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Must be differences between UK and US law - here in the UK, they can't just lift me without giving a reason. Now they don't have to give that reason to anyone else, just me.

I thought Airports didn't count as part of a country or something? That'll learn me to get info from overlong if heartwarming movies. Damn you Hollywood!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh the Police are welcome to chat to me whenever and about anything.

But as soon as they try to arrest me or unfairly waylay me, they better read me my rights and tell me what it is I'm being arrested on suspicion of.

They can't just nick me.

And I'm fairly sure that a Police Officer in the above scenario is more than simply a henchman for the carrier - and if I argue my case to the police officer, they will have the power to choose whether or not to remove me, no?

And a general aside - I was under the impression that airports have a weird sovereign status thing (though that is based on that Tom Hanks film)?

as a note, the officer has been suspended. as of this morning the feds are investigating the incident.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Must be differences between UK and US law - here in the UK, they can't just lift me without giving a reason. Now they don't have to give that reason to anyone else, just me.

Note that I'm not talking about what is a legal arrest in the sense that your lawsuit over wrongful arrest will fail in court, I'm talking about the practical question of "what do you do when a cop says you're under arrest and pulls out the handcuffs". It doesn't matter what you think about the situation, what reasons they've given, etc, you either accept that you're arrested and comply or you commit the crime of resisting arrest and get subdued by whatever force is necessary. Even if it's a blatantly illegal arrest and you're about to sue the police for a ton of money you are still required to comply at that moment, and dispute it later in court.

And of course, in this situation, there was no such blatantly illegal order being given. Your entire argument about removing the passenger being unacceptable relies on a subtle legal argument involving a complex contract. In a situation like that the police are always going to get the benefit of the doubt and the assumption is that their instructions are legal, and you're obligated to obey.

I thought Airports didn't count as part of a country or something?

No, that's something that was (apparently) made up by a movie. Airports are part of wherever they're located, the only difference between the airport and the property next to it is that the airport is subject to various federal laws governing airports and aviation in general.

 Peregrine wrote:

No, it's how contracts work. If you're stupid enough to agree to a contract for a major purchase without bothering to read what you're agreeing to then you have only yourself to blame if you don't like the details of it.

Unfortunately because the contracts are almost always huge and hard to read, almost no-one reads them. Did you read the full T&C for the last flight you booked?

I don't know how long the UA T&C are, or at what point they are provided (on booking? check-in?), but do you really expect everyone to have read them?

Then if the contract is vague, do you expect a layman to query it (will UA clarify contractual terms if you ask them without a lawyer? and do you trust the interpretation of the person at the desk?), or do you expect them to either just go with it (no choice) and make what they feel is the most obvious conclusion from the words in front of them?

A good lawyer can easily argue that those 4 crew were in fact, crew, and that the T&C didn't allow for the Passenger to be evicted on their behalf.

Peregrine is correct in that it's on the consumer to read the T&Cs, contract and what have you.

But likewise, if that contract isn't clear, fair and not misleading, and doesn't rely on uncommon definitions of words (especially when it's defined others), why would you find in favour of the business?

 Peregrine wrote:

The basis for removal is "because God said so". Everything after that is only relevant to a potential future lawsuit, after the passenger has been removed from the aircraft.

Was the pilot actually involved in this, beyond having authority over the plane in which it happened?

Herzlos wrote:
I don't know how long the UA T&C are, or at what point they are provided (on booking? check-in?), but do you really expect everyone to have read them?

No, I expect that many people will buy without reading the contract they're signing. But if you do that you don't get to complain when it turns out that you agreed to something you aren't really happy with. And this is especially true in the case of overbooking and bumping passengers to a different flight, something that is standard practice in the airline industry. This isn't the airline pulling out some obscure sub-sub-sub-section of the contract that only happens once a decade, it's the airline enforcing a straightforward condition of purchase that happens hundreds of thousands of times per year. If you haven't bothered to pay enough attention to understand that buying a ticket for a particular flight does not guarantee that you will travel from point A to point B at that exact time then you have only yourself to blame.

As for when they're provided, they're available before you purchase the ticket. They're referenced in the purchasing process, and available on the airline's website at any time.


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Herzlos wrote:
Was the pilot actually involved in this, beyond having authority over the plane in which it happened?

Implicitly, by being the final authority on everything aboard the plane. The crew acting as the pilot's subordinates may exercise that authority sometimes, and are minor gods underneath God.

