the random musings not worthy of new thread thread

[Tomahawk]

protest is sometimes uncomfortable to the masses whether its a strike by truckers that might not put enough broccoli in your produce aisle or a guy on a plane who is ruining someones life by making them 30 minutes late to a destination he had as much right to get to as anyone else on the plane

but thats humans....always full of two things: shtein and themselves

He had as much right as anyone, but as soon as he was asked to leave that right expired. It's not like we're constitutionally or declaration of independencely guaranteed the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of air travel. Sorry bud, but you're not CCR's fortunate one either, now gtfo, instead of throwing a tantrum like a five year old.

This guy was almost assuredly not convening an impromptu protest of the impropriety of the policy; he was only thinking of himself and his needs, not the greater good.

[ice grillin you]

you just said he deserved a beatdown for delaying passengers a few minutes.....yet he was being told he couldnt fly home at all and he overreacted?

thats awesome

[PhillyPhreak54]

Dear Team,

The truly horrific event that occurred on this flight has elicited many responses from all of us: outrage, anger, disappointment. I share all of those sentiments, and one above all: my deepest apologies for what happened. Like you, I continue to be disturbed by what happened on this flight and I deeply apologize to the customer forcibly removed and to all the customers aboard. No one should ever be mistreated this way.

I want you to know that we take full responsibility and we will work to make it right.

It's never too late to do the right thing. I have committed to our customers and our employees that we are going to fix what's broken so this never happens again. This will include a thorough review of crew movement, our policies for incentivizing volunteers in these situations, how we handle oversold situations and an examination of how we partner with airport authorities and local law enforcement. We'll communicate the results of our review by April 30th.

I promise you we will do better.

Sincerely,

Oscar

aka "oh farg our stock has tanked - I need to eat my words from yesterday"

[hbionic]

Nothing like losing money to motivate someone to 'do the right thing'. We'll see what changes come about. Hopefully the other airlines are seeing the fallout from this and make the necessary changes to eliminate this headache in the future.

[ice grillin you]

Nothing like losing money to motivate someone to 'do the right thing'. We'll see what changes come about. Hopefully the other airlines are seeing the fallout from this and make the necessary changes to eliminate this headache in the future.

at the very least you cant seat someone then kick them out....you have to be able to identify your farg up before you board everyone

also you shouldnt over book any flights but short of that airlines should have a rule that you dont over book flights to cities that dont have another option within 5 hours or whatever amount of time you wanna come up with...i believe this cat couldnt get home until 3pm the next day

[PhillyPhreak54]

I am sure the other airlines will make sure to not resort to The Trumpian way ("get him outta here!") but they're still deeply flawed. Delta just got hammered over the weekend because of another systems failure exacerbated with a huge weather issue in ATL. But they ended up taking care of most people.

The root cause is they are too big - the mergers have created no competition. The airlines like Spirit have forced the legacy carriers to get down and dirty on pricing and squeezing so many seats onto planes. The Dreamliner was designed to hold eight seats across in coach. United squeezed in nine abreast.

They're making huge profits now and keep reducing service. The days of them losing money like back in 2008 when they were hammered with fuel costs are over. They're protecting every hot cent and know that if they piss people off what can we do about it? Who can we turn to? No one, really.

If I wanted to fly American or Delta I have to deal with connections out of Houston. Nothing really direct for me other than on United.

[PhillyPhreak54]

http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united-low-priority-passenger-20170412-story.html

[Tomahawk]

you just said he deserved a beatdown for delaying passengers a few minutes.....yet he was being told he couldnt fly home at all and he overreacted?

thats awesome

He deserved a beatdown for being an selfish prick. He drew the short straw; it's not fair, but it doesn't justify him trying to delay the inevitable. Any adult making that sound is overreacting.

I'm just glad the flight attendants were able to get home, but I'm more concerned about the plight of the working man than you are.

[rjs246]

The root cause is they are too big - the mergers have created no competition. The airlines like Spirit have forced the legacy carriers to get down and dirty on pricing and squeezing so many seats onto planes.

Ok so I'm not going to get into the fact that an airline used a hired goon squad to remove a paying customer. The fact that we have all just accepted the practice of over-selling seats and kicking people off means that we are as much to blame as the airlines.

