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Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
81–90 of 379 posts
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you keep reading it becomes apparent why this is actually quite shady and not a clean dodge for united. It's an attempt to use lower-wage non-union workers, made more interesting by the fact that Republic are going through bankruptcy (and therefore aren't themselves being sued by the passengers, since there's some sort of limit on the compensation they could get) and that United are semi-OK with taking the blame t…
Why does Lufthansa use Cityline and/or Germanwings or any number of similarly positioned companies to do their bidding on lower density routes? Nearly every major airline in the world that serves feeder routes does this. Remember that Republic also does the American Eagle flights. If these contracting arrangements weren't possible, then you'd see many major airlines dropping the routes. The typical plane for the rout…
The subcontracting of routes isn't what I meant was shady (maybe a bad choice of words) - but the whole "things aren't as they seem" vibe. Plus since United could rightly have lumped the entirety of the blame for an insanely high profile screw up on someone else and issued the usual press release about how they're gonna hold their suppliers to higher standards in future blah blah. But they didn't, it's just ... weird
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than blame the goon squad, you should blame the king for ordering them into action. Or, in this case, the subcontracting sheriff's deputy. I think the more serious error here is the error you display: "people are asked/told to get off planes every day." That may be true, and maybe in most cases results in only a grumpy exit, but this situation seems to have exposed that it is not a legal requirement, and that…
Not an expert, but my understanding after reading that article was that at an important level, whether or not Dr. Dao was obligate to exit depends on whether or not he was appropriately told to exit. If he was, he was trespassing; if not he was not. In this way, it does come back to the police action, because they should have treated it more as an investigation, asking all the parties involved about what was going on…
The trespassing argument is very shaky. There's good analysis out there of the regulations and contract of carriage suggesting the airline had no basis to order him off in the first place, and generally to claim trespass you first need to have the right to exclude the person. "I don't feel like performing my part of my contract with this person" doesn't get you there.
And since the instruction to leave his seat may not have been a lawful/reasonable one, the other prong of the usual argument ("federal law requires compliance with crew member instructions") might not get there either.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you honestly name or a remember a PR disaster as bad as this one about any company in the past two years? Volkswagen was probably just as bad at the time. Now of course most people have kind of forgotten or at least moved on and VW just posted strong Q1 results, handily beating estimates.
Glad you brought that up. VW has even less to do with the dieselgate scandal than UA has with this O'Hare incident. VW uses engines and engine software parametrization from Audi. Audi uses engine software and esp. the cheating device from Bosch. Everyone else also uses it. But VW being the biggest of them all is getting the blame and has to pay the fine.
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Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#85Does anyone else worry from a safety perspective that the pilots flying these "subcontracted" flights are probably paid very low? I read somewhere that even Captain pay at some of these guys can be 60-70K. I know FAA license requirements are stringent but I would have a hard time believing that working for shitty, bankrupt or nearly bankrupt low-cost airlines that don't pay well has to affect your performance to some…
First Officers are paid as low as 25k.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This rubbish is everywhere. Contract cleaning (offices etc) for instance, used to be a profitable small business. Not enough to be rich, but enough for a big house with some decent amenities and to raise a family on a single income. Then in the 90's these gigs went into a pyramid of contracting and sub contracting companies where the company buying the service is paying more but the grunt doing the work is lucky to b…
I can vouch for this story. My parents went through this scenario exactly. They had gotten into office cleaning because it was relatively well paying in the 90's. But in the 90's middle men came into the mix. Someone with better sales ability would win the contract for cleaning office, and subcontract it to someone else. And even that 2nd person might subcontract it to someone else. Eventually, the person really doin…
That is a nice example of why the free market is not neccessarily the guarantor of efficiency.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#87This is not a good article. For one thing, it goes out of its way to paint fairly ordinary things (the use of regional carriers, and the fact that there are many regional carriers, and many of them have contracts with multiple mainline carriers) as "deceptive" (and implying that code-sharing among partner airlines is also "deceptive"). Which says right off the bat that this is someone who doesn't know how airlines re…
> For one thing, it goes out of its way to paint fairly ordinary things (the use of regional carriers, and the fact that there are many regional carriers, and many of them have contracts with multiple mainline carriers) as "deceptive" (and implying that code-sharing among partner airlines is also "deceptive").
