I wrote earlier about a doctor who was dragged off a United Express flight last night when the airline needed to transport crew instead of four passengers. He needed to get to work at a hospital the next day. United, though, needed crew in place in Louisville.
In this case it doesn’t appear that United sold more tickets than seats, rather they discovered for operational reasons they couldn’t carry as many passengers as expected. They needed to position crew at the flight’s destination.
Credit: @Tyler_Bridges
What I wanted to explore here, though, is a comment from reader neversink,
You buy a ticket. You should be guaranteed a seat. Overbooking should be illegal. And if the airline wants people to leave, they should up the ante to the market rate until someone takes the offer. Whatever it takes. Even if it takes $20,000 to get someone off the plane. The airlines play this game at the passengers inconvenience. It’s time the airlines were inconvenienced.
Why Airlines Overbook
While there wasn’t an oversale in this situation, most airlines in North America will sell more seats than they can carry passengers. They use historical information to determine how many passengers are likely not to show up for a flight. They want each seat to go out with a passenger in it.
Maybe they figure passengers are likely to oversleep a Sunday morning flight out of Las Vegas, so they can transport home those passengers that do make it to the plane. Passengers that oversleep expect to stand by on a later flight (either free or for a fee). Either way, an empty airline seat is a spoiling resource.
Airlines are pretty good at guessing these things, taking data like when the flight is and how far in advance tickets were purchased. And indeed they’re getting better, the rate of denied boardings has been on the decline over the past two decades. (In 2000, 0.21% of passengers were denied boarding (voluntary and involuntary) by the largest US airlines. In 2015, 0.09% were.)
You might think airlines shouldn’t overbook, sell each seat one time. But if that were the case airlines wouldn’t really be able to allow passengers the freedom to switch flights at will either on refundable tickets or merely by paying a change fee. Show up 15 minutes late for the airport, buy a new ticket.
What Does it Even Mean Not to Overbook?
If an airline sells exactly the number of seats they have on a plane, they still may not be able to accommodate everyone. Sometimes weather requires the plane to take on more fuel, and so they have carry fewer passengers (weight and balance issues can even affect a widebody aircraft).
And the number of seats on a plane itself can seem somewhat arbitrary. American Airlines has more seats on a Boeing 777 than Cathay Pacific does, so American is more likely to be unable to carry as many passengers as the plane has seats on Los Angeles – Hong Kong than Cathay is.
Is American overbooking by selling each seat on their plane, knowing that sometimes heavy winds on the long flight could cause challenges?
If Airlines Couldn’t Overbook, Had to Sell Fewer Seats, Prices Would Be Higher
You may not like the idea of overbooking, but denied boardings are rare. And the flexibility to do it means that the airline has more seats to sell.
Ban overbooking and that’s fewer seats being sold. That means higher costs per passenger (since you’re spreading the costs over fewer ticket sales). And quite simply, holding demand for seats constant reducing the quantity of seats supplied raises their price.
But Shouldn’t Airlines Spend More Time Seeking Volunteers?
It often seems that airlines should work harder to find volunteers to take a bump in exchange for compensation, instead of involuntarily denying boarding to passengers who have to get where they’re going. Maybe the airline only offered $200 or $400 in vouchers, why not $600 or $800 in cash especially when they’ll be on the hook to pay out to passengers involuntarily bumped. Should the airline here have been forced to keep upping the ante to $2000 or $5000?
Except that the time spent doing this might cause even bigger problems. Or at least it’s reasonable for the airline to think ex ante that it might.
- Delaying a flight even a little could cause crew to time out and the whole flight to cancel
- Government may have given the plane a very specific takeoff time (air traffic control) and if they miss their window the flight could be substantially delayed or even cancelled
- A late flight might cause passengers to misconnect with their next flight and be stranded
- And late arriving crew would delay other flights
- Or crew might be required to sleep in the next day to meet legal minimum rest requirements
There are No Guarantees in Air Travel
JetBlue doesn’t overbook their flights but saw a big spike in involuntary denied boardings. It turns out they had to substitute small aircraft on a number of occasions, which had fewer seats than the original planes.
Weather cancels flights. Mechanical issues cancel flights. Airline IT meltdowns cancel flights.
A friend had her Delta flights cancelled three days in a row last week (on day two we got her a United flight using miles that Delta had said was unavailable, no time to argue over a rebooking).
Sometimes flights are delayed and you don’t make your connection, and sometimes those connections are the last flight of the day — or even the week.
