Excellent. That is what my husband and I did several years ago; the incentive was so good that we accepted it and had to wait only two more hours for another flight.

Sadly, United has the legal right to remove passengers. As a matter of fact, the crew can have anyone removed for any reason, should they so desire. (Southwest wins the award for most removed passengers.)

The security officer (not police) has been suspended for the way this was handled. The odds are the doctor will probably sue. I'm not convinced he would necessarily win if it would go to trial, but the odds are it will settle out of court. Twas an ugly scene but a legal action.

Strange the United didn't know that these pilots had to be on the flight and then they could have handled it at the gate before boarding. It was handled very poorly

not the passengers problem.....

they should of rescheduled the flight crew.....not the paying passengers....

No flight crew, nobody sitting on the plane the crew needed to get to, goes anywhere. Make four passengers mad or two hundred?
Guess who gets the seat...?
Not a difficult decision for a company.
Its not right, It's not the passengers fault but Like it or not, ultimately it was the passengers problem.
It should have been handled better than it was.

Overbooking... Only on an airline can they sell you something they have no intention of delivering!

United should have kept increasing the compensation for volunteering to give up your seat until they had a sufficient number of volunteers instead of randomly choosing passengers to displace. At some point, the compensation will get high enough that they will get a sufficient number of volunteers. I have seen it go to $1500. In the "good old days" before airlines became better at over booking, I would offer my seat, just in case it was needed, as soon as I got to the gate. I received quite a few free travel vouchers over the years for very little disruption of my travel plans.

It really doesn't work that way and I have seen hotels do it also. The airlines know, statistically, how many "no shows" they will have. Overbooking is a way to decrease the number of empty seats. They fully intend to get you to your destination. When it is done correctly, everybody wins, and is happy. In the small percentage of cases where they actually need people to give up their seats, they compensate them, and rebook them on the next available flight. It is best done by getting volunteers, who are usually overjoyed to give up their seats in exchange for compensation.

Am I missing something ? You know four of your employees have to be on this flight. You know their whereabouts ( i.e. in the terminal or just debarking from their previous flight, meaning you know they will be able to catch this flight to get to where they are needed ) Computers can tell you where they are every minute they work for you. Under those circumstances, why board the flight and sit a body in every seat ? If United knew it needed four seats for crew members why did they not simply reserve them and not sit someone else down in them ? This is a question a lawyer will ask and it will seem awfully logical to anyone listening including a member of a jury if it gets that far. ( It will not ) The doctor, if indeed the passenger was one, is going to be able to pay of any remaining student loan debt and buy a much bigger house after this one hits the civil legal system.

I think it was the police..............Chicago Aviation Police, which is a division of the Chicago Police Department. Fact check me.............but this is my understanding.

A lawsuit will obviously pull in United Airlines, but they followed the "contract" with the ticket holder........how the passenger was ejected maybe of question.

IMHO great post, but you are assuming too much. You are assuming that the people in charge of booking this flight had commonsense, quite obviously they did not and, unfortunately, lack of commonsense seems to be pervasive in our lives right now.

I'm assuming that until everyone checks in at the gate to board the plane, they don't know if everyone will show.

Yes it was the aviation police. And the regular Chicago police department got involved in explaining the incident and tweeted that the "69 year old Asian" "fell"
If you watch video it certainly does not look like the man "fell". And what his ethnicity had to do with the situation escapes me.

As to whether United acted in conformity with their contract is a legal question. You can read the contract, it has language about refusing to board passengers on oversold flights in rule 25, but that language all applies to BEFORE boarding. It seems once you are seated they must fly you unless rule 21 is invoked. There is nothing in rule 21 about overbooked removals. You are always required to follow the reasonable orders of the flight crew as to not endanger safety. [turn off your cell phone, put on your seat belt].

I would believe that removing a passenger for the convenience of the airline is not a safety issue. United had multiple other ways to get its crew to Louisville including simply driving them [under 5 hours drive time]. United failed to utilize any of several none-forceful methods to get its crew to Louisville and therefore is likely to not only loose in the court of public opinion [watch their stock go down today] but also in a court of law. Delta recently paid a family of three, $11,000 to give up seats on a flight. If United had upped their offer until they had 4 volunteers it would have avoided all this mess.

It is very possible that you are missing something. We don't know why a relief crew was needed. We don't know when United/Republic found out they needed a relief crew. We don't know that the crew was needed in Louisville, or if that was just a connection to somewhere else. We don't know how long it took to determine that the best course of action was to fly a crew from Chicago to Louisville (and perhaps on from there). We don't know when the gate agents got the word that they needed 4 seats on the flight to Louisville. We don't know how that need was expressed to the agents in Chicago.

I hate to comment until all the facts are in, but for the sake of discussion I will:

When you choose to fly, you voluntarily enter into an agreement with the service provider. You agree to follow the airline's rules and bumping proceedures. That's all you need to know. Once it was determined that this man was no longer able to take that flight he should have exited like a man, not a baby that must be drug off. He alone chose how he was going to leave the plane.

Police force is often not pretty. That's why society pays others to do it. Just remember the force is determined by the subject. I doubt the police just walked up and beat him up for fun. I also doubt the doctor line. If he is a doctor, are there no other doctors at his facility?

I avoid these airline problems by driving my truck when I travel. But even then I must play by the rules and I have no right to resist if I break those rules.