Seth Dillon, CEO at news satire website Babylon Bee, was flying American Airlines out of Columbia, South Carolina on Saturday morning and reported that the flight was oversold by 20 passengers. He suggests that 70 people checked in for a flight that only seated 50.
The airline’s gate agent had a unique threat to get passengers to make their way to Charlotte by car instead of plane: threatening that if there weren’t 20 volunteers to do this, then nobody would be flying and they’d cancel the flight instead. Apparently the threat worked, but it was a complete fabrication.
American Airlines operates 7 peak daily departures from Columbia, South Carolina to Charlotte. They’re all on either 50 seat Embraer or larger Bombardier CR9 regional jets. The 89 mile flight is usually scheduled at about one hour and eight minutes.
Driving between the airports takes about an hour and a half, and then a passenger arriving in Charlotte would have to clear security.This morning’s American Airlines flight 5699 was operated by their wholly-owned subsidiary Piedmont Airlines using a 50-seat Embraer ERJ-145. It wound up departing one hour and 22 minutes late, and arriving in Charlotte just shy of 2 hours lates. That delay is despite the aircraft having overnighted in Columbia – the plane didn’t arrive late.
It turns out that passengers would have been no worse off taking up that gate agent’s suggestion to make the trip to Charlotte by cab! But passengers should certainly be compensated for voluntarily giving up their seat, not just have their cab covered.And if ’20 passengers didn’t volunteer’ the solution isn’t to just cancel on all 70 passengers.
That’s stupid.
American needs the plane back in Charlotte anyway, and the crew too, so the aircraft is going to head there.
American doesn’t want to deal with rebooking 70 passengers, farther away from a hub.
American is better off getting as many people to Charlotte as possible.
Instead, if the airline doesn’t get enough volunteers, they’re stuck choosing which passengers not to transport – and paying those passengers involuntary denied boarding compensation.
Since the oversale doesn’t appear to have resulted from an aircraft change, and it doesn’t appear weight and balance restrictions were an issue here, then the amount American would owe each passenger is set in regulation:
200% of their one-way fare, up to $755, if the passenger arrives at their destination 1-2 hours late and
400% of their one-way far, up to $1550, if arriving over 2 hours late.In other words, the collective punishment threat that America will “cancel this flight and no one will make it” isn’t how this works. It isn’t how any of this works. If the American Airlines gate agent said it in Columbia, South Carolina, then they were making it up as an (unauthorized) tactic to get passengers to give up their seats on the flight.