Air travel is complicated, and subject to the whims of mother nature, the skills of the airline, and the vagaries of chance.
Unfortunately you have to roll with it, and if you really really need to be somewhere you need to build in a cushion (something my friend on Delta did, flying to Los Angeles a day and a half early, but with Delta’s operational problems this last week and their personnel and IT failures it simply still wouldn’t have been enough).
What Should the Doctor Have Done? And How Should United Have Reacted?
In this case the flight was delayed, and the situation went bad. It’s reasonable for an outside observer to think the police should have found a less confrontational way to work with the passengers who were ordered to get off the plane than to drag them off and bloody them!
In fact that’s my hunch, fully realizing that we only have seen video of what happened once the man was being dragged off and not what happened leading up to that.
However when an airline orders you off the plane, you need to follow instructions even if it sucks. You could face criminal charges for failing to do so. You could wind up in Guantanamo and frankly no one wants to be water boarded…
If the passenger had gotten off the plane, they still could have made it to the hospital the next day albeit more worse for wear. There was a later Chicago – Louisville flight on United — and also on American (if they’d hurried) — although it’s not clear United would have put them on it. It would have been a 4.5 hour drive but a rental car is possible. It would have been ~ $300 with UberX. These options are all bad but it’s better than being dragged off by cops and bloodied.
Sometimes there are no good options so you look for the least bad. That’s basically never confronting crew and then confronting police. Confrontations with police can end badly not in an airport. In an airport the stakes are even greater, and this situation could have become worse than it did.
While the police probably could and should have done better, in some sense the man got lucky.
1. United simply should not oversell their last flight of the day
2. Had the United employees not been put on this flight, there would not have been oversell at all – purely poor scheduling
I guess the issue is the average flier doesn’t understand, and isn’t made aware to what degree rights are given away when you board that plane.
I can see the sense of ‘I am on the plane – I paid for the ticket – I have not caused any disturbance’ – who are they to make me get off.
Respectfully, I think you are on the wrong side of this situation. For all we might point fingers at the doctor, the problem stems from the airline. They could have paid more, they could have sent their staff by taxi etc. so many other options.
I respect and support you a lot Gary, but use your bully pulpit to be a leader and speak out here.
I think it’s a bunch of BS. “…the main got lucky”. Cut me a break! You are a white
Man that travels a lot. The stakes are changed now. By saying what you said we essentially allow law enforcement to act in humane and brute force. THERE IS NO ROOM OR PLACE FOR THAT. While we don’t know what the circumstances prior to the police confrontation, there is no evidence from the other passengers that he was a threat to others or the police. Further, given his social status and being a doctor myself, I highly doubt he was a serious threat beyond the usual anger one may experience when being forced off the plane. While your reasons are understandable, I’m certain $1000 cash would have found 4 volunteers or get another plane or airline to take the crew. Your rationalization of this event is a disgrace to others who experience racism and unfair treatment on airlines and at airports. In stead of bwing an advocate for passengers you claim that “he got lucky”.
When they got no takers for $800 they should have immediately upped it to $1000 and that would have resolved the situation. After all they’re already on the hook for $1500 if the pax is over 4 hours late when involuntarily denied.
Instead to be cheap and thoughless they use brute foce on a doctor who had told them he had to be at the hospital. And now the airline has taken a hit that it may not survive, deservedly with the way they’ve allowed staff to behave toward customers. As Mr. 33% proves, Americans don’t buy into authoritarianism for long.
Where was the customer service manager to at least show the officers how to move the middle armrest since the video shows reckless police behavior that could be expected to seriously injure the man’s hips or ribs by dragging him over it?
Good riddance to authoritarian rubbish. Take it to Russia.
Agree w Gary. You have a medium and voice to have an affect and you’re using it to your fellow passengers detriment. I had always supported you but this is clearly a pebble in the road.
Disagree with you Gary. Not on the explanation on how airlines oversell flights, etc… but on how United handled this situation. I can guarantee you this will cost United way more to clean up the mess and bad publicity than would have cost them to increase the vouchers by a couple hundreds of dollars. I’ve seen in many flights that the word “thousand” breaks people resistance. I believe the doctor would not take anything to give up his seat but many people would if the word “thousand” was used. I would rather take a Greyhound bus than fly United.
Agree w Carl above. Gary, you have a medium and voice and opportunity to have an affect and you’re using it to your fellow passengers’ detriment. I had always supported you but this is clearly a pebble in the road.
