How United Airlines Went from “Friendly Skies” to Throwing People Off Flights

It is exactly what booking a seat is: buying an entitlement to seat in that plane for that specific flight. Otherwise what's the point? I understand that overbooking can be useful for companies, but in that case they should just buy back the service they oversold. That's how markets work.

Property rights are not everything. What is protected in a market economy is the free transaction between two economic actors. United's property rights of the plane, of course (even though it's likely to be leased, anyway), but also the rights created by the contract between the carrier and the passenger. If you don't protect these rights, you have nothing like a functioning market economy. Capitalism relies on social structures able to protect rights.

United's own Contract of Carriage uses the term boarding and discusses overbooked flights: https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of-carriag...

However, by all accounts (including the statement from Oscar Munoz) is that the Airline Employees needed to board after the customers had already boarded.

The simple matter is that United really doesn't have a policy in place for such an event, but they tried to treat is as an overbooking anyways, which is questionable.

If this had happened before the passenger got on there wouldn't have been much of a story - but United got themselves into a pickle by not having a procedure in place for moving their employees around when the plane was already loaded up and ready to go.

Strictly speaking, refusing to leave was a violation of the airline's rules, but they also didn't really have the right to eject him per their own Contract. You don't surrender all rights when you board a plane, and quite frankly it doesn't seem like United has a lot of ground to stand on when it comes to this particular incident. They didn't have a policy in place and tried to make another one fit, but it was an awkward fit at best.

I realize that "overbook" can mean different things but United flight #3411 wasn't oversold to statistically offset no-shows. Instead, the plane had a capacity of 70 seats[1] and United sold all 70 seats to paying customers with zero cancellations. That's a perfect economic situation for United.

What went wrong was 4 extra United employees needed a last-minute ride on that plane to Kentucky. Since this is an HN audience, I guess we could frame it as a massive failure in the "information flow" through their computer reservations system.

The very second that United knew they had 4 employees they had to acccomodate, their computer system should have immediately confirmed those 4 employees on flight #3411 first such that the plane only shows 66 available seats instead of 70. (Computers doing math for the win!) That way, either 4 of the customers get denied a boarding pass at the check-in kiosk, or they get denied at the gate that scans the barcode before they enter the jetway. Instead, United let all 70 passengers board and settle in their seats.

If United insists that their employees take precedence over paying passengers, their damn computer systems need to reflect that reality in the seating database!

All of those opportunities to have the computer system "help" were missed that would have prevented the situation from escalating to a bloody face plastered all over the news.

[1] https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...

But most people traveling for personal reasons (and many traveling on business) choose or are required to choose the rock bottom price which results in not only stripped down amenities but also a general focus on cutting operational costs to the bone.

Furthermore, the big legacy carriers are still generally more attractive to regular business travelers because of their loyalty programs which insulate them from at least some of the worst aspects brought on by competition on price. (In that they get a somewhat better class of service without paying for it directly.)