Unreadable contracts have been ruled non-binding in the past though, on the basis that it's not feasible to read them. I'm positive it happened with one of the Apple contracts (iTunes is 56 pages of legaleze).

Thanks for the link to the CoC; it's 79 pages, 37527 words. That'd presumably be at least a days work for a lawyer to read and agree to, and it was updated a few weeks ago so would need to be re-read.

Herzlos wrote:
A good lawyer can easily argue that those 4 crew were in fact, crew, and that the T&C didn't allow for the Passenger to be evicted on their behalf.

They really can't. They aren't performing any job duties aboard the plane, aren't getting paid for being there, aren't subject to any of the FAA regulations governing crew aboard a plane, aren't legally responsible for the safety of the flight, and aren't considered crew under the relevant federal regulations for their industry. They are employees of the airline commuting to work as passengers, and the entire argument otherwise seems to be "this one document doesn't explicitly say that they aren't crew".


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Herzlos wrote:
Unreadable contracts have been ruled non-binding in the past though, on the basis that it's not feasible to read them. I'm positive it happened with one of the Apple contracts (iTunes is 56 pages of legaleze).

Thanks for the link to the CoC; it's 79 pages, 37527 words. That'd presumably be at least a days work for a lawyer to read and agree to, and it was updated a few weeks ago so would need to be re-read.

Good luck with that argument. I'm pretty sure that contract has been used enough in the past that is validity has been established. And I'm pretty sure that there's a significant difference between having 56 pages of contract for a simple music player and having a similar number of pages for a very expensive product with complex liability issues, international legal issues (and their governing treaties), etc. You can make the argument that Apple is throwing up an unreasonable wall of text that no reasonable customer can be expected to read. You can't make the same argument about the CoC, which is a pretty straightforward handling of a subject that inherently requires a long contract to cover every aspect of it in adequate detail.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Here are some helpful questions you might think about, in determining if the passengers involved were even "crew" in any informal sense:

1) What legal responsibilities did they have while aboard the flight? Were they subject to the federal regulations governing crew, or to the rules for ordinary passengers?

2) What legal authority did they have while aboard the flight? Were they permitted to issue instructions to passengers and expect compliance, or were they in the same position as ordinary passengers and limited to politely asking someone?

3) What would have happened if the pilots had asked them to take over for a bit while they went to the bathroom? Would this have been a normal division of responsibilities between crew members, or a blatantly illegal action that would result in the FAA revoking the licenses of everyone involved and putting some serious attention on the airline as a whole?

(The answers are "ordinary passengers", "ordinary passengers", and "we fired them, please dear god don't revoke United's operating certificate over this".)

Being employees transported by their employer, I'd be interested to see what their contract of employment has to say about conduct and expectations (if indeed anything). If it has specific instructions, that alone differentiates them from regular Passengers, creating a new situation.

What provision is made for an Airplane! type situation where the flight's crew take ill - are they or are they not expected to fill in, whether officially off the clock or not?

Taking over the flight? Probs completely illegal (though one does wonder if not unheard of. When you gotta go, you gotta go!)

I'd argue they weren't commuting to work, in the conventional sense. They were being transported between sites of work, at their employers instructions, at their employers expense. It also wasn't pre-booked travel.

Now I appreciate that they probably weren't on the clock, but to a layman (having probably not read the FAA stuff) it's hard to distinguish between crew and off-duty crew, from a legal POV, when the CoC doesn't make any distinction.

At the end of the day it's down to what lawyers can make of the words written in the CoC, but this will get settled long before that because UA know how badly they've stuffed up.

I wouldn't settle meself. You may have noticed, I can be quite belligerent, and I'd be keen to set a precedent for this sort of situation (not the assault, the 'get off, we're putting our staff on instead')

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Being employees transported by their employer, I'd be interested to see what their contract of employment has to say about conduct and expectations (if indeed anything). If it has specific instructions, that alone differentiates them from regular Passengers, creating a new situation.

That is not sufficient. Employees of an airline that are clearly NOT crew often get free travel perks (and have to follow the company's code of conduct while getting free travel), but it would be insane to argue that a random customer service person is considered "crew" on a flight just because they have some "don't make the company look bad" rules to follow.

What provision is made for an Airplane! type situation where the flight's crew take ill - are they or are they not expected to fill in, whether officially off the clock or not?

That would be an emergency situation, which means that the normal rules no longer apply. The pilot in command has the authority to do whatever they feel is necessary* to ensure the safe conclusion of the flight, including getting assistance from non-crew passengers who have useful skills to offer. On the clock, off the clock, even whether they're employed by the airline at all, none of that matters. It would, however, be a last resort in a "we're all going to die otherwise" situation, not any kind of intended backup crew. If at all possible the pilots would divert to an alternate airport and land early.