To some extent, this was bad luck for United, but why does the same airline keep being the one experiencing misfortunate? To some extent, a man (or airline) makes his own luck and “bad luck” is a symptom of systemically poor decisions.
How much will this end up costing the airline in terms of bad press? They should have increased their offer.
Thank you Gary. Someone finally gets it. What a sense of entitlement to refuse to get off – when you were selected – because your being a Dr means you are more important than the other people on the plane. Read your ticket contract… you do NOT have an unrestricted right to that seat.
Unfair as it seems, just do the right thing and get off the plane. That way you avoid impacting thousands of people with your self righteousness.
Funny that you mentioned renting a car and driving or using Uber. Why didn’t United simply do that to get their crew to where they needed to be? Oh, that’s right, it’s all about screwing the customer. Seriously, the airline was wrong, the cops were thugs and the passenger was right. It was United’s screw-up. It’s getting beyond tiring hearing excuses of corporations and their abuses.
Whatever. Don’t let the airlines hide behind a veil of terrorism scare tactics. They screwed the consumer because they miscalculated.
It’s interesting how the airline just makes the call and the police do the dirty work.
This is how society has become. And why things escalate to the level they do. It’s because we are not treating each other with calm respect – and that’s the real crime.
Airlines suck, police make mistakes. But it’s a lack of respect that causes all of this.
Should the doctor have left – probably. Should the airline offer more and been more respectful – probably. Should people avoid dumb mistakes by a disrespectful United – yes.
There has to be some accountability in this world for bad calls and bad behavior.
If I worked for United now, I’d be thinking about the backlash on the brand and working aggressively to compensate out of court.
If I was the doctor, I’d be thinking which United plane I wanted as my own.
For shame – to everyone.
I understand overbooking, but do not see any justification whatsoever for taking an already boarded passenger off a plane so that the airline can send a crew member somewhere. All the options you recite are equally available to the airline for its crews.
To me, the issue here is not one of legality, but whether or not there is a culture at the airline that places respect for the customer at the forefront.
If this culture is in place, then an airline would work toward finding a solution to the overbooking problem that does not place the customer and the airline at odds with one another. Something tells me this kind of thing would never happen on Southwest. Why? Because Southwest has a culture that would encourage employees to find a better solution to this problem.
Literally, we have a situation in which the airline feels that it is forced to get into confrontations with customers who simply want to pay money to reach their destination.
Any company and industry that truly embraces a customer-centric culture would work feverishly and maniacally to come up with innovative solutions to avoid this situation from ever coming up.
I despise UA. I don’t prefer them or AA or any other airlines but within the USA, you have no choice. I prefer asian carriers or any foreign carriers over any US based airlines when flying internationally. The attitude of the US airline counter agents, gate agents and flight crews are always condescending, rude and unfriendly whether you fly alone or with family members. Sadly our GOV is with the big airline companies! You are there to make profit of course but you have to have respect and courtesy to your passengers!
All your points are valid, Gary, but the larger issue — the one screaming from newspaper headlines today — is that United mis-handled this situation, and badly. There is no excuse for the situation escalating to this point, and the airline — not the passengers, and maybe not the employees — is to blame.
Classic example of “penny wise, pound foolish!”
BS – UA tried to do this on the cheap. $800 was not enough. Especially if vouchers, which are at best worth 70% of cash.
UA could have upped the offer and switched to cash, I reckon they probably get takers once they go north of $1k cash.
If there was a later AA flight, why not offer $500 + seats on later flight. Again they would likely have got takers.
Finally, they could have put the crew on the AA flight / UBER
Lots of options, but UA picked the worst one. No good Oscar hyping up the new UA when on the ground we see this sort of nonsense.
100% behind the doctor on this. The airline is the cause no matter the economics. They made a conscious decision to overbook/allow crew to take this flight.
Hopefully this costs them significantly more than a couple grand they offered.
United, and many other airlines, have been shooting themselves in the foot as they replace well paid employees with min wages agents.
Total mismanagement on United’s part. How is it they only discovered they needed to deadhead 4 employees AFTER. everyone was onboard. No planning at United? FAIL.
Isn’t the airline required to apprise passengers of their rights before IDB?
