Make Passengers Walk? Let Money Talk!
Voluntary Trade Benefits Everybody
by
Eric Paul Nolte
As a recently retired airline pilot with 41 years in the business (most recently at United Airlines, not incidentally), I know the airline industry better than I know my family tree, so I speak with authority when I tell you that the media are not telling you the whole story about David Dao, the hapless Vietnamese-American doctor who was recently bullied, bloodied, and dragged off a United Airlines flight in Chicago.
We hear that United Airlines summarily removed four passengers to make room for its own employees. The reports say that the flight was overbooked, and there is widespread resentment that airlines engage in such perceived selfishness and disdain for the rights of passengers.
No passengers were willing to give up their seats when the company offered a few hundred dollars for each seat. When no passengers volunteered, four of them were singled out for involuntary denial of passage according to company procedures. Since these passengers were already aboard the airplane, they were asked to leave the ship. Dr. Dao refused to deplane, so the Chicago airport police were called in, and when Dr. Dao resisted arrest, the police cruelly forced him off the airplane, as we know from the video of the horrible scene that shortly went viral on YouTube.com. Dr. Dao suffered several serious injuries.
We share the outrage over this kind of brutality that we would not expect to see outside of a police state. But the media’s reporting of this incident displays little understanding of the real situation or of important details of the airline business.
Of course, the first concern is to wonder why did this situation get so out of hand that the airport police were called in?
Airport security these days is spring-loaded to deal with terrorists, not to intervene on behalf of some little misunderstanding over the seating arrangements of passengers and airline employees.
To call in the cops is overkill, like unleashing attack dogs over a little disagreement at a hot dog stand. This was an unwarranted and frightening threat of lethal force to resolve a little mix-up between customers and a service provider.
The police should not have been called in to resolve this dispute.
The airline could have easily solved the problem if they had put into practice a little understanding of the law of supply and demand. The airline should have realized that they were in an overbooked situation and that the goal here should always be to resolve the problem voluntarily, with good will, and with an eye towards achieving an outcome that is of mutual benefit to company and passengers. It only makes sense. To paraphrase a recent ad for Southwest Airlines, we want to beat our competition, not our customers! This good will is central to maintaining the good reputation that is crucial to prospering in business and life.
How would this seeding of good will work in this case? We have an auction here. If no passengers are willing to give up their seats for $200, then offer them $400. If $400 is not enough to entice passengers, keep raising the offer until somebody is finally willing to make the trade.
The airline did offer some money for the seats, but no passengers were willing to give up their seats for the amount offered. The company should have offered more money. The police should never be called in unless there is a threat to life or limb.
Why would an airline be willing to buy their passengers’ seats back? It is simple economics, but the press has not displayed much understanding of it.
The media have shown some understanding of why airlines overbook flights —they do so in order to fill seats left empty by no-show passengers, and the actual number overbooked for each flight is artfully calculated on the basis of specific flight data and statistics.
But I have seen little in the reporting of this incident that displays a grasp of why the company would feel compelled to remove paying passengers to make room for airline employees.
This is a situation I have seen often enough over the years and the reasons for it are easy to explain.
For example, suppose an airplane is at an outstation where no aircrew members are based. At the outstation there will be no crews available to be called into work on short notice. If a plane at the outstation has a mechanical problem that delays them long enough, the crew will run into a government regulation that prohibits them from being on duty for too many hours. The flight would either have to be canceled or delayed until the crew has been given a rest period required by the federal aviation regulations. But if a fresh crew can be called up and ferried out to the outstation to replace the first crew, the flight can be salvaged. Canceling an airline flight can cost the company millions of dollars! So it makes good economic sense to pay some customers enough for them to want to give up their seats so as to make room for a replacement crew who can be dispatched to prevent a costly cancellation.
Now, the fine print of an airline ticket reveals a contract that allows the company to deny boarding to passengers under certain conditions. It is not true that a passenger has a right to an airline seat after purchasing the ticket, contrary to widespread opinion. There are too many situations where it might not even be possible to transport a passenger as originally agreed by the ticket purchase.
There is a world of confusion and chaos over the nature of rights—those of humans, animals, Gaea herself, welfare rights, liberty rights, positive and negative rights, the rights of races, genders, nations, and, to the point here, airline passenger rights.
As with so many of the contentious matters with which she wrestled, I believe that Ayn Rand cut through this cloud of confusion with greater clarity than anybody since the time of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Rights are conditions of survival tied to each individual’s life in a social context. Rights belong to each individual, and these “individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” as she put it in her essay on “Man’s Rights.” The source of these rights is human nature, not an arbitrary social convention dreamed up out of the largesse of governments who bestow goodies on warring special interest groups for political power and advantage. (Yes, I know that this view is contrary to much of contemporary legal thought.)
So, like all of us, Dr. Dao has a right to his own life, liberty, and property—a right to be protected against the unwarranted initiation of physical force against him. The purpose of government is the protection of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property. The purpose of the police is to restrain the predators among us and keep the peace. The police are granted the power to intervene and restrain anybody in a civilian dispute until they can figure out what is going on and how to restore law and order. As an individual who unwittingly wanders into a fight, when the police show up, you are obligated to cooperate with their efforts to sort out the problem, and if you display the poor judgment to resist them you can put yourself in mortal danger, as happened to Dr. Dao.
I believe that the company was legally entitled to deny boarding to those passengers, much as we dislike the way they handled the matter, but to call in the gendarmes under these conditions was to risk creating a big stinking brouhaha, especially when Dr. Dao resisted arrest so adamantly.
So, what of the unfortunate Dr. Dao? Again, in my humble opinion, the company could have prevented the whole mess by raising the price it was willing to pay until some passengers would have cheerfully given up their seats.
Nevertheless, what happened to Dr. Dao was reprehensible.
Having said that the brutality against Dr. Dao was deplorable, I have to ask what on earth was the poor man thinking when he resisted arrest?
The situation strikes me as comparable to driving your car and being pulled over by a police cruiser. You may be convinced that you were doing nothing wrong at all, but any fool knows that if you resist arrest, you risk getting your ass pounded or worse! How could Dr. Dao think that anything good can come out of defying a trio of police officers who are pumped up and primed to fight terrorists?
I hold the police blameworthy for failing to exercise better judgment in this situation.
I hold the unfortunate Dr. Dao responsible for exercising poor judgment in the face of his admittedly terrible predicament.
I hold the airline responsible for failing to keep the police out of a situation in which they should never have been called out.
I also hold the airline responsible for failing to arrange matters so that the problems caused by overbooking and crew transportation could have been prevented in the first place through the peaceful, voluntary trading of good things between people for the benefit of all concerned.
E P N
2017.0418
c. 1,550 words
