Feds must make skies friendlier

It needs to be written into law that if a passenger pays for a seat, he or she cannot be booted from it unless that person presents a clear danger to the people onboard.

You’ve no doubt seen video of a bloodied Dr. David Dao being dragged off a United Airlines flight. I’m not going to give a recap of what happened. This is just a plea for some common sense, to make a repeat of such a scenario unlikely.

It’s time for the government to step in.

I know. I’ve said many times in the past that I’m a libertarian. And libertarians are generally loath to call on the government to enact additional laws. However, libertarians are also big on the taking of personal responsibility — the owning of the results of your actions — and if airlines and their passengers aren’t willing to do what it takes to prevent such situations from reoccurring, then somebody else needs to make them behave like adults.

Airlines regularly overbook. That wasn’t the case with Dr. Dao’s flight, although United reportedly said the flight was overbooked but later made clear that it wasn’t. Anyway, whether his flight was overbooked doesn’t matter. Airlines do overbook, and it needs to stop. It needs to be made illegal, right now.

The reason airlines overbook is because there are often cancellations by passengers and overbooking assures that an airline won’t be stuck taking losses. OK, I’m down with that. I see no reason for airlines to lose revenue because of someone’s capricious decision to cancel tickets, say because they found a better deal elsewhere. So, when we make overbooking illegal, we also make the cancelling of a ticket illegal (except when proof of medical emergency or other unforeseen disaster is provided and verified.) You buy a ticket, you pay for it. Period.

Now that the airlines have no reason to overbook, and overbooking is gone, nobody will be kicked off his flight because of that. However, there is still the matter of why Dao was removed from his flight, which is that four United crew members needed seats on that flight to make it to Louisville ontime to man another United flight.

It needs to be written into law that if a passenger pays for a seat, he or she cannot be booted from it unless that person presents a clear danger to the people on-board.

If a flight crew is needed in Louisville, get a damn flight crew to Louisville some other way than by dragging your customers out of their paid-for seats. I know there are union rules to be followed, as well as Federal Aviation Authority regulations, so some options — Uber or other ground transport — perhaps could not be employed. Fine. Charter another carrier to fly your people to Louisville. Or always leave seats open for your personnel on every flight. It is not the responsibility of your passengers to pay, in inconvenience, for your mismanagement of resources.

There you go. Common sense. Problems solved.

Of course, as Will Rogers once noted, common sense ain’t common. And I’m sure old Will would have agreed that asking the government to provide it is a mighty shaky proposition. But I reluctantly have to conclude it seems the best option at this point to ensure that air travel not continue to devolve into something that makes far more lengthy bus rides seem both safer and more pleasant by comparison.