13 APR 2017: Wow! After this week’s shenanigans in Chicago, in the category of making a mountainous PR disaster out of an everyday molehill, United certainly takes the gold medal. Actually make that platinum, which is more expensive!

There are a multitude of lessons for all carriers to learn from this unfortunate incident. What stands out however – something that clearly isn’t a part of the ‘standard operating procedures’ UA proudly claimed to be following – is, “When in doubt, try applying some good old-fashioned common sense.” Unfortunately, the ability to ‘think outside the book’ is a rare commodity these days and, by definition, cannot be put in manuals or trained. It is however something which well-run companies should encourage and reward, rather than condemn and punish.

While they had no idea what kind of ‘you know what’ was about to rain down, just consider how some smart thinking on the part of the gate agents on the ill-fated UA flight might have avoided the “United Put the Hospital in Hospitality” situation and saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and inestimable damage to the brand.

Instead they did everything by the book: They’d offered significant compensation for passengers to deplane – some reports say $800 others $1,000 – and incredibly there had been no takers. Within the rules, they could have gone higher but for whatever reason chose not to. So they then moved on to the next step in the book, which was to “randomly” select passengers to be involuntarily off-loaded.

So far I have seen no explanation as to how United’s ‘random’ selection process works in such situations and whether it differentiates ‘denied boardings’ from ‘off-loadings’ – two quite disparate predicaments. Presumably some algorithm spews out the names and seat numbers of infrequent fliers with the lowest priced tickets, the last ones to check in, those with no checked bags or any combination thereof.

Having seen how generous financial incentives to deplane had failed, it should have been self evident to the gate agents that there might be more than a little resistance when they now had to inform computer-selected passengers that, like it or not, they were not about to fly the friendly skies. This is where a little common sense might have helped.

Given the circumstance, the smart thing to do would have been for the gate agents to take a quick look on board, visually check out what kind of selections the system had facelessly made and decide if they looked okay. Had they done so, perhaps they could have figured out that a bespectacled senior citizen in a window seat towards the rear of the aircraft was hardly an optimum choice. At the same time they could have “randomly” picked someone else, perhaps younger and in an aisle seat towards the front. But, as the world now knows, they did no such thing.

As with most such airline stories the media and the politicos immediately start to jump on the wrong bandwagons. As much of a screw up as this was, it had nothing to do with the overbooking policies of the big bad airlines. United had not oversold this flight, their flight ops people just failed to schedule a deadheading crew that (contrary it would seem to their ‘conditions of carriage’) they used as reason to offload some unfortunate revenue passengers.

The media condemnation of United CEO Oscar Muñoz’s statements was however totally justified. Rule #1 in every crisis management handbook is, “Don’t rush out statements until you have fully established all the facts.” And common sense rule two is that, admirable as it is to stand by your “team”, you cannot do that blindly simply because they were going by the SOP book: As was the case here, the book isn’t always right.

Finally, despite the reported outrage in Asia over this incident, I really don’t believe race played any factor whatsoever here. That said, United did dodge one major bullet – imagine how much worse the PR aftermath would have been had the system chanced to select an African American passenger!

And when it comes to dodging bullets, I doubt that any of us will have to worry about being offloaded from a flight for the next few weeks! After this week’s goings on, when next a gate agent gets the call to offload revenue passengers to accommodate deadheading crewmembers, one can just hear them saying, “What are you kidding me – I’m not going anywhere near that one. Tell flight ops to charter them a Gulfstream, it will be cheaper.”