According to airlines’ Contract of Carriage — a document that is several dozen pages long and typically about 40,000 words — the airline has ultimate authority to prevent you from boarding a plane for anything ranging from how you are dressed to a lack of personal hygiene.
United Airlines found itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons recently, when video emerged of a man being forcibly removed from one of their aircraft after he refused to give up his seat to a United employee. The video footage sparked a national dialogue about the behavior of airlines, and more importantly, it’s helped to drive a conversation about the rights of airline passengers. By now, most people are familiar with the story of Dr. David Dao. We’ve seen the video of him being forcibly removed by an airport security employee from a United Airlines flight; his face bloodied from the encounter, all because he refused to “volunteer,” as the airline put it, to give up his seat for a United employee. Just a few weeks before this incident, two young women were denied entry onto a United Airlines flight because they were wearing leggings. Stories of people being denied entry onboard an aircraft are all too common, but Dr. Dao’s situation was especially appalling due to the fact that he was violently removed from an airplane that he had already boarded — an act that is typically reserved for people who pose a threat to the safety of other passengers. But there’s an uglier side to this story — one that most people don’t realize. And that is that the airline industry is set up in such a way that they can remove anyone, at any time, for virtually any reason. According to airlines’ Contract of Carriage — a document that is several dozen pages long and typically about 40,000 words — the airline has ultimate authority to prevent you
from boarding a plane for anything ranging from how you are dressed to a lack of personal hygiene. And when you buy your airline ticket, you are essentially signing an agreement saying that you accept these terms and will abide by them. The story really begins in the late 1970s, when the airline industry was able to convince Congress and former President Carter to deregulate their industry. When this happened, authority to regulate airlines shifted mostly to the industry itself, with federal laws covering only a few simple items related to air travel. For example, the No Smoking laws for airlines are from the federal government, and the government makes sure that the airlines don’t engage in deceptive practices or fraud and that they honor the No Fly List, but that’s about the extent to which they interfere with the business of airlines. When it comes to denying admission or raising prices or even reducing the width of a seat, those are decisions that the industry gets to make for itself. But one of the biggest gifts that the airline got from deregulation was that they were able to bully smaller airlines out of business, and as a result, there are only four major airlines operating in the United States today. So when you hear people talking about boycotting United Airlines over their behavior, you have to understand that in many instances that simply isn’t an option. The airlines have made it to where they can have a monopoly on air travel, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The Trial Lawyer x 43