Police Drag Passenger Off Overbooked United Flight
United Airlines overbooked a flight from Chicago to Louisville this weekend and needed a volunteer to leave the flight. It happens — airlines always overbook, and in the cases where there end up being too many passengers, they offer incentives (travel vouchers, etc.) to entice a passenger to wait for a later flight.
What doesn't happen is this — police forcefully (and we mean, forcefully) removing a passenger who was unwilling to get off the flight. It's horrifying:
According to Audra Bridges, who posted the video, the passenger was a doctor who needed to get to Louisville for his hospital shift. The Louisville Courier-Journal reached out to United and got the following statement, which more or less confirmed the incident went down as the video showed:
"Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked," the spokesperson said. "After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate."
United is going to get a lot of bad press for this, and it deserves every bit of it, but the Chicago Police Department will also get some, especially with statements like this: