Airline experiences mechanical failure, passengers get inconvenienced. This is news? Oh wait, yes it is, because UNITED. The little embellishments designed to outrage the reader (they saved everyone’s life!). Who doesn’t have an important reason to take a flight?. I’m surprised the couple weren’t going to get special medical help in Canada for their son, who was seriously injured by a falling turd from a UNITED flight, and the UNITED insurance refused to cover it! And the gate agent laughed at the boy too!
Oh, here’s another one:
At some point we all need to realize that victim culture is a serious problem, too.
I really think you are white knighting the wrong people here, dude. These are actual real examples of United fucking up pretty seriously. So seriously that they even admit it.
My company had a huge PR snafu last year, which led to a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and making false allegations or blowing minor issues out of proportion because of one real issue. It sucks when you know you’re being taken advantage of but the company has to take it on the chin for a while because they did fuck up at some point, badly.
Really? How? In my mind at least, a “pretty serious fuckup” in a flying bomb would involve a couple of hundred people killed.
Here we have a mechanical failure, and an airline unable to find a seat soon enough for a couple to make their hugely important cruise. So the airline buys them a ticket on another airline, leaving from another airport. Seems pretty accommodating to me. Then buried somewhere in the fine print is that if your ticket is from your home city, and you’re delayed overnight, you’re not given a hotel voucher. Yeah that sucks.
Look, I’m sure United would be happy to charge an extra on each ticket to cover all eventualities, but people choose the cheaper fare every time.
Hardly. It’s the bare minimum they could have done, given that they are at fault for the cancellation. In Europe they’d get the alternative flight, accommodation and compensation as a legal requirement. That’s for every customer on the plane, let alone the ones that stopped the airline from killing its customers.
Aviation is a rules-obsessed culture. You most certainly do not need a body count to get your “pretty serious fuckup” achievement.
To put this in perspective, if you were pulled over going 120 mph in a school zone with a sky-high blood alcohol level, it would likely be regarded as a pretty serious fuckup even if nobody got hurt.
I feel like I might be missing something here @Scott123.
According to the articles, the honeymoon couple had to contact employees twice, twice about fluid dumping out of the wing of the plane because United’s initial response is often indifference to outright not caring. Then you post you about them breaking a custom wheelchair? How they hell did they wind up breaking that chair?
Why are you defending United in these scenarios. None of these have been proven fake so far.
Don’t know why I’m defending United - just that they really seem to be getting singled out by this victim culture and unfair expectations.
It seems the real ‘crime’ against the couple was not giving them a hotel. But the airlines policy for compensation in event of cancellation would have been part of their contract, the fine print, and airline policy. Can someone else point to what else United could have done?
The details are interesting to discuss, too. A aircraft is taxiing to a runway and a passenger jumps up and runs to the front, the crew “yells at him”. Not sure about others here, but I’d rather be on that flight, and not the one where the crew says “hey man, what’s up?”. We’re talking about a situation that was, in fact, resolved through communication, yet we are angry about the initial part of that communication? Or are we angry about the mechanical failure itself (it happened, I’ve had worse, deal with it). No, I think it comes down to not being given a hotel. Which presumably, they could have paid for if it were really that big of a deal.
In the wheelchair case, it looks like the airline struggled with a 550-lb wheelchair which they’d never seen before, and it took some damage. Again, what are the expectations? That the airline has custom-wheelchair experts on-call 24/7 so that custom wheelchairs don’t get damaged on loading or unloading? What was the cost to the airline of taking that passenger and wheelchair on-board, even without any damage claim?
Fucking yes. If they are going to accept the item, they should not damage it. You’re suggesting that it’s the customer’s job to figure out what United can or can not handle.
And what else could United do for the couple that saved a plane full of lives? Put them up in a fucking hotel, that’s what. Because you’re not a robot and can see that it’s the right thing to do.
This is cold. You have a couple that contacts you about problems with the plane, shows you it’s dumping fuel. The first contact with this comes off as if United simply doesn’t care. Later it turns out it’s a real problem to the point they cancel the flight and don’t really show they went above and beyond, that’s a thing, just in case it’s been forgotten, customer service as above and beyond experience to help the couple that caught fuel dumping out of their plane.
As for the luggage, treat it like it’s it’s the custom and expensive item that it is. Give a shit. This airlines has a song, an actual song about breaking instruments.
Look United has a cultural problem. They treat their customers, especially the ones with additional needs, like burdens, not customers. If someone shows up with an instrument, it is not a shrug event if it shows up destroyed. If someone has a wheelchair, do everything you can to make sure it arrives in tact… that’s their legs, their mobility, their way of existing in a world mostly designed for people with two legs. If a couple alerts you to a disaster that for some reason employees didn’t catch or worse come off like they don’t care. go ABOVE and BEYOND and ensure they get to where they need to be.
