Everyone is upset about the incident on this flight. I have some thoughts. Hear me out.
Despite the fact that the flight was not actually overbooked, many are still crying foul about what a terrible practice overbooking is. There is a legitimate business case for this policy, and as much as you personally may have been annoyed, inconvenienced or harmed by getting bumped from a flight, the practice is not without some merit. Marketplace explains it better than I ever could. When passengers do have to be bumped, there are certain passengers who are protected - disabled passengers, children flying alone, and first class passengers because OF COURSE. We - the consumers of flight travel - should advocate for more consumer protections if this practice is truly so egregious, but frankly, I'll be spending my time advocating for student loan forgiveness, prescription drug regulation, and criminal justice reform before I get to airline passenger rights. Everyone knows that air travel in the post 9/11 era is the fucking worst. Let's just get some high speed trains and reduce our need to fly so much? Maybe?
Others have argued that the $1350 legal limit on what an airline can offer an individual passenger to incentivize them to give up their seat is too low. And perhaps it should be higher, but if there were no limit then what would stop passengers from demanding $10,000? Since each person is likely to have a different definition of reasonable compensation, and since even one person’s idea of reasonable compensation could vary depending on why they are flying (what might be reasonable if you’re flying for a fun vacation might not be enough if you’re flying to a once in a lifetime event like a wedding or a funeral), it seems rational that there is a defined upper limit to the incentive, and that it is generally in line with what the cost of a more expensive flight would cost. It probably should be a little higher. I don't know what the number should be, I'm not a magicia-- er, economist.
On NPR I was listening to an interview with a behavioral scientist whose name now escapes me and he had a lot of suggestions for how airlines could more effectively entice passengers to accept the incentives, including addressing them individually at check-in - or better yet, by direct text messages - rather than making a general announcement. When a general announcement is made everyone looks around to see if anyone else is volunteering. If no one volunteers quickly, as time passes it becomes less and less likely that anyone will volunteer. He said, "Humans are sensitive to looking like suckers," which made me laugh because HA HA HA Donald Trump is our President, we are a nation of the suckeriest suckers! But I also know it's true. If airlines could more effectively get passengers to accept the incentives there'd be less opportunity for PR-nightmare-inducing situations like the one in questions to ever occur.
I’ve also seen people incensed that an airline would bump paying passengers to allow airline personnel to travel instead, but again there is a completely logical reason for this that actually benefits all airline passengers on the whole. If a flight crew is on duty for too long because of, oh, say, weather delays in some city, then fresh crew members must replace them. Please tell me we can all agree that tired ass pilots are a universally recognized terrible idea, right? If there are no rested crew members in that airport, airlines must transport crew there to operate the scheduled flight. This is a federal Department of Transportation regulation which airlines are required to follow. And with good reason! No available crew means a canceled flight which means a serious disruption in the flow of aviation. The airline is forced to inconvenience four people in order to avoid inconveniencing hundreds of others. That should be an obvious choice. Airline personnel who are jumping on a flight for free cannot force a paying customer to lose a seat, they have to wait for a legitimately empty seat.
Do I think that United could have handled their communication and customer service better at virtually every step of the way? Of fucking course! They could have explained why it was legally necessary that the crew members be seated while also expressing genuine regret that it would inconvenience four passengers. They could have offered them the maximum incentive. Better yet they could have resolved the issue at the gate before anyone had boarded the plane. Reports indicate that United personnel told the seated passengers something like, "We have four United employees who need to fly and this plane isn't going anywhere until they're seated." That is an abhorrent way for a company to address its passengers. I think it is extremely unfortunate that things escalated to the point of physically removing Dr. Dao from the plane. I think it is disgusting that reporters are now digging into his private life in attempts to dig up whatever salacious details they can to try to discredit him. None of that is relevant to this incident. The critical mater of importance is that, however clumsily United staff handled the process up to that point, once they asked him to leave the plane and he didn’t, he was breaking a federal law.
I am no great fan of airlines in general or United in particular, honestly I'm only writing this shit because I've read 492 Facebook comments about it and am gobsmacked at so many people's inability to be logical. I can easily see both sides of this situation. Perhaps because in a public library we librarians are the stewards of maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for all patrons, and we frequently have to deal with irrational or mentally ill people who defy the rules of our space and sometimes even the law. We’ve had to call the police a number of times. It always sucks, but – and this is without exception – if the patron had just followed our polite requests to adhere to reasonable rules for using a public space everything would have been fine. And a public library is a relatively lower stakes environment than a fucking airplane.
For me it all boils down to whether or not that law – the law requiring compliance with flight crew's requests – is an inherently unreasonable, unjust law. I don't think it is. I think there are many good reasons for such a law to be in place, and they are all related to passenger safety. Of course it is possible for just laws to be unjustly applied, but in those situations people have many options for recourse ranging from the reasonable (comply and complain or sue) to the wholly unreasonable (defiantly refuse to comply and risk forcible detention). Dr. Dao chose to be wholly unreasonable.
The comparisons to Rosa Parks are utterly inapt since her refusal to move was in protest of a fundamentally unjust law. We have a moral responsibility to oppose unjust laws. But that is not what Dr. Dao did in this instance. By irrationally refusing to comply with repeated requests to leave the plane, he escalated a bad situation into the worst possible one. United may have dragged him to the edge, but he threw himself over that cliff.
In the time that we’ve all spent (myself included) obsessing about this incident, our military has dropped a huge bomb on ISIS in Afghanistan, accidentally killed 18 allied fighters in a misdirected air strike in Syria, and started talking about pre-emptive non-nuclear strikes against North Korea. We live in a time where there are truly, seriously, literally deadly things to be outraged about. We need to be better critical thinkers and information consumers so we can save our righteous anger for the moments when it is really needed.
This entirely unfortunately but nevertheless avoidable incident on United flight 3411 just ain’t one of em. Which means I just wasted forty minutes writing this, and you wasted ten minutes of your time reading it. We're all supremely fucked.