Greg, where is your $1500 number coming from? As Gary stated in his other recent post, under “14 CFR 250.5 they’re required to pay four times your fare up to $1350 if you aren’t given transportation scheduled to arrive at either your first connection or final destination within 2 hours of schedule.” Given that this was an incredibly short flight, it’s very possible that his ticket was $200 or less, hence their reluctance to offer more than $800 in compensation. We can all agree that airlines are motivated primarily by profit, so this is probably the most likely explanation. But who are we to blame them? Everyone should be well aware of the rules when they purchase their ticket… if they don’t like these regulations, then perhaps they should petition their congressmen to increase the compensation requirements, since apparently many members of congress love attacking the airlines as well. The airline certainly could have handled the situation a little better, but once the decision was made to call the airport police, it was out of their control how the situation was handled. It was very unfortunate, but it’s absolutely no excuse for this man to behave in the manner that he did, further inconveniencing hundreds of other passengers (on this flight and on the other flights that likely were delayed due to this flight delay and the possible crew timeout). If three police men with guns instruct me to leave the plane, I will always leave the plane without issue and I think 99% of Americans would as well. It’s a crappy situation, but there’s no need to make it worse for everyone else by acting like a child.
My issue is the opaqueness of the process to get volunteers. Airlines should be required to provide a fixed amount of compensation for a bump based on how long the passenger will be delayed and provide a passenger with a sheet clearly detailing his or her rights.
I was recently on plane that had to bump people due to higher fuel requirements to avoid storms. We were given one offer and were told if we didn’t accept we would be involuntarily bumped and receive nothing. I’m not sure that’s correct under federal guidelines for compensation, but shows that the airlines are willing to threaten passengers and lie to save money.
First, I don’t think its United’s fault this guy got hurt. Police officers were responding to a situation where a passenger didn’t cooperate with crew member instructions (which is against the law). Yes, they could have been more gentle with him, but we don’t know what happened leading up to him being pulled out of the seat. At the end of the day, this guy knew he was going to be forcefully removed by three police officers if he didn’t voluntarily get up. Its his own damn fault for first not listening to crew member instructions and again his fault for not listening to a lawful order from a police officer. It sucks that United had to bump him, but it happens. No passenger has a right to fly just because they paid for the seat. Stop blaming the airline when the guy would have been perfectly fine if he had just listened and done what he was supposed to do in the first place.
Interesting that this was suggested as a course of action for the passenger but not for United repositioning their crew.
“If the passenger had gotten off the plane, they still could have made it to the hospital the next day albeit more worse for wear. There was a later Chicago – Louisville flight on United — and also on American (if they’d hurried) — although it’s not clear United would have put them on it. It would have been a 4.5 hour drive but a rental car is possible. It would have been ~ $300 with UberX. “
Finally the voice of reason! United reserves every right to bump passengers for whatever reason. They are under no obligation to reimburse you or entice voluntary bumps with vouchers; that is done as a courtesy. This unruly passenger should face criminal charges for failing to follow airline orders to disembark, which cost taxpayers money by requiring police intervention and disrupted the travel plans of others. Tough luck doctor but you don’t own that plane, and you agreed to the terms of the ticket.
Doesn’t matter if the passenger was a doctor or not, he was a paying customer that was treated worse than a criminal.
First, it was not an overbook as the seats they wanted were for employees. Overbooking references revenue passangers.
Second, United Contract of Carriage specifically does not provide the right or option to remove a boarded passenger due to the need for employee seating (alse Section 21 does not apply either). They should have stopped boarding, then addressed. Once a valid boarding occurred it was too late.
There is always going to be someone willing to be bumped if the price offered is high enough. Period.
When airlines choose to oversell a flight they’re effectively making a bet that says that they’ll either have enough no-shows to mean that the flight goes out at zero extra cost to them or that they’ll at least be able to get the aircraft out without having to offer too much compensation.
The problem here is that United doesn’t appear to understand that it shouldn’t be allowed to use threats and police/security as a stop-loss for when the bet goes against them.
As ever gambler knows, if you’re going to make bet after bet after bet you’re going to get burned pretty badly every now and again….except it would appear that airlines don’t want to accept this. They want everything their own way with their downside limited by, in this case, blatantly inappropriate behavior on their part.
United really screwed up here and, as others have pointed out, they should have kept increasing the offer to pax until they got the number of volunteers they needed. That’s how the “bet” should work….but the day airlines actually take true responsibility for their own miscalculations and “bets” will be the day pigs fly (under their own power!).