You act like the bare minimal is okay in these cases, there was a mistake so now United has to barely care… that’s not acceptable.
Yeah, I don’t want the flight crew to listen to anyone that sees fuel literally gushing out of the wing tank either. Sit down, Mr. I-see-a-gremlin-on-the-wing!
I’d rather be on the second flight. Because if the guy is running to the front for good reason, then potentially the whole plane is at risk. If he has no good reason, then he is mainly just putting himself at risk.
Now, perhaps you’d prefer to see order enforced rather than safety assured. But I think that United’s culture lately demonstrates a disturbing lack of critical thinking, and eventually that could cause an even more serious incident.
Good answer - the airline should have seen the wheelchair and said “sorry, this thing is really heavy, looks expensive, and we don’t know how to transport it. You’re not allowed to board”. Can you imagine the outrage? I can. Certainly more than one article so far.
Jeez man, I’ve slept in a car, in a tent, and on the floor of an airport, twice, that I can think of. It’s not the end of the world (it’s really not). I tend to agree, it would have been nice for them to get a hotel, against United’s policies and contract rules and razor-thin profit margin.
But there’s no mechanism for the ticketing agent to know that this was the customer that raised the flag. Was the steward in the aircraft (full of concerned passengers in the middle of a moderate crisis) supposed to go into the system, find the passenger, and add a note “treat this one guy really well because he helped us out”?
I appreciate and understand the sentiment. I’m not convinced they have a culture problem. How do you know they didn’t 'do everything they can to make sure the wheelchair arrived in tact"? Things get damaged, you sound like it was intentional. Should airport cargo staff training really include custom 550lb wheelchairs? United employs 86,000 people and flies 390,000 people per day, and we’re getting a couple of newsworthy _customer-service level_stories per day at most. Isn’t that incredible? Think about policing or incidents in any other city of 476,000 people.
Depends. Have United’s competitors mastered the art of transporting wheelchairs?
Oh please. It’s a wheelchair, not a porcelain vase. I think any logistics team worth its salt should be capable of moving it without ripping the wheels off. It’s not like they merely scuffed the seat. That kind of damage takes effort.
And no, United does not get a prize because they didn’t mangle any other wheelchairs that month.
Because they don’t say it. Because when they engage with the public time after time after time and then again they communicate in the most cold and inhumane way possible. Even their CEO got his hand slapped for coming off like a piece of ice and not holding his employees to task and defending some of their horrific behaviors. Look, I understand the need and want of having upper management have the employees backs, everyone wants that. Who wouldn’t want to know their boss and their boss’ boss has their back? The problem is, where is the humane factor in these stories?
Did they just wheel that wheelchair out, hand them a subpar replacement and hand them a piece of paper to sign if they refused United’s help? Or did come out apologizing, telling them everything they’re trying to do to make it right?
Did they cancel the flight for the honeymoon couple who not only captured the horrific event of a plane dumping fuel out of the wing and then do everything they knew how to do to get them to where they were going?
Look, there is even a nice list for all these events:
And maybe they are doing they best they can but their spokesmen, the way these customers talk, about the event, their CEO and initial responses. They come off like they don’t give a fuck. It’s on United to make sure people know they’re doing their best and it doesn’t require the media to get these situations addressed.
I don’t know about you, but my gut instinct isn’t to post a complaint about a company that screws up and not follow-up with how they took care of it. Hell most the time, I won’t even post my complaint if I feel they are going to handle it. You call it a pile on, I think, but these are not made up incidents. United knows they are under the spotlight and this is still the response… god what are they doing when people aren’t looking?
Yeah, that’s really the rub on that story. United didn’t just knock a component off, or rip a tear in a cushion. That would be damage I could see happening to any wheelchair by any transporter. They literally busted a wheel off the chair. That’s a crazy level of incompetence.
And yeah, United is getting a massive amount of social media scrutiny. That shit happens when you fuck up all over the place. The answer isn’t to double-down on the existing shit service and hope the trend goes away on its own.
After the first big incident it should have been media silence because United was in full on face-saving mode. Instead… well here we are. They’re not getting better. If your company fucks up repeatedly it probably shouldn’t be around anymore. That’s how the hand of the market is supposed to work isn’t it?
It’s also worth pointing out that in aviation, as in medicine, it can be very difficult to establish the risk of catastrophic failure. So instead, there is a strong focus on eliminating all “adverse events”, no matter how minor. The frequency of adverse minor events is used as an indicator of the overall cohesion and effectiveness of safety efforts, and therefore it is a proxy for the likelihood of a catastrophic event.
The moral of the story, in aviation and in medicine, is that you cannot blow off minor mishaps as inconsequential. They may be your only clue that something awful is waiting to happen.
