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United is doing their part to make sure no one ever boards one of their planes feeling like they’ll be there very long.
If you were keeping a running count of days United has gone without kicking someone off a flight, please reset the number. A recently married couple hoping to enjoy their honeymoon were ejected from a United flight out of Houston.
The reason, while sketchy without the full picture, seems to stem from fear of escalating a situation to the level we saw last week when Dr. Dao was brutally beaten and dragged off a United flight.
According to KHO in Houston, the couple were boarding a flight to Costa Rica when they saw a man laying across their entire row taking a nap. Instead of waking the man up (or getting a flight attendant to do it) the couple simply sat in the first open row they saw. It just so happened that this row was deemed an upgrade row on the flight and they were asked to move back to their original row. It was at this point they were then asked to leave the flight by an air marshall.
This is the situation created when your airline drags a guy off a flight, blooding him up in the process. It’s likely that the Hohl couple didn’t want to wake then out of fear it’d escalate into a similar situation as the Dr. Dao incident. That lack of faith then fractured off into a situation in which they were the ones getting kicked off the flight, thus pretty much confirming that had the eject happy flight attendant woke the sleeping man up there would have been a problem.
United offered up a statement, one that reads like they’re sick and tired of having to issue these:
“We’re disappointed anytime a customer has an experience that doesn’t measure up to their expectations. These passengers repeatedly attempted to sit in upgraded seating which they did not purchase and they would not follow crew instructions to return to their assigned seats. We’ve been in touch with them and have rebooked them on flights tomorrow.”
It really feels like United is in full coasting mode when it comes to these sorts of things. Can you imagine the high of relief when this incident was reported and it ended without violence? The fact that there was probably mass relief over that goes to show you the dark place United is in.
