Machiavellian said:
There is absolutly nothing in the regulations that state before boarding. What you normally see with airlines is that this happens before boarding because they know they are overbooked and get that resolved before boarding but the regulations themselves do not stipulate before or after boarding. This is not an isolated incident to United and people have been booted while on the plane. Actually United is not even the worst offender in bumping people off planes as I believe its Delta. In this case they were not overbooked but instead wanted to bump for their own employees. This is outside of the oversale policy and thus United is not safe under that regulation. At Bolded: Now you hit the right question. This is why you elect officials to protect your rights because of situations like this. The regulations could change if enough outcry but currently there isn't anything preventing any airline kicking you off if they oversold their flight. This only pretains to the oversale regulations as I have not seen anything outside of that regulation on the topic. Edit: Here are your policy makers to the rescue. As I stated there isn't anything preventing Airlines from bumping you either before or after you are on a plane but your trusty congressmen are looking to add a bill to remedy that problem. |
Even in that rule it cites (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/part-250) it only talks about being denied boarding. He wasn't denied boarding. If the rules are about how you can be denied to board the plane if you have a ticket (but not a boarding pass yet), you would assume that that means before boarding. If it has been happening more often that people have been asked to leave the plane after boarding than that was outside regulations as well.
Anyway good thing more specific rules are being drafted now. Still disgusting that it has to come to this to knock some comon sense into companies. Good name for that bill too, Customers Not Cargo Act.
