Several folks have written me about the United Airlines incident to suggest that the passenger, Dr. David Dao, was at fault for not quickly complying with police orders. Others have linked me to this article allegedly by a pilot's wife giving the company's side of it.
She's right that the airlines have the right to just kick a paying passenger off a flight. Back in 2012, United Airlines was in serious P.R. trouble. This is not a new thing for them and back then, my buddy Joe Brancatelli wrote this article. It was about how airlines have all the rights and passengers have none…and that equation has not changed. And she's correct that sometimes, the airlines need seats to shuttle their employees to where they need them to keep the system functioning.
Where she starts to lose me is when she brings up 9/11 and couches matters in terms of security. That's a nice, all-purpose excuse which the airlines could use to justify any kind of misbehavior. ("Trans-Debris Airlines is sorry that we had to lock your six-year-old son in the overhead baggage compartment and give his seat to one of our corporate executives but there were safety concerns which we're not at liberty to explain, especially since 9/11.") I didn't hear anyone claim they needed to remove Dr. Dao from the flight because someone thought he was a hijacker.
And she really loses me when she rebuts the statement, "It's the airline's fault for not planning better!" by writing…
You obviously have no clue about the complexities of aviation travel and should do some research. There are about a million and one things that can cause a crew shortage including but not limited to weather, maintenance, weather, connecting fight delays, weather, FAA timeout regs, and did I mention weather?
In the incident in question, no one has cited weather or any of those other situations as a justification. No one has suggested that if, say, a hurricane was about to hit, an airline might not be justified in making some decisions that inconvenience passengers. I also have this strange hunch that the airlines — not just United but all of them — have been having 'round-the-clock meetings to discuss how to avoid this kind of thing by planning better. Yeah, this whole brouhaha would not have happened if Dr. Dao had behaved better. It also would not have happened if United had figured out they needed that seat before he was told he could board the plane.
It is true that we, as consumers, don't always understand all the invisible-to-us reasons why some businesses do what they do. That does not mean our complaints are wrong or that we should stop making them. I don't really know how my sewage system works but if it starts emptying into my sock drawer, I'm going to at least suspect my plumber has done something wrong. In the meantime, Matt Yglesias has a good, long article on what's wrong the airlines today. [SPOILER ALERT: It's because so many of their customers care about getting the lowest price and nothing else.]