Does it matter that the United Airways passenger was a doctor?

Correction: United Airlines.

it doesn’t make any difference, Whether he is a doctor or not.

United Airlines have no right to beat a passenger just because he is not giving his seat!!

It’s regrettable that United Airlines always comes into the limelight just of their negative behavior (another incident happened with Musician Dave Carroll for his Guitar, read more here- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars)

^^ I’m not asking whether beating him is ok, I’m asking if in your opinion being a doctor means he gets to stay on, and the airline should pick someone else. I see the media saying ”...and he’s a doctor, more reason he should be allowed to stay on the plane, he has patients.”

I’m definitely torn on this. My initial instinct is to say no , but then I hear interviews with passengers (from that flight) who said their were staff announcements asking if there was a doctor on board. Apparently United would have liked to find a doctor to help… the doctor.

Yes, he is a doctor. Whether he had patients or not is debatable. I looked him up on the Kentucky Board of Medicine and he has been in quite a bit of trouble and has lost his license back in 2003. He has since regained it, but is only allowed to work one day a week under supervision. If that one day a week was the next day after his flight, I can see why he had the extreme reaction that he had.
I think most of us have places we have to be, jobs we have to be at, people we have to report to. No one should be more important than another.

I don’t give a fuck what his profession is or what his history is. I am just as angry at the spreading of his personal information as I am that he was assaulted. The whole thing is outrageous.
If you paid for a flight, they shouldn’t be able to just pluck you off on a whim. Of course flights have to be rerouted or canceled or rescheduled for various reasons, but this was not that. This was a huge steaming pile of bullshit.

@JLeslie Do you rank an off duty flight attendant as a more important person than a Doctor? United does.

@JLeslie No.

@chyna That report is untrue. It was a different doctor in Louisiana with a different middle name, according to my understanding as of this morning. At east that is what I read. It could be untrue as well, but…regardless, a persons past has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

@Coloma I read it on the Kentucky Board of Medicine website. I’m pretty sure it’s true. But the only reason I sited it was because of the poster’s question asking if it mattered that he was a doctor. My point was that IF he lied and didn’t actually have any patients the next day, then the media’s outcry, per @JLeslie‘s answer above, was invalid.
I also stated that I didn’t think anyone is more important than anyone else.

@chyna Yes, I agree, no one is more important than someone else. Maybe my sources were skewed, I red it was an incorrect report but who knows.

Absolutely it should be taken into account. Imagine he was your doctor and you were scheduled to see him the next day and you got a call in the morning that he couldn’t make it.

Most people have to make special arrangements to get out of work to make it to a doctors appt. The last time I went to my doctor I was getting stitches removed and I wasn’t going to be able to walk for a few days. So my sister had to take a day off from work to drive me there, wait, and then drive me home.

And also there is the whole entire shifting of his schedule so it could cause a chain-reaction of peoples appointments getting pushed around.

So yeah.. This dude getting home was probably more important than 99% of the others on the flight.

Edit above: read not red. haha

The question would be what if everyone on the plain claim that they’re doctors and have to attend to a patient just to avoid being dragged off the plane. United don’t care about excuses and they won’t make time to check everyone’s background, so no, it doesn’t matter whether or not he claimed to be a doctor. But… it matters if someone claim to be a high-ranking politician or government officials… you mess with the wrong person you pay the price and there’s absolutely no price to pay from harassing someone who claimed to be a doctor.

Well, if he actually had a pressing reason to go, as in someone’s life was on the line, then yes. Otherwise, no.

I read an interesting article that suggested the United employee who needed the seat was a UA pilot who had to be in the next town to fill in on a flight. Him not making it would have caused a huge bottle neck of cancelled flights and affected thousands of people, not just one.

”The question would be what if everyone on the plain claim that they’re doctors and have to attend to a patient just to avoid being dragged off the plane.”

I can’t imagine that would happen since it would obviously be bullshit. And the dude probably had a business card or something.

United could have chartered a flight or got a car. It was only a 8 hour drive.

It is pretty interesting to see the people that spin shit to make it where a paying customer can get his front teeth knocked out and get a concussion for refusing to stand up fast enough. It explains the election of Trump and needing a strong daddy. SAD.

No, looks like Vietnam beats the US again…or maybe that should be the other way around.

Well, not merely in the sense that one might presume more money is involved in his work. But possibly in terms of the importance of those appointments to the patients, which is rightly a confidential private matter, so presumably yes, you shouldn’t bump doctors if you can avoid it…

Which gets back to how stupid it is for an airline to get to the point where they are forcibly bumping people. The PR impact of this one case is going to set UA back far more than they could gain by money-grubbing ovebook/bump tactics backed by stingy bump negotiations.

