Man dragged bloodied from overbooked flight
Horrified onlookers watch as three police officers forcibly remove passenger
United Airlines says a man wouldn’t give up his spot on an overbooked flight Sunday.
So, according to witnesses and videos of the incident, he was pulled screaming from his seat by security, knocked against an arm rest and dragged down the aisle and back to the terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
United refused to answer questions about the incident, which horrified other passengers on the Louisvillebound flight. An airline spokesperson only apologized for the overbooked flight and said police were called after a passenger “refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily.”
What followed was captured on cellphone video by at least two passengers.
Tyler Bridges recalled trouble starting almost as soon as he and his wife boarded. An airline supervisor walked onto the plane and brusquely announced: “We have United employees that need to fly to Louisville tonight . . . This flight’s not leaving until four people get off.”
“That rubbed some people the wrong way,” Bridges said.
Passengers were offered vouchers to rebook, he said, but no one volunteered. So the airline chose for them. A young couple was told to leave first, Bridges recalled. “They begrudgingly got up and left.” Then an older man, who refused. “He says, ‘Nope. I’m not getting off the flight. I’m a doctor and have to see patients tomorrow morning,’ ” Bridges said.
A police officer boarded. Then a second and a third.
One of the officers quickly reaches across two empty seats, snatches the man and pulls him into the aisle. He goes limp after hitting the floor. “It looked like it knocked him out,” Bridges said. “His nose was bloody.”
His glasses nearly knocked off his face, the man clutches his cellphone as one of the officers pulls him by both arms down the aisle and off the plane. And it wasn’t over. In another video, the man runs back onto the plane, his clothes still mussed from his forcible ejection, frantically repeating: “I have to go home. I have to go home.”
The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher.
“We followed the right procedures,” United spokesperson Charlie Hobart told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “That plane had to depart. We wanted to get our customers to their destinations.”
Airlines are allowed to sell more tickets than there are seats on the plane — and they routinely overbook flights because some people do not show up.
It’s not unusual for airlines to offer travel vouchers to encourage people to give up their seats and there are no rules for the process. Oscar Munoz, CEO of United Airlines’ parent com- pany, described the event as “upsetting” and apologized for “having to reaccommodate these customers.” He said the airline was conducting a review and reaching out to the passenger to “further address and resolve this situation.”
In the end, Bridges and his wife got to Louisville about three hours late.
“It was a pretty tense flight,” he said.