United Airlines is a terrible business
I agree. I have flown more than 1.9 million miles on UA, so this is from experience.
Dr.D said:
hey knew they were oversold
They were not oversold. They had 70 seats and 70 confirmed passengers with seat assignments.
russ_watters said:
Bumping often happens when the plane is already boarding, because that's when they know it is actually overbooked!
That's not what happens. Here's how it's supposed to work. Around 15 minutes before the flight starts boarding, it goes under what they call "gate control". At that point, they stop selling tickets and stop allowing people to change their flights to this one without going to the gate. Also at this point, they have N seats, M passengers with seat assignments, K passengers confirmed but without seat assignments, and L passengers on the standby list. For the flight in question N = 70, M was probably about 60, which would make K around 10, and I don't know what L was. In this case things are straightforward - print up K boarding passes and go.
Often things are more complicated - then first the M are boarded. Based on N, M and K, some number of the K are given seat assignments. The gate agent keeps a close eye on N - M - K (free seats) and K and L (the number of people she's trying to get out). At T-15, if you haven't boarded, you lose your seat assignment, so M drops and K grows. The GA continues to keep an eye on things (perhaps there are people not at the gate but connecting from a flight that has just landed) clearing passengers a few at a time as the situation with people who have seat assignments but are not there clarifies.
There is a bit of an art to this. If you have a frequent flyer and 3 non-frequent flyers who are likely to misconnect, the GA may drop three seats right away, and hold the fourth longer: the frequent flyer is likely to get off first, likely to better navigate the airport, and the airline wants to keep him happy. If after a few minutes, he's still not there, then drop him.
What if the flight is oversold (N < M + K)? Then, before boarding, the GA asks for volunteers for a given compensation. If you volunteer, you give the GA permission to reduce M or K by one - essentially, you can be moved to the top of L. This is called VDB: voluntary denied boarding. The VDB compensation is whatever you negotiate. I have received travel credits, cash, upgrades, lounge passes, hotel stays and frequent flyer miles at various times. If they can't get enough VDB's, they go to involuntary denied boarding or IDB. Here the compensation is legally mandated, and for the case in question is $1300. Cash. IDB's are reported to the DOT, so the airline has an incentive to avoid them.
In the Old Days, GAs were empowered to do whatever it took to get the flight out on time. When Continental took over...I mean merged with United, the new CEO, Jeff Smisek clamped down on this. SHARES, the reservation system, made it difficult and slow to offer any compensation other than what the computer thought was right - and ruthlessly audit any GA who offered more. It is faster to IDB passengers. To keep the compensation down, GAs were instructed to have the pax sign a statement that the deboarding was really voluntary, and they would usually receive compensation less than the IDB statutory - often as flight credits instead of cash. If the pax made a stink, the GA could give them the legally mandated IDB package, and if they still made a stink, the GA was instructed to call security.
Note that
this all happens before boarding. United handles the capacity controls via boarding pass, and ensures that if there is drama, it happens off the plane.
OK, now the situation at hand. The plane was not oversold. For operational reasons, United needed 4 crew from Trans-States at SDF, otherwise they would have to cancel a flight. Inconveniencing 4 passengers by bumping them off the ORD-SDF flight was better than inconveniencing 50 (it was a flight on an Embraer 145) by cancelling the flight. So they added them to UX3411 - but they did this after the flight had gone under gate control, and according to accounts, after the flight had boarded. So the normal mechanisms didn't work. Nonetheless, the GA plowed on ahead with them as if they did - made a compensation offer, raised it once, and then did an IDB and called Chicago Aviation Security. Just as if this all happened in the boarding area. But a small aluminum tube is not the same as the boarding area.
So essentially United decided that it needed those seats, and that they didn't want to pay what the pax holding those seats thought they were worth, so they used Chicago Aviation Security to ensure they got their way. There are reports that before this happened, a passenger asked for $1600 in travel credits and was laughed at. United has travel credits on the books at 25% of their value, so the decision was made that it was worth bringing in some muscle to save the airline $400.
Passengers who fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew, federal regulations, or security directives;
The person informing the pax that he must vacate his seat should have been the GA, not any of the flight crew. The flight crew, by contract, is not allowed to handle these situations.
Because this was not an oversold situation, and the pax was actually boarded, this does not fall under Rule 25 (Denial of Boarding), but rather Rule 21 (Refusal of Transport) in the CoC. However, none of the conditions in 21 seem to apply here. It appears that United breached its own CoC.