What seems even more significant about the passenger being a doctor, is that the three large young security guards had even less reasonable cause to regard the 69-year-old guy as a threat whom they should reasonably use injuring force on, and that UA staff should have been able to reason with him based on him presumably being an intelligent rational adult.

UA should train their crews in good negotiation skills, and give them enough authority to negotiate that they would never have gotten to the point of ordering random people off the plane.

Something I don’t understand is that my understand is that there were 4 people who had to disembark. Apparently he’s the only one who threw a fit (right or wrong) and that some how turned it into a racist situation. I don’t get that.

Any airline should know that once they’ve seated people, it’s done. Those people are going on the flight.

The pilot/staff who were dead-heading should not have put off their flights until anything later wouldn’t get them to their next scheduled flight on time.

Now United is reimbursing the ticket cost to all passengers on that flight. Or hoping to. Considering the reactions of some I’ve heard interviewed, there are going to be lawsuits coming from them as well.

Given that he already said he was calling his lawyer before the muscle arrived, United staff should have realized this was not something that was going to work out well.

@Dutchess_III – he didn’t throw a fit. He was quiet before they started to physically haul him away. He said he was staying on the flight and was calling his lawyer. There’s video of all this.

There was no fit throwing.

There was passenger-tossing, nose-breaking, tooth-breaking, concussion-causing.

There was no fit throwing.

”Apparently he’s the only one who threw a fit (right or wrong) and that some how turned it into a racist situation. I don’t get that.”

Provide proof. I have seen nothing to support this and I watch the news all fucking day.

Here is one..

Another.

China

variety
aljazeera
buzzfeed

Try harder.

Aljazeera is a respected news source. The name sounds middle eastern though, and that scares some people.

Here is a New York Times article.

As @johnpowell suggested, I think it does make a difference that he is a doctor and had patients to see. I haven’t seen anything that discredits his suggestion that he had patients to see the next day. I do think him not being available to see his patients has a bigger effect than me not being able to turn up. I seem to recall seeing something about him having to see patients in the hospital, but that might not be right. I would expect United Airlines, or any airline, to talk to passengers they’re asking to leave the plane to see if they have a valid reason to be in the place they’re travelling to. It’s really ridiculous that they just look at the person’s flight history, cost of their seat and that type of information.

I’ve seen news content that has said there was a racist slant to the choice, but I haven’t seen that it was the doctor who has tried to spin this. I read somewhere that all four passengers who were ejected were Asian, but I’m not sure if that’s true.

The BBC

It depends on what they had to see him for, IMO, @Earthbound_Misfit.

@johnpowell “I can’t imagine that would happen since it would obviously be bullshit. And the dude probably had a business card or something”

Everyone can lie, and if the guards choose another passengers, they too, will make excuses of equal importance just like the doctor. So no, me having a billion dollar contract that has to be signed on time is just as important as a doctor having a patient, and the guards don’t have to care about any of those excuses, they’re just following the rules by doing their job. What matters is that one person they don’t even know or care about gone so that they can continue their flight, as harsh as it sounds like. To tell the truth, people might pity the doctor but they’ll still prefer their own flight on schedule, which is proven by not even one person want to volunteer to replace the doctor.

The BBC link doesn’t say anything about the Dr. having / throwing any kind of fit. Neither does the NYT link. Complaining/commenting that he’s being targetted is not throwing a fit. The video doesn’t support your suggestion.

I read a very rational and well written article this morning that settled a lot of questions for me. The airline was in the wrong, and it doesn’t matter who it was.
Here is the article.

I can’t see how being a doctor, in itself, would make it worse. If you’re traveling with your family, does that exempt you? How about the person taking a cruise and missing the flight means missing the boat? I have no idea how they decide who gets bumped but the whole situation could have been avoided by a little better planning on United’s part. How did they suddenly realize, at the last minute, that they had a plane somewhere with no crew? $800 is not much for losing a day regardless of what you do.

Doctors are frequently thought of as making life and death decisions. That allows the media to hype this so they do. A dentist or a manicurist would need to make the same schedule adjustments. They should have offered more money until they got volunteers.

Bet they don’t make the same mistake twice! Gotta love the media.

I thought about this myself but then I came to another conclusion. It doesn’t matter if he was a doctor or a housewife, or even unemployed. The real question, is why are paying customers being asked to give up their seat after being seated? Why can’t the airlines schedule return flights for their staff? Why does that lack of scheduling have to fall at the inconvenience of passengers who planned their trip accordingly and arrived on time? He did and said the same thing anyone who had appointments the next day ,or was expected back at work the next day, would argue. There are stories about people being bumped off their flight when they were on a way to catch a cruise. When they write out the schedule for pilots and their crew, they know where they are going to be and should know how they are going to get back. Hoping for empty seats shouldn’t be the way they figure it out. Especially since most airlines don’t refund you your money when you miss your flight.