By now, you’ve probably seen the video. United Airlines had an overbooked flight, so they sent Police on board to forcibly remove a man from the place, leaving him with a bloodied face and a concussion, among other injuries. The footage went viral on social media and is, quite frankly, disgusting.
United is faced with a PR nightmare from the incident, to say the least, and they deserve it. In an inane attempt to calm people down with regards to this brutal occurrence, the airline has offered the passengers of Flight 3411 who witnessed it full compensation of their ticket price.
They can take that compensation in cash, travel credits, or miles. Yeah, like they’ll ever want to fly with United again.
So, when every passenger takes their compensation in cash, United Airlines’ hope is that they’ll forget they witnessed a man beaten and dragged off a plane for having had the audacity to buy a ticket off them.
United will no longer send police to remove people from full flights
United have also announced that they will end their policy of sending police officers onto planes that they sold too many tickets for because they f*cked up to beat and drag passengers off the flights simply because they bought a ticket off them. The man did nothing wrong. He was sitting in a seat on a plane that he had paid for.
It was United who f*cked up the ticket sales – that was their bad – and then they f*cked up even further by subjecting a paying customer to brutal violence.
So, United aren’t going to do that anymore. There’s a lot of people who would argue that they should never have done that in the first place. It’s dumb. It’s a dumb policy.
These are customers who bought tickets to be on your plane, you shouldn’t send police to force them up because you made a mistake. United should be bankrupted as a result of this. It’s absurd.
United CEO appeared on ‘Good Morning America’
Oscar Munoz, the CEO of the corporation that owns United Airlines, made an appearance on ABC’s morning show “Good Morning America” on Wednesday for what some belief was a “staged” apology.
Munoz said on the show that when he watched the video, he felt “ashamed,” as well he should have been.
Munoz vowed to take another look over the United Airlines passenger-removal policy, as one should hope so – it should’ve been looked at a long time ago. He apologised to David Dao, the 69-year-old doctor from Kentucky who was subjected to being forcefully dragged off the plane by police. He also apologised to Dr. Dao’s family and the other passengers who had to watch him get dragged away. His apology wasn’t entirely convincing.
Dr. Dao is taking United Airlines to court, and rightly so
Despite United’s desperate plea to stop him from taking them to court (veiled as trying to “resolve the situation” with him out of court), Dr.
Dao has hired a team of attorneys to help him bring the despicable airline to justice. Plenty of attorneys were glad to help him, since it’s a horrifying display of injustice caught on video, and Munoz has been giving them a ton to work with, including blaming Dr. Dao at one stage for the incident because he was being, in Munoz’s words, “disruptive and belligerent.”
Dr. Dao’s attorneys have requested that United Airlines and the city of Chicago (whose airport the plane was preparing to depart from when Dr. Dao was beaten and dragged off it) to hold onto any evidence in the case that they might be able to use. So, if United try to dispose of any evidence (which they probably will), they’ll be in far worse trouble than just a PR crisis.
This will lead Dr. Dao into a lawsuit against United Airlines, and with the world rallying behind him, hopefully a successful one. And it’s safe to say, by the way, that this would not have happened if Dr. Dao was white.
