Rather than find a sensible solution to a problem the company created, United chose violence…
Video appeared online late Sunday night showing a United Airlines passenger getting dragged off of a plane. The airline had overbooked and needed four seats for their employees to make their connecting flights. They first offered 400 dollars and a replacement flight, then 800 dollars and a replacement flight. Nobody volunteered so, apparently being inspired by the Hunger Games, they randomly selected four passengers. One of the men selected claimed to be a doctor who had patients he needed to see Monday morning and couldn’t give up his flight. Showing the kind of sensitive customer service that is the subject of this post, United Airlines summoned three security personnel to drag him from the plane. In doing so they busted his lip and as you can see in the disturbing video, he was rather disheveled as well.
We don’t know the entire situation, but we do know that a stupefying and inflexible solution to a problem is typical of every bureaucracy. No matter how noble the intention of the bureaucrat or bill, it still produces unintended consequences that usually hurt people. So a bill designed to make health insurance more available, results in millions losing their insurance, bills designed to create affordable housing lead to the most expensive housing markets in the country, tax increases designed to raise revenue are dodged and end up producing less revenue, and a school nutritionist hired to help kids be healthy and happy, thinks it’s appropriate to take away school lunches from hungry children. This is why people must separate the idealistic rhetoric used by politicians to justify a new law or course of action, with its possible and unintended side effects.
But in this case, the forcible removal seemed like an intended policy! United could have chosen any number of alternatives to avoid arriving at the point where they forcibly remove a passenger that paid for his ticket. In the pursuit of profits that come from full flights – not mostly full flights – their first mistake was allowing customers to overbook the flight. They could have figured out another way to move their personnel or simply had their staff wait for another flight, thus suffering the consequences of the company’s decisions. Sure, that isn’t ideal, but it shouldn’t be that difficult to put customers first especially after the company created the problem in the first place. They could have offered even more significant compensation that would have induced volunteers to give up their seats. I’m pretty chill and wouldn’t have minded trading an extra night in town for a good meal, nice hotel room, and a first class seat the next morning. But I was not there and people have unique priorities.
Sadly, the airline didn’t do any of those things. They relied upon brute force to solve a problem caused by their capricious judgement and inflexible policies. Stories like this happen all the time. Faceless government or corporate bureaucrats rarely craft well thought out policies that can create sensitive and timely solutions. Instead, customers that paid for a flight are given a bloody lip and dragged from the aircraft.
Morgan Deane is an OpsLens Contributor and a former U.S. Marine Corps infantry rifleman. Deane also served in the National Guard as an Intelligence Analyst. He is the author of the forthcoming book Decisive Battles in Chinese history, as well as Bleached Bones and Wicked Serpents: Ancient Warfare in the Book of Mormon.