*For a very generous definition of "whatever". As PIC you have the authority to break any law or FAA regulation if that's what you have to do, and unless you do something very blatantly unreasonable you're not going to be punished for it.

Taking over the flight? Probs completely illegal (though one does wonder if not unheard of. When you gotta go, you gotta go!)

No "probably" about it, it would be several different kinds of illegal and I seriously doubt it ever occurs. It would be the kind of situation where the FAA shuts down the airline entirely for tolerating such a massive lapse in safety, if it was anything but a one-time incident by pilots who immediately ceased to be employees of the airline.

On the flight thing - I'm sure someone, somewhere has done it. Idiots afterall abound!

On the passenger/crew thing. That may boil down to how the airline defines 'don't make the company look bad'.

For instance, my Aunt and Cousin are both Trolley Dollys. Whilst things are a bit more relaxed these days, when crewing a given flight they had strict uniform rules (British Airways for instance went so far as specific shades of lipstick). If such standards are also demanded of employees being transported to their next flight, there's an argument to be made that they remain employed etc.

But as I said, without knowing the in's and out's of the employees and their contract (and good luck to any of us finding that out) it's just conjecture.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I wouldn't settle meself. You may have noticed, I can be quite belligerent, and I'd be keen to set a precedent for this sort of situation (not the assault, the 'get off, we're putting our staff on instead')

And the airline would bury you in legal fees until you give up, then quietly amend their CoC to explicitly allow them to bump customers to make room for their own employees. There is exactly zero chance of a lawsuit over this forcing a change in policy.

The actual reason that United will probably settle this out of court, if a lawsuit is even attempted in the first place, is that it's bad PR. The average person is ignorant of the legal issues involved here, and only sees some poor bloody passenger in a video that completely omits the fact that they were resisting the police when they were hurt. The court of public opinion is the relevant one here, and the cost of settling the case is almost certainly less than the cost of dragging everything out in a public legal battle. Pay him some money to shut up, put out a standard "we're sorry you were offended" corporate not-apology, and get the whole mess out of the headlines before they lose any more sales.

Also, there were given a special priority due to being an air crew (or no-one would have been kicked off). So by performance, these 4 crew were not "Passengers", or they'd not have been allowed to board.


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 Peregrine wrote:
That is not sufficient. Employees of an airline that are clearly NOT crew often get free travel perks (and have to follow the company's code of conduct while getting free travel), but it would be insane to argue that a random customer service person is considered "crew" on a flight just because they have some "don't make the company look bad" rules to follow.

They are not equivalent though - a staff member getting free travel as a perk is clearly a passenger - they are treated the same as any other passenger except that they didn't pay for the ticket.
A staff member being sent as part of their job is not a passenger. They may be somewhere in between depending on the CoC and whatever else happens.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But as I said, without knowing the in's and out's of the employees and their contract (and good luck to any of us finding that out) it's just conjecture.

It's actually fairly common knowledge if you pay attention to the airline industry. I'm not sure about the exact details, but it's a pretty basic "wear professional clothes, behave like an adult" set of rules. They aren't expecting you to act as an employee, they just acknowledge that you're probably wearing the company uniform on your way to your assignment and you'd better not do anything that makes the company look bad.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I wouldn't settle meself. You may have noticed, I can be quite belligerent, and I'd be keen to set a precedent for this sort of situation (not the assault, the 'get off, we're putting our staff on instead')

And the airline would bury you in legal fees until you give up, then quietly amend their CoC to explicitly allow them to bump customers to make room for their own employees. There is exactly zero chance of a lawsuit over this forcing a change in policy.
.

Class actions have been won for less. The fact this is a PR nightmare with the feds now investigating and it being shown over and over on all the major networks has probably cost the airline millions in wasted ad money.

If they're wearing the uniform, that probably isn't in the airline's favour either. If they expect a higher level of behaviour from their travelling employees, and that they were the uniform unless travelling for pleasure....

But remember, this is all hypothetical stuff!

Herzlos wrote:
Also, there were given a special priority due to being an air crew (or no-one would have been kicked off). So by performance, these 4 crew were not "Passengers", or they'd not have been allowed to board.

Err, what? Why would they not be allowed to board? United simply added them to the passenger list, at which point the flight was overbooked and four random people got removed.