@Theresa, he was a criminal. He broke the law, twice… This situation was completely avoidable if he had listened to their instructions. United refused boarding, how else do you get someone off a plane when they refuse to get off?
Maybe the head of United’s revenue management department should be knocked unconscious, bloodied, then dragged off of a plane. Then maybe this wouldn’t happen again.
The police were called for a corporate issue, not airline security or safety. Police violated this mans Constitutional rights and falsely detained.
He will get alot more than $800 when this is over…..and there will be several fewer employees…..
How was he treated “worse” than a criminal? By definition, he WAS a criminal by his refusal to abide by the instructions of the flight crew or the police. Your comment makes no sense.
Also, how is the factor that he was an Asian doctor even relevant, and why does the media keep emphasizing this? Can anyone even imagine how the circumstance would be portrayed if it was a Muslim man in tradition clothing speaking Arabic, or a black man with a hoodie? As awful as it sounds, the passengers on the plane would have likely erupted in applause after the police removed these “criminals”, so I’m not sure how this man’s race or occupation is even relevant to the situation. Anyone who is refusing to obey the commands of the flight crew or the police is by definition a criminal and should be treated exactly the same, regardless or race, occupation, gender, etc… but since this was a little, harmless-looking Asian doctor, everyone is so quick to jump to his defense without even knowing the full story or seeing what happened prior to the videos that have circled the internet. It’s pretty messed up, when you think about it…
At least in the UK BA only steals the food from economy passengers’ mouths – this would NEVER happen on an EU airline. It’s a disgrace how this man was treated. I’m shocked by it and I would never fly United as a result. Do you realise how bad this makes US airlines look?
The assumption underlying your analysis and opinion is that the situation had to be resolved at the passengers’ inconvenience. You have failed to notice that all of the options you point out—car rental, taxi, uber, etc—were equally available to UA and its crew. I’d even guess that UA would have come out ahead by renting one car for its crew and keeping the airfare from 4 paid pax.
The problem is that there is no incentive and no culture of thinking out of the box, or in a humane way, proportional to the situation.
Culture evolves slowly but money can provide incentive quickly, so maybe it is time for much higher vouchers and even a hefty penalty whenever a confirmed pax is denied seat.
So the bottom line is that while the public *thinks* that they are reserving a seat on an airplane, they are actually only buying into a “seat lottery” for which there are X number of seats, and X+Y number of tickets. There is a Z% chance that they will not actually get a seat, and they are given no choice but to accept that risk when they buy a ticket.
Such a system is only acceptable IF you make this clear to your customers that this is the game being played AND you provide them both additional information with which to make a decision and/or give them other choices.
So first of all, airlines need to have very clear disclaimers in big red letters stating that “this purchase does not guarantee you a seat on this flight”, since it obviously does not. As it stands, it’s quite obvious that the public believes that they DO have such a guarantee.
Secondly, airlines need to offer people who simply cannot accept any “bump risk” a pricing option to purchase a firm, non-bumpable seat. A “if the plane makes it to the destination, you WILL be on it” fare.
Finally, they need to provide the consumer more information with which to make a conscious cost/benefit probability analysis to decide on whether the price justifies that particular risk that they’ll get stranded. For starters, airlines should provide statistics showing that, for example, the 9:00 a.m. LAX to JFK flight has historically oversold 15% of the time, whereas the 2:00 p.m. flight oversells only 2% of the time. Since the airlines base their overbooking procedures and pricing models with this info, they clearly have such information.
@Quinn United did NOT deny boarding. He boarded and was in his seat. Look up United Contract of Carriage….the passanger did nothing wrong!! They should have REFUSED boarding…which happens at the gate.
@AKTCHI, the crew would have exceeded the federally mandated guidelines for required amount of rest before work and thus would have “timed out” if they had been forced to drive to the destination.
Well commenter Tom if the airline is so motivated by profit, how much will this negative publicity cost in profits? Alot more than the extra few hundred dollars I bet
@JD, Like I said, the airline COULD have should have handled it a bit better, but it wasn’t exactly their fault if the police used excessive force. They also had no way of knowing that the passenger would literally fight with the police to the extent that he would need to be wrestled out of his seat and dragged from the plane… the vast majority of sane human beings would comply with armed officers when requested to do so, especially when on an airplane… obviously this didn’t turn out how United had anticipated, and I’m sure they regret the decision now, but it really is bad luck.. do you honestly think that American or Delta would have bent over backwards for this guy?
