No One Will Be Fired For Dragging Incident: United Airlines

Passenger David Dao was hit and dragged off the plane by Chicago airport officers summoned by United.

Since the controversial incident on Flight 3411, the shares of United fell by 4.4 percent. (Photo: iStock)

Oscar Munoz, the CEO of the United Airlines on Wednesday said that no employee of the organisation, including himself, will be fired over the dragging of a man off their plane due to overbooking of passengers.

While he asserted that he took full responsibility "for making this right," he said that his organisation will review and update their policy on overbooked flights by the end of April. He also promised that such incident would never happen again, and that they would treat their customers with dignity.

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It was a system failure across various areas. There was never a consideration for firing an employee.

Oscar Munoz

Munoz maintained that it is too soon to know if the incident has influenced any drop in their ticket sale as #BoycottUnited has been a popular hashtag across social media platforms for the last two weeks.

Since the controversial incident on 9 April on Flight 3411, the shares of United fell by 4.4 percent, resulting in loss of market value worth $1 billion. However, other airline stocks also reported a decline during this period.

Also Read: After Bloodying Passenger, United Airlines Brings Change in Policy

Munoz started the conference call slated to announce the profits for the first quarter, by apologising for the incident and announced that the airlines made a profit of $96 million, which is reportedly 69 percent down from 2016.

69-year-old physician David Dao from Kentucky was hit and dragged off the plane by Chicago airport officers, called by employees of the United because Dao wouldn’t give up his seat on the overbooked flight. Munoz initially supported employees and labelled Dao “disruptive and belligerent.”

It is still not clear whether United oversold Flight 3411, or the Dao was asked to step down after four Republic Airline employees boarded the flight and demanded they get seats for their next commute.

Munoz failed to address the growing call from both consumers and politicians for a ban on overbooking of tickets on flights.

(With inputs from AP)