Remove United from your flight results

I object to the parent's question as being a form of character assassination. There's a lot of garbage written on the internet, and claims of being a lawyer or in any way an authority on a particular subject should be questioned.

It's great that others have checked out the guy's statements, but I think the downvotes on the parent and easy dismissal of his/her IMO reasonable question is a bit much.

Put the Flight Attendants on the Jumpseat, and put the pilots on the UPS flights that to go SDF. If they were truly "Space-Positive" must-rides, they would have had seating assignments.

Seriously, this wasn't hard.

> If people were not deplaned, another flight would have been delayed/cancelled affecting not one or two people but hundreds.

And how does that become David Doa's personal problem?

And how are you gonna feel about "restorative justice" when United pay his hospital bills - and then assault one of your family/friends next month, because they know it's cheaper doing that than delaying/canceling flights (or, you know, getting their fucking shit together and having proper plans to get flight crews to their planes without turfing paid and seated passengers off aircraft...)

Like I said - I hate "ambulance chasing lawyers", but I genuinely hope this ends with an out of court settlement north of 10mil - not because I think Dao or the lawyer "deserve" that much, but to make it crystal clear to all United employees (including the CEO) that this is _never_ the right way to deal with this problem.

We _know_ what his seat was worth - $1600 - someone else offered to get off for that, and was "laughed in the face". United were offering $800. The one of the four crew missing their spots - worst case - affects "hundreds" of other people (people you'll note who, like Dao, have paid-up tickets and contractual arrangements with United, not Dao...).

Let's say United managed to only incur the $800 per seat costs they were offering here as compensation to the "hundreds" of other passengers potentially affected by one crew members absence. At the very low end, if "hundreds" is only 200 - that's $160,000 dollars of risk - and I admit that's something the on-site United manager needed to mitigate. Which they had the option to do for only $800. Instead - they almost certainly broke the law, purposefully mis-used non-applicable regulations, and didn't back off when things started to go pearshaped, not just in the aircraft, but with the tone-deaf initial two messages from the CEO.

So by saving $800, they put a guy in hospital, and the people who made that decision got backed all the way up the management chain to the CEO and his legal advisers - in a $22billion company.

And you're somehow implying that what the victim did here makes him as much as a jerk as the United and airport rent-a-cop people?

Sorry, we do not agree on that - you are just wrong.

And I stand by my earlier comment - if this doesn't end up with a settlement up in 8 figures, _my_ read of that will be that United fully intend to do this again next time it suits them, and that assaulting paying customers in the interest of "shareholder value" is part of their procedure manual.

I'm pretty sure they even have interline agreements covering this situation.

That is exactly it. Hindsight. In hindsight I'm sure a lot of the people involved would have made different decisions. That's easy, and it's easy for all of us to criticize what they did, given that we have the benefit of hindsight (and a distinct lack of solid information, so the usual outrage machine has taken hold).

This was a very rare event: in the majority of cases, they're able to get volunteers to take a later flight. In almost every single one of the cases where they aren't, the people involuntarily bumped leave without incident. I doubt anyone on the flight crew foresaw their chain of actions ending in violence, right up until it happened. And I think that lack of foresight is entirely reasonable and understandable.

United (as a company) did a poor job of handling the aftermath, though.