They are not equivalent though - a staff member getting free travel as a perk is clearly a passenger - they are treated the same as any other passenger except that they didn't pay for the ticket.
A staff member being sent as part of their job is not a passenger. They may be somewhere in between depending on the CoC and whatever else happens.

Except in this case it IS free travel as a perk. The employees are given access to seats for commuting purposes, they aren't required to travel that way. If you want to live 500 miles from the airport you're operating out of you can take the free travel benefits, if you want to live 5 miles from the airport you can drive your car to work. The situation is no different from any other employer telling you to be at a job site at a particular time, you aren't on the clock while commuting there. You're just self-loading cargo that happens to collect a paycheck from the people who own the plane.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
If they're wearing the uniform, that probably isn't in the airline's favour either. If they expect a higher level of behaviour from their travelling employees, and that they were the uniform unless travelling for pleasure....

Note that they aren't required to wear the uniform, it's just very likely that they were because they were on their way to start their job assignment. And it's hardly demanding expectations, more like "if you get drunk and start a fight over the armrest with the person next to you you're going to be fired for embarrassing the company".


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And, again, "crew" and "on-duty employee" are not the same thing. A customer service employee can be on-duty and wearing the company uniform and all that, but is still clearly not part of the crew even if they happen to be aboard a plane. They're clearly passengers because they are not part of operating that particular aircraft.

There is also the argument they've given unfair preferential treatment to their employees.

Yes, they would reasonably know that Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch all need to be over there by that time.

But to say to paying passengers who have presumably (without evidence to the contrary) booked that flight to be over there by that time for their own reasons 'tough, you're not flying today' seems colossally unfair, regardless of whether crew being shifted are actually defined as Passengers by their own Contract of Carriage.

 Peregrine wrote:

Herzlos wrote:
Also, there were given a special priority due to being an air crew (or no-one would have been kicked off). So by performance, these 4 crew were not "Passengers", or they'd not have been allowed to board.

Err, what? Why would they not be allowed to board? United simply added them to the passenger list, at which point the flight was overbooked and four random people got removed.

Because if they were normal passengers they'd have been told it was fully booked. They must have been added to the passenger list after the flight had nearly completed boarding.

They are not equivalent though - a staff member getting free travel as a perk is clearly a passenger - they are treated the same as any other passenger except that they didn't pay for the ticket.
A staff member being sent as part of their job is not a passenger. They may be somewhere in between depending on the CoC and whatever else happens.

Except in this case it IS free travel as a perk. The employees are given access to seats for commuting purposes, they aren't required to travel that way. If you want to live 500 miles from the airport you're operating out of you can take the free travel benefits, if you want to live 5 miles from the airport you can drive your car to work. The situation is no different from any other employer telling you to be at a job site at a particular time, you aren't on the clock while commuting there. You're just self-loading cargo that happens to collect a paycheck from the people who own the plane.

But it's not; they are being sent to another place to start work. They aren't flying for the fun of it. You can't claim being sent from job site A to job site B by your employer is a perk.

There are now rumors circulating that all four passengers "randomly" selected had Asian names. If true, oh man its clobbering time.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But to say to paying passengers who have presumably (without evidence to the contrary) booked that flight to be over there by that time for their own reasons 'tough, you're not flying today' seems colossally unfair, regardless of whether crew being shifted are actually defined as Passengers by their own Contract of Carriage.

Sure, you can argue that it's poor customer service and the kind of thing that gets people to give their money to your competition, but that's not the question here. The issue is whether it was legal for United to do this, and there are a great many things that are "unfair" or poor business strategies but indisputably legal.

 Frazzled wrote:
There are now rumors circulating that all four passengers "randomly" selected had Asian names. If true, oh man its clobbering time.

That's the problem with it being "random" - it's entirely possible for it to be fair and random and still pluck out 4 Asian sounding passengers, but without scrutiny it's hard to count as fair. CoC doesn't seem to describe how they randomly determine who to kick off.

Herzlos wrote:
Because if they were normal passengers they'd have been told it was fully booked. They must have been added to the passenger list after the flight had nearly completed boarding.

That doesn't matter. Obviously there are different tiers of passengers, and the CoC even acknowledges this in listing various factors that can go into deciding who gets bumped (ticket price, frequent flyer status, etc). Obviously a first-class passenger is not going to lose their seat when the flight is overbooked, but being a higher tier of self-loading cargo than the common peasants in the back doesn't make you part of the crew.

