From aviationweek.com: The era of the widebody airliner began at 11.34 a.m. on February 9, 1968, (sic) when the first 747, RA001, took off from Runway 16R at Snohomish County Paine Field in Washington. (Read the article here and note that the date is wrong in the original article. It should be 1969, 50 years ago today.)
A month later, the new plane was featured on the cover of the March 10, 1969 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology:
Will the "drag the passenger off the plane" incident inspire other customers to try and create a problem on a United flight? Create some kind of a disturbance, get themselves kicked off the plane, plug into social media and hope for Twitter outrage and a big settlement? Looks like it. Here's the headline currently at people.com, about an incident that took place Saturday afternoon:
Utah Couple Claims They Were Kicked Off United Airlines Flight on the Way to Their Wedding (read it here)
Of course if you try something like this you're at the mercy of headline writers, and over at NPR it's no big deal:
Bridal Couple Removed From United Airlines Flight Without Incident
(read it here)
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 30th.
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
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.
