessons from this to make sure it never happens again to any passenger”. I am sure the lawyers probably told him to deny the way he did in his first statements, but in this case the court of public opinion is a lot more important then trying to stonewall lawsuits or having to pay out, at this point no matter what the corporate weasels tried to do they already were facing massive losses.
I suspect the legal eagles at United are already proposing a pretty hefty settlement to keep the doctor quiet, personally I would love for the family to take it to court where all was public, and while UA and their legal staff could do what they typically do, ie drag this on for years, with appeals and motions and the like, it would also likely be a nice, humbling experience for the airline industry that has shown most of us contempt for all this to come out in court, but I suspect now United will pay anything to make this go away.
@bunsenburner:
Actually, fares are not that cheap now if you compare what they were before. Given how much it costs you for those ‘cheap seats’, all the things that used to be included, I wonder how cheap they really are, what it is is that the airlines have created the equivalent of a third world airline (without the chickens on board, at least not yet).
busdriver, when you say “They offer as much as they are allowed to,” why do you assume there is any ceiling whatsoever on what airlines can offer someone to voluntarily relinquish their seat? There may be a ceiling on the compensation for involuntary boarding, but where in the law is there any limit to what the airline can choose to offer to someone? I see no reason why they couldn’t have offered $1500 cash, or $2000 cash. If they had done so, someone would almost certainly have accepted the offer, and then their relinquishing the seat would not have been involuntary.
I am asking how much more you will be willing to pay for a contract that guarantees your seat no matter what compared with the current crappy contract - not saying anything about whether prices are too low or too high.
If we were to talk about cheap or not cheap, here is one personal anecdote. In 2000, when we flew to HI for the first time, I paid $450 for bargain-basement tickets. Last year, I paid $500 for same kind of tickets. My Comcast bill went up to $105 from $15 in the same period of time… for the same crappy programming. I’ve paid as low as $300 RT to Maui after 9/11. No one wanted to fly.
@bunsenburner:
The real question is that 450 dollar flight in 2000, how did it compare to the 500 dollar flight? Did the 450 have a meal with it, and the 500 did not? When you flew that 450 dollar flight, likely there was more leg room then with the 500, they crowd a lot more people on planes now. That might have been a bargain basement flight back then, but was it comparable service other than the fact that you got to Hawaii? My take is that you are paying more for comparable service these days, you can’t compare the typical third world flight of today with even coach back then, least not based on my experiences flying.
I regularly pay more to fly Delta because I think this sort of thing is less likely to happen and I get better service. I recently opted to take Amtrak instead of flying and was very happy with the experience.
musicprnt- I don’t read your whole posts because they are just too long. I believe that has been pointed out to you. I assure you that I am very familiar with the locations in which my company operates and I am well aware of some of the hazards facing even the farming communities that surround us. Our company is a leader in customer satisfaction and customer service, but there are still some bad apples out there and we won’t tolerate some behaviors.
Also, how many times do I have to say that I am not bringing up the doctor’s drug conviction and restrictions to victim-shame him but merely to counter the allegations that he was so special that he had to get back to his patients. I don’t care if he was a street person flying on a charity ticket. He should not have been manhandled. I think we all, including the CEO of United, agree on that. He did state that he would have to be dragged off the plane, and, in fact, he was. His need to get to Louisville that night was less than that of the crew and no greater than that of any of the other passengers.
That’s just silly. They will not take this to trial.