What I do want to address is this section of Jay's post. First, it doesn't make sense. You blame a lack of competition and then use an example of competition (in Spirit) as part of the problem, so that's downright confusing. But secondly, the problem with airlines absolutely is NOT a lack of competition. If anything it's the opposite. Big American airlines struggle mightily to make a profit and are heavily subsidized by the government. Most of the best airlines in the world are nationalized and exist almost without domestic competition. The free market does a great job at certain things, creating a race to the bottom in airline travel is not one of them.

[Tomahawk]

I buy broccoli from the Farmer's Market...the grocery store can go farg itself.

[rjs246]

Why the farg did you capitalize farmer's market? fargin weirdo.

[PhillyPhreak54]

The root cause is they are too big - the mergers have created no competition. The airlines like Spirit have forced the legacy carriers to get down and dirty on pricing and squeezing so many seats onto planes.

Ok so I'm not going to get into the fact that an airline used a hired goon squad to remove a paying customer. The fact that we have all just accepted the practice of over-selling seats and kicking people off means that we are as much to blame as the airlines.

What I do want to address is this section of Jay's post. First, it doesn't make sense. You blame a lack of competition and then use an example of competition (in Spirit) as part of the problem, so that's downright confusing. But secondly, the problem with airlines absolutely is NOT a lack of competition. If anything it's the opposite. Big American airlines struggle mightily to make a profit and are heavily subsidized by the government. Most of the best airlines in the world are nationalized and exist almost without domestic competition. The free market does a great job at certain things, creating a race to the bottom in airline travel is not one of them.

I agree with your first part - no one should accept the approach taken by United here. At no point should the police have intervened let alone even been called.

With that being said - I disagree on the second part. Sure I cited Spirit but I don't consider them competition. They're literally the greyhound of the skies. They struggle to get people from point A to point B.

Are you in support of the cable company mergers and acquisitions that have robbed us of choice in that area? We are all farged bc the smaller guys have been swallowed whole. No competition means higher prices and "oh you don't like zesty service? farg off. What are you gonna do about it?" attitudes.

Much like the airline mergers.

AirTran bought ValuJet - not too bad because ValuJet's name was mud after their crash in the Everglades. Which killed an NFL player btw.

Southwest then bought AirTran.

Alaska just bought Virgin America
America West merged with US Air
American bought TWA
American merged with US Air
Delta merged with NWA
Continental merged with United

Those are the big boys - I'm not even counting the gobbling up of the smaller regionals.

All of that has led to lousy customer service, monopolized routes and pricing and severe devaluation of loyalty programs.

Your choices are basically Southwest, United, Delta or American. If you're in a hub city like I am then you're doubly farged. Pay the premium to fly direct/non-stop or deal with stupid connections. If I want to fly Delta I'm connecting through ATL, MSP or SLC. If I want to fly American I'm connecting through CLT, PHX or DFW. And at no real price break.

Remember the line in Goodfellas "farg you, pay me"?

That's the state of airlines in America. And it was allowed by the government. I'm certainly no anti-trust lawyer but I've read many articles that suggest these mergers shouldn't have been allowed.

They've eliminated services for the most part. They've downsized fleets and increased seating much to the chagrin of the traveler. It's rare to see empty seats now. Even of some wacky ass routes which normally wouldn't have a 100% load factor.

If NWA, Continental, US Air and others were in market still it gives the consumer choices.

[rjs246]

I'm just observing what works and nationalized airlines work better than the US model. Cable service is essentially a monopoly. The companies collude with each other to keep prices high and there are only a couple of companies anyway. It would benefit from more competition because it is a completely different beast than air travel. Cable service is a luxury and is exactly the kind of thing that consumers can haggle and negotiate to get better prices when there are more choices, or just choose not to have cable and go on with their lives. Airfare is completely different. Most people don't fly for luxury and that's why streamlining the industry would make way more sense than having a hundred different airlines all racing to the bottom to squeeze out an extra buck.

[Tomahawk]

Why the farg did you capitalize farmer's market? fargin weirdo.

That's how important that shtein is in the MA-idwest.

40k out 650 million bumped every year

As terrible as the booting policy is, affecting a statistically insignificant population of fliers, it's more outrageous the CEO of United earns around 300 times more than his average worker, and has a much more significant social impact.

At some point though, that guy needed to understand he was either going to do it or do it with a limp. If you're going to lose your dignity, do it with a profanity laden tirade as your grabbing your oversized carry-on you stuffed into the overhead bin.

[General_Failure]

First they came for the overbooked passengers...