It was NOT an overbooked flight - lawyer explains

[DanTex]

21. I don't see why that's true.

There's a clear distinction between a situation where a plane can't safely and legally take off unless someone is bumped, and a situation where the plane could take off without bumping anyone, but the airline chooses to bump the people anyway.

Apparently if you can't point to that in the contract it doesn't exist. There are no distinctions between "ordinary" bumpings and others.

Actually, yes, there's a whole section about removing people from a flight for safety reasons. As there should be. What I haven't seen anywhere, either in the UA contract or in the legal regulations, is anything indicating that an airline can bump someone for its own convenience/profit, even though they could fly all the ticketed passengers if they wanted to. Maybe it's in the fine print. But in those links, the bumping scenarios they are talking about deal mainly with safety and overbookings.

Actually... it probably is. They didn't sell more tickets than seats on the flight (which would be the normal person's understanding of the term... so the airline clarified that this didn't happen) - but it does meet the definition in the contract and from the regulators. Overbooking occurs any time there are more tickets sold than available seats. Nothing says that the number of available seats can't change. That's what happens when smaller equipment has to replace larger ones. Suddenly they have an overbooked situation even though they didn't intentionally sell too many tickets.

In this case the seats actually were available, by any reasonable definition of "available". If an airline can arbitrarily decide to declare some seats "unavailable" for whatever reason it wants, the whole concept becomes meaningless.

You're making a claim without foundation. "It's own business reasons" is "must carry" if some other flight won't be able to fly if they don't get there. There has been lots of speculation about who they were (crew, maintenance, etc.) and whether they could have taken a cab... but we don't have anywhere near enough information to challenge the designation

I don't see how the other flight makes this a "must carry" situation. Certainly not any more of a "must" than "the ticketed passengers on this flight must be transported to their destination". It would be a "must carry" situation if the extra crewmembers were needed for the safety of this particular flight, but that was not the case. The other flight is UA's business problem, not the problem of the people who had tickets for this flight.

Also, as you said, we don't have enough information to know whether or not the other flight would really have had to be delayed, and for how long, and whether UA had other ways of resolving this without kicking ticked passengers off the flight.

What we do know, without speculation, is that is that UA was in a jam and needed to move some crew members, and they decided to get out of that jam by kicking ticketed passengers off of a flight that was not overbooked.


Again, maybe this is all legal according to fine print, but it's certainly not the same as bumping people for either overbooking or for safety reasons.