Tuesday, April 11, 2017

4/11/17 United Airlines, Throwing People Off Planes?

    Why are airlines allowed to oversell their seats in the first place?  I believe once you are confirmed a buyer, that seat should be yours, unless you change your mind.  If the airline is going to make you get off the plane, there better be some damn good compensation.  A story came out this evening of a man on a United Airline flight and because the plane was oversold, meaning there were more passengers than seats, somebody had to get off.
    There is a game played by some people who will get off when the airline starts offering money for the seats.  According to the story, up to $1350 per seat can be offered if the flight is an international one and the person being "bumped" is going to be 1-4 hours late.
    As I understand it, most of the time, the seat "bumping" happens before people even get on their plane.  I believe once you get on a plane and put your bags away and sit down and accept you're on that flight, personnel should not then be allowed to take you off.  The worst part of this whole story was that the extra seats were for United personnel to fly free.  How do you take your product which you survive by selling, take it away from a paying customer and give it for free to internal employees and look yourself in the mirror and say that is the right thing to do?
    This man might have had a bit of a language barrier, but again, he did nothing wrong, he just wanted to get home.  How do we know he hadn't been working all weekend, maybe even volunteering his free time for some cause, and he saw that plane ride as some much needed rest, only to be gang tackled by police officers, while doing nothing wrong.
    I am already scared to fly, ever since Kevin Smith was labeled too fat to fly.   I would hate to be told to buy two seats.
    I don't know what exactly happened on that flight, maybe they did the offer and nobody wanted to get off, the next step is to go electronically, and I do like his claim, was he being targeted because of his skin color?  We didn't get to see the other passengers that got off without complaining, maybe they were Asian, Hispanic, black....maybe they were random and they were just white.
    United needs to get its shit together.  A couple of weeks ago it was a couple teenage girls were not allowed because they were dressed in leggings, this fight is lost, society accepts them as pants, let it go.  There was a pilot, leaving Austin to San Francisco, who got on the PA and started ranting about Trump and Hillary, her divorce, and other uncomfortable topics.
    There are plenty of shenanigans going on all the time, we don't need our quiet and respectable companies to get up and raise hell.  You're supposed to be the rock and foundation of what makes this country great.

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