UA screwed up. The passenger was not IDB, he was boarded. The plane was not over sold. UA wanted to pull a passenger off so that a member of staff could fly instead. At this point in the process they needed to find another way to get staff to the other end or offer passengers more compensation.
@Quinn — if, after removing the stick from up your ass, you continue to stand by your comment, then would you care to explain which law of physics demands that removal of a passenger requires bleeding and knocking them out.
Many pax are removed against their will, often for drunkenness and whatnot. There are videos of these situations. No blood or loss of consciousness.
United should have taken care of this overbooking issue BEFORE the boarding. Or they should have upped compensation for deplaning.
“United didn’t just decide crew were more important than passengers, they needed those crewmembers in place in order to work a flight in the morning. The crew needed to make it to Louisville that night, and they’d have to meet federal rules for minimum rest before operating a flight the next day.”
They didn’t bump the passengers simply because a member of staff wanted to fly, as you suggest, they needed to bump the passengers in order to ensure that the crew arrived at their destination with enough time to rest and be able to meet federal regulations in order to operate their flight the following day. Had the crew members not taken the flight, the morning flight would have also been delayed due to lack of crew, and this would have likely cascaded to other flights throughout the day as well, inconveniencing hundreds and possibly even thousands of other passengers.
@Tom when the pax refused the flight crew’s “random selection” and threatened to call his lawyer I’m sure at that point it only strengthened their resolve to not get “shown up”. If airport security was directed by the airline to remove the passenger by force they are still liable for the actions of the police. They surely could have found a pax less resolve and with less valid reasons to take this flight, but they didn’t want to look bad. Ironically that’s exactly what happened anyway
@Jason, no need for the personal attacks, he was simply stating a fact. How is it United’s fault that the police used excessive force? Were they supposed to just allow the passenger to blatantly disregard their orders and sit their patiently, delaying all the other passengers, until he voluntarily stood up from his seat and walked off?
“Less valid reasons” ??? So his reason for taking the flight is automatically more valid simply because he claims he is a doctor? Since when did we start ranking passengers reasons for taking flights?
As a person who teaches law at a Texas university and is part owner in a longtime small family business that owns property, I can say that this situation is a direct result of the huge power accumulated by the federal government and by HUGE corporations, who then use terror laws and other extraordinary government security measures for their own business purposes. In my own family business, we’ve had tenants, when they vacated one of our restaurant sites, steal half the kitchen in the middle of the night while police stand by, claiming its a civil dispute, and they watch as our property is taken away. As another example, there was once a guy who was owed money by one of our tenants in one of our shopping centers, and he came by with a pick-up truck and stole our sign (that we own) off our shopping center parking lot. This fly-by-night lender, when told by our small business that the sign was ours (not the tenant’s sign), the shady lender still refused to return it until the tenant paid him. And, even though we were able to identify who this thief was, the police refused to get involved to get our sign back because they said it’s a civil dispute. United, through their own stupidity, allowed too many people to board the aircraft peaceably and then wanted forcibly to replace those people with United employees completely for the purposes of furthering their bottom line as a corporation. The passenger did not engage in disruptive behavior which required his removal (and I realize that bad behavior is a problem out there in the travel world, and police should remove disruptive passengers). Rather, United made a business mistake and thus created a civil dispute. United then took the business dispute and escalated it by using force in a way that most small businesses don’t have access to. In Texas, we can padlock a tenant’s commercial property if they don’t pay rent. But, we are not allowed to stand out in front of our property with a gun to prevent delinquent tenants from entering their store. Rather, we have to go to court, and that can take weeks. This passenger paid for a ticket, and United peaceably allowed him onto the plane. They should have either paid him whatever they needed to, or they should have cancelled the entire flight and rebooked everyone and not let the guy fly on the new flight if they wanted to make a point. But for me, as a small business owner (and a licensed attorney in Texas), I find it incredibly unfair in this country that HUGE corporations get to use the power of the federal government under color of law to push the rest of us around, for their own bottom line, and we apparently just have to take it. Until we realize as a country that the power of Washington – which includes the TSA (and Homeland Security), the EPA, and all manner of other federal agencies that are way too involved in our local communities – needs to be severely curtailed, these types of things will continue. I realize these were local cops in Chicago who removed the guy, and Chicago police don’t have the best human rights record. But, these local cops get to do that because they have the power of the federal government behind their actions – all sorts of things are used as excuses to fight terrorism.