UPDATES WITH DETAILS
A Facebook video showing a passenger being forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight Sunday evening at O’Hare International Airport is drawing worldwide attention.
The 31-second clip posted on the Facebook page of Audra D. Bridges about 7:30 p.m. Sunday shows a man being dragged by his arms from a plane.
“Please share this video. We are on this flight. United airlines overbooked the flight. They randomly selected people to kick off so their standby crew could have a seat,” Bridges wrote on Facebook.
“This man is a doctor and has to be at the hospital in the morning. He did not want to get off. We are all shaky and so disgusted,” she wrote.
On the video — which had more than 1.5 million views as of Monday afternoon — one passenger can be heard asking of the United crew that was getting priority seating: “Can’t the pilots drive to Louisville? Can’t they rent a car?”
Multiple passengers can also be heard exclaiming, “Oh my God!” as the man screams while being yanked out of his seat.
“Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked,” United spokesman Charlie Hobart said in an email statement.
“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” Hobart said.
“We apologize for the overbook situation. Further details on the removed customer should be directed to authorities.”
“This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United,” Oscar Munoz, United Airlines CEO, said in a statement posted on Twitter Monday morning.
“I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened. We are also reaching out to this passenger to talk directly to him and further address and resolve this situation,” Munoz said.
Another video posted on Twitter by @stephenlaca also shows the man being dragged forcibly down the aisle.
The city’s Department of Aviation police handled the situation, according to Chicago Police. Spokespersons for the aviation department and the mayor’s office, as of Monday afternoon, had not replied to requests for comment.
Aviation industry expert Robert W. Mann Jr. watched the video Monday and told the Chicago Sun-Times he had never seen anything like it.
“I’ve never seen a passenger forcibly removed unless it involved an unruly passenger of some sort. That I think is a first for me and I’ve been around for 30 years,” he said.
“What I would have asked the passenger is, ‘Why not? Why can’t you do this? Can you give me a really good rational reason?’ And if he could, then we try to find one more volunteer. I think I would have gone to round two of the selections,” he said, adding that airline employees probably had a ceiling on how much they could sweeten the cash offer to incentivize volunteers.
“The other thing to keep in mind is what’s going through the mind of the gate agent in charge, which is: ‘If I don’t get this flight out on time, I might get fired.’ They are evaluated on their ability to get a flight out on time.”
“If flights get in late, then other flights are late. It’s a time based process, which magnifies the drama: the clock is ticking and I’ve got an offer on the table that isn’t attractive to anybody. What do I do?”
“At the very least, it’s a teachable moment for the airline,” Mann said.
“Some days your the bug and some days your the windshield,” he said of the situation.
“It’s very likely the customer will file a complaint with the Department of Transportation, the question is what will be the reaction of the DOT,” Mann said, adding that the airline does have the right to forcibly remove passengers.
“If you read the carrier’s contract of carriage, which no body does, yea it’s in there,” he said, adding that the contracts — which describe how a carrier will behave in such a situation — are usually located on a company’s website.
Mann said he’d never heard of a computer generating the list of unlucky passengers.
“Its seems inelegant to me,” he said.
“There are a variety of means. Sometimes its in order of fair paid, sometimes last to book is first off, and then there are some for examples in which a carrier absolutely won’t choose an elite frequent flyer,” he said.
“It’s not looking like one of the Polaris moments for United,” Mann said, referencing the airline’s recent branding usage of Polaris, also known as the North Star.
“I wouldn’t say this was one of their shining moments.”