What the CEO Meant To Say

Update #2: United's CEO has issued another statement:

The truly horrific event that occurred on this flight has elicited many responses from all of us: outrage, anger, disappointment. I share all of those sentiments, and one above all: my deepest apologies for what happened. Like you, I continue to be disturbed by what happened on this flight and I deeply apologize to the customer forcibly removed and to all the customers aboard. No one should ever be mistreated this way. 

I want you to know that we take full responsibility and we will work to make it right. 

It’s never too late to do the right thing. I have committed to our customers and our employees that we are going to fix what’s broken so this never happens again. This will include a thorough review of crew movement, our policies for incentivizing volunteers in these situations, how we handle oversold situations and an examination of how we partner with airport authorities and local law enforcement. We’ll communicate the results of our review by April 30^th. 

I promise you we will do better. 

Sincerely,

Oscar 

Afternoon update: United's problems are not going away. I has just re-tweeted this...:

Even my friends in one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world are trashing United... pic.twitter.com/1UireJrNaG

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) April 11, 2017

...when I saw this (The Hitler reference is from Sean Spicer's briefing today):

Clarification: Hitler re-accommodated “em” to the genocide way stations. https://t.co/xy5KSWSPBZ

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) April 11, 2017

The company has also lost about $1 billion in value on the stock market. What happens next?

Original post:
In an alternate universe, United CEO Oscar Munoz would have said
something like this:

"All of us at United deeply regret the incident on flight 3411 Sunday evening, and on behalf of everyone at United I sincerely apologize to the customers on the flight. I want you to know that I understand how upsetting the video is for everyone and we have initiated a thorough investigation into this incident and are reviewing our procedures to ensure that future overbooking situations are handled professionally and courteously for all customers. Our operation is complex and we sometimes have to make difficult decisions that result in inconvenience to customers, but what happened last night is unacceptable. We are also reaching out to the customers involved." 

This is an ugly story and as of Tuesday morning it's not going away. United is being excoriated in the media, not just here in the U.S. but around the world. 

From an article at the Washington Post, dateline Beijing: 

BEIJING — News that a passenger was forcibly dragged off a United Airlines plane has gone viral all over the world, but in China the outrage has been fueled by one uncomfortable fact: The doctor who was pulled off the plane, first screaming and then bleeding, appeared to be of Asian origin and was overheard complaining that this might have been a factor in his treatment.

“He said, more or less, ‘I’m being selected because I’m Chinese,’” fellow passenger Tyler Bridges was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.

That quote, translated into Chinese, was widely circulated on social media here. (Another witness on the plane said the man was originally from Vietnam, according to the BBC.)

By late afternoon on Tuesday, the topic had attracted 160 million readers on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and 97,000 comments. Petitions to boycott United Airlines were also going viral on WeChat, a popular messaging service.

In addition to criticism, there's ridicule, as in this clip from the Jimmy Kimmel show: 

Confession: I worked at United for over 25 years. Subsequent to that I had a job where I traveled so much that I achieved 1K status as a customer. I've seen the airline from the inside as an employee and from the outside as a customer. I have a soft spot in my heart for United and I understand the complexities of the operation. Even so, watching this thing play out yesterday and into today I want to scream: What are they thinking? Who put together that lame and tone-deaf statement from the CEO? 

United screwed up the response to the "teen-age girls in leggings" incident and so far they've screwed up this too. You bet I'm watching, along with many, many others, to see what happens next.