United Airlines PR Disaster

knapplc said:
El Diaco said:
knapplc said:
Lots of victim blaming in here. Regardless of how this guy reacted, it never should have gotten to this point. United bear the sole responsibility for creating and escalating this when they had many other options to choose from before ever laying hands on their customer. If they had explored those options we wouldn't be having this discussion. They took the easy way out by putting their problem into the lap of a paying customer. Their fault, full stop.
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You're absolutely right. United had many other options that should've and could've prevented this. It should never have gotten to the point of needing to involuntarily remove a passenger. But once it did go that far, it seems highly likely that the passenger and aviation cops contributed more than their fair share to the physical confrontation that ensued. I don't think "fault" is always fully attributable to the very first thing that could've prevented any problem. That provides an undeserving excuse for all contributing actions.
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I agree with you mostly. I see it in three stages:1) United should have found alternate means for their crew. In this stage, 100% of the blame lies with them.2) Once they made the mistake and we progress to this stage, the passenger was refusing a lawful order and bears some of the blame. However, he doesn't get all the blame in this stage because even now, United could have called it all off and found alternate travel plans for their crew. I'd say in this stage, blame goes 70/30 to United. It's not 50/50 because, although the guy is not complying, he still shouldn't be asked to.3) Now we're at the police involvement stage. Or security. I'm still not 100% sure who these guys were. They were called in, just doing their job, just like the real cops would be if I was belligerent and refused to leave a restaurant or bar. At that point, you resist arrest and bad stuff can happen to you. I give the cops 5% of the blame here, and that's probably too high. Lots of people will blame them much more because they're the ones on video busting the guy's face, but until some proof comes out that the uniform INTENTIONALLY slammed the guy's face, I'm giving them mostly a pass. When it gets to that point, you can't blame the cop. Fault here lies 5% with the cop, 65% with United, 30% with the guy (the last two for the same reasons as #2).
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I 100% agree.

The only reason I left room for the possible inclusion of the aviation cops is because it's possible they were a little overzealous. Nothing indicates that yet but I didn't want to place that whole stage at the feet of the passenger without knowing exactly how it went down.

 
Hold up. Is this true? Did those journalists publish the records of the wrong guy? It is not true. They have the correct guy.


EDIT

This guy I quoted above is wrong. The guy with the sketchy background IS the guy on the plane. This woman corrected it here:


 
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Hindsight is 20/20, but one thing they could've also done is further incentivized a passenger to get off with a higher travel voucher. Hell, you could argue a $999 million dollar travel voucher to one of those passengers would've cost them less money than what's happened now.

 
A colleague of mine was on vacation last week and she came across a group of guys traveling for work on a Delta flight. Apparently, shortly after this video went viral and the fallout began, their CEO sent out a note saying they were immediately terminating all future flights with United (the company they've exclusively used for years) and would be finding an alternative moving forward. She didn't remember who they worked for but they're a Fortune 500 with thousands of employees.

 
Moiraine said:
Which types of news stations talked aboht the guy's supposed criminal record?
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A broad range. One that I saw was Lisa Fletcher, reporter for a DC-area ABC affiliate. She tweeted out a picture with huge piles of papers on her desk stating that this was all background information to the story she was prepping for that night's broadcast on the passenger's "troubled past." She said it was her job to dig into stories like this and took a ton of flak for that, including this fantastic response from another journalist.


Ms. Fletcher has since deleted the tweet, and I haven't heard if the story she worked on actually ran, but she did tweet this out later:


 
And you know what, I say it's fair to present pertinent background on the guy - like was he in the bar screaming before boarding? Did he push his way to his seat? Did he punch a baby in the airplane? All pertinent to this situation. A charge/conviction he had years ago, no matter the specifics doesn't matter here (unless he was charged with being a customer on an airplane and was then physically dragged out of his chair, knocked unconscious and etc)

 
Ha, this cluster is going full CF. As a reporter, how do you disparage this guy based on false identity?

I will say, the only way his past or present as a doctor is valid is if he in fact was not able to practice medicine at the time of this event. If he was throwing a fit on the plane about being doctor and predicating his belligerence on that, then yeah, by all means report that he was not in fact a doctor in good standing. But that doesn't seem to be remotely the case. Before this is all over, this deal may be best thing monetarily to come his way in a long, long time.

 
News reports that United will stop using police to drag people off of their planes. I assume they found some goons that guaranteed not to leave any marks.

 
El Diaco said:
Ha, this cluster is going full CF. As a reporter, how do you disparage this guy based on false identity?

I will say, the only way his past or present as a doctor is valid is if he in fact was not able to practice medicine at the time of this event. If he was throwing a fit on the plane about being doctor and predicating his belligerence on that, then yeah, by all means report that he was not in fact a doctor in good standing. But that doesn't seem to be remotely the case. Before this is all over, this deal may be best thing monetarily to come his way in a long, long time.
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I haven't heard he complained about that to them. Maybe he did. I don't know how it was discovered he was a Dr. All I've heard from interviews of people on the plane were that he wasn't reasoned with.

 
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I may be in the minority I believe both parties are at fault.

United shouldn't have overbooked and allowed the passengers to board the plane and should've upped the $800 amount to $1,000 or more.

The doctor is at fault for not getting up and removing himself after been informed several times that he was going to be removed. The doctor has a shady past and as seen in the above video had plans to sue the airline before the confrontation. He resisted which lead to him meeting the armrest face first and then he has the audacity to run back onto the plane after being removed. And lastly who would rather go to jail than just remove yourself from the plane? Obviously this guy does as he said so

 
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