But it's not; they are being sent to another place to start work. They aren't flying for the fun of it. You can't claim being sent from job site A to job site B by your employer is a perk.

Of course it's a perk, because it's the same free travel option that lets you, say, live in Florida when your job is in New York.

And let's not wander off on a complete tangent here, whether it's a perk or an obligation they're still not part of the crew. Not all employees of United are crew, so merely acting as an employee is not sufficient to make you no longer a passenger. They are commuting between jobs, not performing any necessary crew functions aboard that particular flight. From the point of view of the actual crew of that flight the employees are just additional self-loading cargo, and the only difference between them and the other self-loading cargo is that those four are more likely to know how to behave in public.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But to say to paying passengers who have presumably (without evidence to the contrary) booked that flight to be over there by that time for their own reasons 'tough, you're not flying today' seems colossally unfair, regardless of whether crew being shifted are actually defined as Passengers by their own Contract of Carriage.

Sure, you can argue that it's poor customer service and the kind of thing that gets people to give their money to your competition, but that's not the question here. The issue is whether it was legal for United to do this, and there are a great many things that are "unfair" or poor business strategies but indisputably legal.

Legal may not be equitable. They broke the contract and have an intentional policy to do so. 40,000 were bumped by airlines. Thats a pattern and practice of overbooking, intentionally designing the system to violate their contracts.

In this instance they did not even go to the legally permitted limit of $1,350 and just went with wacking people.

NPR was discussing how this will impact United's relationship with China and its Chinese market. Oh boy.
And its in WAPO:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/11/was-that-doctor-dragged-off-the-united-airlines-flight-because-he-was-asian-many-in-china-think-so/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_wv-unitedchina-0406am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.c9948a227fea


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Herzlos wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
There are now rumors circulating that all four passengers "randomly" selected had Asian names. If true, oh man its clobbering time.

That's the problem with it being "random" - it's entirely possible for it to be fair and random and still pluck out 4 Asian sounding passengers, but without scrutiny it's hard to count as fair. CoC doesn't seem to describe how they randomly determine who to kick off.

If true then thats prima facae evidence of discrimination under Federal laws and the US Constitution. the fed is now liable to be come very interested in their methodology.

They shouldn't be overbooking the flights in the first place. If they've got the money for the seat then it doesn't matter if the person doesn't turn up. Taking advantage of the fact that often people miss flights as a reason to gamble by selling more tickets than there are seats is just plain greedy and frankly shouldn't be allowed because you're selling product you don't have. Burying reference to being expected to give up a seat in such circumstances in a 50 page contract isn't reasonable (if that is the case).

 Frazzled wrote:
Thats a pattern and practice of overbooking, intentionally designing the system to violate their contracts.

Uh, no. Their contract very clearly permits overbooking, and even describes the process by which overbooking is resolved when they do it. There is no contract violation, only customers who don't read the contract they're agreeing to and feel entitled to a guaranteed seat that they were never promised.

In this instance they did not even go to the legally permitted limit of $1,350 and just went with wacking people.

That's because you seem to be confused about what is required as compensation. There is no legal minimum or maximum for compensation for voluntary bumping, only whatever the passengers and airline agree to. For mandatory bumping it's twice the ticket price (up to $650) for a two-hour delay, four times the ticket price (up to $1,350) for a 4+ hour delay (with longer times for international flights). The passenger in this case would have been entitled to the mandatory compensation, if he hadn't been an idiot and refused to leave, allowing United to boot him without compensation under the "refusing to obey the crew" rule.

Uh, no. Their contract very clearly permits overbooking, and even describes the process by which overbooking is resolved when they do it. There is no contract violation, only customers who don't read the contract they're agreeing to and feel entitled to a guaranteed seat that they were never promised.

Your reliance on contract law is interesting. This is not a contract dispute and United knows it.
By not offering higher funds they are defacto setting up a dangerous situation, and negligent situation likely to cause problems. By permitting actual boarding to occur and then attempting to force ticket holders to leave they have negligently and maliciously set up the conditions for he event that occurred.

"Esteemed members of the jury, my client, a doctor was physically battered and permanently injured. His reputation has been irreparably and permanently harmed. And United intentionally did it. They set up this system, knowing they would overbook. Then instead of attempting to ameliorate their negligence they compounded it, by allowing everyone to board. Instead of discussing it in a reasonable manner with my client they called in the police and DRAGGED HIM OFF THE PLANE LIKE A CRIMINAL. Lets send this faceless airline a message that good people will no longer tolerate such wanton negligence. "

Oh yea...