United Airlines and common sense
Certainly “common sense” is dead in America today as your Thursday editorial on the United incident pronounced. The airlines apparently have the right to remove a paying customer from an airplane for whatever reason they can articulate. In this case, airline officials say they were overbooked.
But wait. News reports have stated that the reason for these four passengers being denied their seats was that the airline had four employees who needed to be in Louisville. These four “passengers” were not paying for their seats, they were going to be shuttled for free by their employer to their next assignment.
Therefore, the plane was apparently not overbooked, at all. But the four passengers were merely in the way of United’s effort to get crew members to their next assignment locations.
The point is that there are and were other flights and other options for the airline to take to prevent this fiasco from occurring. Dr. David Dao should never have been asked to leave this flight. He certainly should not have been assaulted and battered by airport police at the behest of United. This was all just for the convenience of the airline and its employees.
Dr. Dao is the hero of this saga. He bought and paid for his seat. He was assigned a specific seat and took it without any issue. Then, for the convenience of the airline, he was told to surrender the seat. This resulted in his significant injuries.
