"I don't think customers realize how many people really do not show up for flights and how much money overbooking keeps fares a little bit lower than they would otherwise be", Ben Baldanza, the former CEO of Spirit Airlines, told CNN.
It's illegal to smoke on a flight, so that can get you booted. How many of these passengers were forcibly removed?
The practice lets airlines keep fares low while managing the rate of no-shows on any particular route, said Vaughn Jennings, spokesman for Airlines for America, which represents most of the big USA carriers. "I've been to 100 games in stadiums with 50,000 seats, they never sell the seat two times to one person, but for some reason, airlines can not figure this out". In some cases you're not entitled to any compensation at all if the airline can get you to your destination close to the scheduled arrival time.
United was trying to find seats for four employees, meaning it wanted four passengers to leave the plane.
The passenger, David Dao of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, a 69-year-old physician specializing in pulmonary disease, is at a Chicago hospital undergoing treatment for his injuries, according to lawyers for his family.
On Tuesday, CEO Oscar Munoz referred to the incident as a "truly horrific event", saying, "No one should ever be mistreated this way".
In an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" that aired Wednesday, Munoz said he felt "ashamed" watching video of Dao being forced off the jet.
Politicians have jumped on the public outrage.
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An online petition calling for Munoz to step down as CEO had more than 55,000 signatures by Wednesday afternoon, but he told ABC that he had no plans to resign over the incident.
"He can't be. He was a paying passenger, sitting on our seat, in our aircraft, and no one should be treated that way, period", Munoz said.
The department said it is continuing its investigation. It gave few details.
Disgusted by a man's violent removal from an oversold flight, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has called for a suspension to the widespread practice of overbooking. United is the dominant carrier at New Jersey's largest airport, which is in Newark. Dao was one of four passengers booted from the flight. That usually works - of the 475,000 people who lost a seat past year, more than 90 percent did so voluntarily, according to government figures. "The expression of apology, and specific to the folks I mentioned before, is an important part of a conversation like this, because, again, that shame and embarrassment was pretty palpable for me and for a lot of our family", he said.
Munoz continued: "We are not going to put a law enforcement official onto a plane to take them off ... to remove a booked, paid, seated passenger; we can't do that". However, conversations with several industry insiders give a sense of how airline systems decide who gets bumped.
Airlines sell more seats than they have because they are counting on a certain number of passengers not to make the flight as planned.
Anyone can Google the term "United Airlines contract of carriage" or "Delta contract of carriage", and you'll see what you're actually getting into.
Twitter, reported tech news outlet The Next Web, is allegedly deleting negative tweets about United. These complex software packages, generally outsourced from either Hewlett Packard Enterprise or IBM, combine all major passenger service functions, including pricing, shopping, reservations, ticketing, check-in and seat assignment, said Brett Snyder, founder of the airline industry blog Crankyflier.com.
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