There is nothing in the contract of carriage that says it is ok to remove a passenger from the plane for dead heads. About the only reason they are allowed to remove a passenger from the plane is safety reasons. Three fact that united might have to cancel a flight and inconvenience other people is totally irrelevant.

You are correct and my post was not precisely worded. I was not trying to say it was OK to forcibly remove a boarded passenger for this reason.

I was responding mostly to the claim that they can only denying boarding in the event of an oversale because they can deny boarding to accommodate positioning crew, it happens all the time.

I agree that once the passenger was boarded, the situation was different. United screwed up, and they compounded the problem in their violent removal of the passenger and their subsequent public responses to the incident.

Read rule 25, and once you realize that employees are booked as passengers when moved like this, you realize there's a whole procedure in place for bumping people involuntarily from flights.

That's actually not true. From 14 CFR 250.1, definitions:

"Confirmed reserved space means space on a specific date and on a specific flight and class of service of a carrier which has been requested by a passenger, including a passenger with a “zero fare ticket,”"

"Zero fare ticket means a ticket acquired without a substantial monetary payment such as by using frequent flyer miles or vouchers" ... "A zero fare ticket does not include free or reduced rate air transportation provided to airline employees and guests".

Which means the employees cannot be counted as having confirmed reserved space. 14 CFR 250.2a says:

"In the event of an oversold flight, every carrier shall ensure that the smallest practicable number of persons holding confirmed reserved space on that flight are denied boarding involuntarily."

Which means denying the smallest practicable number of persons holding confirmed reserved space means denying 0 paying passengers. They cannot bump passengers for crew. Whether they do or not, they legally cannot.

>Which means the employees cannot be counted as having confirmed reserved space.

I believe your interpretation is incorrect. This was discussed in another thread last night.[0]

Assuming 14 CFR 250 even applies (there's multiple reasons why it may not), the explicit exclusion of employees from the definition of a zero fare ticket is immaterial due to employees otherwise satisfying the definition of confirmed reserved space.[1]

The critical point is that the definition merely includes zero fare tickets, which are explicitly defined as not being employees. That does not mean employees cannot otherwise satisfy the definition of confirmed reserved space.

Deadheading employees are not involved in the operation of the aircraft, so they may be considered passengers. The employee travel passes used reserve a specific date, flight and class of service at their request.

Due to the urgency of that particular situation, the passes used were positive-space, also having higher seating priority than paying passengers. While that sucks, the alternative is that an entire flight is delayed or canceled, with many passengers on that flight missing their connections. Those missed connections then bump people off subsequent flights, creating a cascade of chaos. That's why deadheading flight crew have priority over ticketed passengers in certain situations.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095224

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?width=840&...

There is a difference between a "zero fare ticket" provided as a perquisite to employees and guests for personal use, and employees/crew flying on a company-issued reservation for duty positioning (i.e. deadheading).

You are simply mistaken. United should have handled this before boarding the passengers--when they would have had a legal right to arbitrarily deny boarding.

United screwed up by failing to follow the correct procedures, and the compounded that failure by sending security personnel onto the plane to manhandle their customers.

Correct, I worded this poorly. Was not trying to defend the forcible removal, only that they can (and do) deny boarding to position crew.

So laws evaporate for the sake of corporate efficiency? This kind of deference to authority and lack of empathy is alarming me.

How is that for the sake of corporate efficiency? If you can't get a crew to a plane they're supposed to work on in time, you have to cancel the flight, and then instead of inconveniencing (in this case) the four passengers they chose to bump, you inconvenience an entire plane of passengers.

That is exactly corporate efficiency. Less efficient solutions that don't inconvenience passengers include:

* maintaining extra crew on standby at each airport, in case of no-shows by the scheduled crew.

* reserving (i.e. not selling) space on flights specifically for such crew transport.

* buying seats for them on other airlines, chartering a small aircraft, or other means of transport.

* offering enough cash to persuade volunteers to debark. Considering that the alternative is to compensate an entire planeful, the budget for this is a lot higher than 4*$800.

> IANAL but pretty sure

That means you are, even if confidently so, guessing? Or can you provide concrete details?