Column: All he wanted to do is get home

The whole world through social media is trying to make some sense of the videos showing an United Airlines passenger who has already boarded and in his assigned seat was forcibly dragged off, bloodied and dazed.

Worse yet, United Airlines through its CEO publicly issued an “apology” for having to “reaccomodate these customers” and at the same time issued a long internal memo to its employees justifying the violence as “an upsetting event to all of us here at United,” but that the employer “emphatically stands behind behind all of you and I commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right.”

Sure employees are vital to a company’s success, but can a company continue to accommodate its employees when it has no customers? Especially United Airlines when it is dreaming to capturing a profitable share of the large China market.

In my opinion, the incident was an outrage - just because four United crew members claimed privilege to bump off passengers already seated, the company uses violence on a man who had every good a reason to be on this plane as the four United employees, bodily drag him off the plane screaming, bloodied and finally silent? The whole story about overbooked flight seems a pretext to me - it appears from some mismanagement, these four crew members suddenly showed up at the last minute before take-off and UA decided they had more right to be on that plane than the paying customer after he had boarded and taken his assigned seat. Otherwise why did UA board seat all the passengers - it seems obvious to me that UA had no idea these four crewmembers existed until they showed up without prior notice.

The other convenient standby is “flying right” which encompasses ensuring the safety of the flight. However this bloodied and humiliated passenger had never been a safety risk. All he wanted to do is get home and to work the next day. There is no reason to treat him like a resisting criminal. All he was doing was trying to say he had a right to his seat and he did say he was calling his lawyer. No need to silence him and drag him off like some animal.

The incident itself certainly was an outrage felt not only by the violated passenger, the other passengers and indeed many in the world. The position staked out by United Airlines after the outrage just makes it mile high worse. Can an airline continue to accommodate its employees when it has no customers?

Charleston C. K. Wang is a resident of Silverton.