Won’t pull people off jets; vic mulls suit
LAWYERS for the Kentucky doctor bloodied and dragged from a United Airlines flight are preparing a lawsuit for takeoff.
The attorneys on Wednesday filed requests with the Cook County Circuit Court and the city of Chicago to retain the airline’s surveillance video, cockpit voice recordings and incident reports, as well as the information of the officers who pulled David Dao from the flight at O’Hare Airport.
The emergency filing came hours after United CEO Oscar Munoz said the airline would never again let cops boot a paying customer from a flight.
“This could never, would never happen again on a United Airlines flight,” Munoz told “Good Morning America” in his first interview since the fracas. “We are not going to put a law enforcement official to take them off the aircraft. To remove a booked, paid, (seated) passenger — we can’t do that.”
In addition, United is compensating all passengers on the flight for the cost of their tickets, the airline said in a statement.
Munoz said United was looking at the way it compensates customers who volunteer to give up seats on overbooked flights.
Some U.S. lawmakers called for rules that could make it more difficult for airlines to overbook flights as a tool for increasing revenue. President Trump on Wednesday told The Wall Street Journal it was “horrible” that Dao was dragged off the flight. Chicago’s Aviation Department said two more officers had been placed on leave in connection with the April 9 incident. One officer was previously placed on leave. As of Tuesday, Dao was still in a Chicago hospital recovering from his injuries, his lawyer said. Pressed on his initial response calling Dao “disruptive and belligerent” and the social media firestorm it created, Munoz — recently honored as PR Week’s communicator of the year — said his reaction “fell short of truly expressing what we were feeling.”
Dao was one of four passengers selected for removal from an overbooked flight from O’Hare to Louisville, Ky., to accommodate four United employees.
After the doctor refused to accept a travel voucher incentive, citing his need to see patients in the morning, cell phone recordings showed Chicago aviation officers yanking Dao from his seat and dragging him down the aisle as horrified passengers protested — and recorded.
Footage from the incident shows Dao, bloodied and disheveled, returning to the cabin and repeating: “Just kill me. Kill me,” and “I have to go home.”