This process of subcontracting was something that I (as a reasonably regular traveller) did not know. Yes I'm aware of flights being handled by an alternate airline, but if I book a flight with Virgin Atlantic, it's because I want the level of service I get from Virgin Atlantic.
There being factors that affect the service you get on a flight that are not obvious to the consumer DOES feel like deception to me.
> Which says right off the bat that this is someone who doesn't know how airlines really work I think we can assume from the level of detail in the article that he does know how airlines work, he just has a very different opinion to you about how significant some of that is.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#88Does anyone else worry from a safety perspective that the pilots flying these "subcontracted" flights are probably paid very low? I read somewhere that even Captain pay at some of these guys can be 60-70K. I know FAA license requirements are stringent but I would have a hard time believing that working for shitty, bankrupt or nearly bankrupt low-cost airlines that don't pay well has to affect your performance to some…
Are you trying to say that 60k is low?
$60k is probably not a good estimate.
In the US, a pilot's wages are determined almost exclusively by seniority with the airline. And working at a regional means you're at the very bottom of the bottom of the seniority scale. Starting pay at a regional have clocked in under $30k/year for quite a while. A lot of this is because crews aren't paid for all the hours they spend working -- they're usually only paid for the time from closing the door of the flight they're operating to opening it at the other end. On the junior end of the scale, pilots sometimes go days without sitting behind the controls of a plane because their duties consist of sitting on standby in an airport in case some other pilot can't make a flight.
Throw in the inconsistent flight hours when they do fly, the fact that they usually come in with six figures of debt from flight school, and have limited mobility since switching airlines kicks them right back down to the bottom of the seniority ladder, and you're talking about effectively poverty-level living conditions for the first few years of a pilot's time with an airline.
This is where the alleged "pilot shortage" in the US came from: airlines mistreated their junior ranks so badly, for so long, that they started running out of people willing to put up with it. There are some signs of adjustment at the regionals, but they run on such razor-thin margins that it's not clear they'll really be able to fix this.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember an Air Crash Investigation where the investigators were surprised to hear that the two pilots sounded completely drunk on the black box. It wasn't alcohol, it was the lack of sleep – the guys had just flown halfway across the USA on a jump seat to start their shift in NYC and slept in an 8-bunk-bed subrental in a suburb. So, yes, pilot's low wages in USA's regional airlines is an endemic problem that has k…
But nowadays drinking and drugs are a bigger problem than hours. Remember the movie "Flight"? Thanksfully those planes fly fully automatic, but still some weather decisions have to be made from time to time.
I actually wonder why we still have pilots on board in 2017.
Re: Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
#90This is not a good article. For one thing, it goes out of its way to paint fairly ordinary things (the use of regional carriers, and the fact that there are many regional carriers, and many of them have contracts with multiple mainline carriers) as "deceptive" (and implying that code-sharing among partner airlines is also "deceptive"). Which says right off the bat that this is someone who doesn't know how airlines re…
> For one thing, it goes out of its way to paint fairly ordinary things (the use of regional carriers, and the fact that there are many regional carriers, and many of them have contracts with multiple mainline carriers) as "deceptive" (and implying that code-sharing among partner airlines is also "deceptive"). This process of subcontracting was something that I (as a reasonably regular traveller) did not know. Yes I'…
It's more that he seizes on this "well I bet you didn't know the airline is DECEIVING you" to spin a whole sinister thing and it just destroys his credibility. Every industry has commonplace things that can be made to look bad, and usually the people who try to take advantage of that are quacks.