re: #39 Sir John Barron

I wasn’t surprised to see many of the usual cast of characters defend the airline, blame the customer, claim that “we all know the rules, we all know the risks” etc.

But as someone who doesn’t fly much, this mentality seems pretty odd to me. You mean, I should know that in buying a ticket I might not get to actually ride on the plane, or that even after being seated, I can be arbitrarily ejected?

And apparently we should also know that its common practice for airlines to overbook and we should all be prepared to endure the inconvenience of that business policy so we can reap the rewards of the low prices and….oh wait.

See, that’s the brilliance of United’s initial excuse-making, that they blamed it on an overbooking so they could portray this guy as acting out in an unreasonable fashion because we’re all too familiar with the concept of overbooking. Meanwhile, the CEO has already sent out a letter (which the media has since published) that shows they know it wasn’t an overbooking, it was deciding that providing seats for four of their employees was not worth whatever it would have cost to get “volunteers” to take a voucher and a later flight. So that, when this whole mess is eventually resolved, United will maintain that they were always the victim of an “unruly” passenger.