As a management consultant, I typically fly 75,000-100,000 miles a year, and as I’m based in Denver, over 90 percent of those miles are flown on United Airlines.
I, like everyone else I know who has seen it, was appalled at the recent of a 69-year-old doctor being forcibly removed from his seat, and then bloodied, by Chicago O’Hare aviation security at the request of United gate employees who horribly overreacted to a common overbooked flight dilemma.
My take on the situation is that, for what it’s worth, what happened at O’Hare on Sunday is isolated to United’s Chicago ground employees versus an issue with United as a whole. Let me explain.
Flying to and through all of United’s U.S. hubs dozens of times a year, I can honestly say that interacting with United ground employees as I move around the country is largely hassle-free and often pleasant — except for when it involves United staff in Chicago.
I have observed for years that there is a distinctly different attitude Chicago’s ground staff have toward customers than elsewhere; I can feel it as soon as I get off the plane anytime I travel through O’Hare. When dealing with customers, United’s Chicago ground employees are numb and indifferent, but trigger-happy under the surface — they almost seem eager to respond to customers with travel problems by further inconveniencing and displacing them, and the harder a customer objects and pushes back, the worse the “punishment” will be.
I speak from experience. In fact, I was at O’Hare on Sunday when this incident took place, and I could feel this same mood among the United ground staff that day. So it did not surprise me to learn that this incident happened in Chicago, and that it was at the hands of United’s O’Hare ground staff.
All things being equal, I really do believe that had this incident unfolded at any other United hub around the country, there would have been a very different, and uneventful, outcome. So it is my hope that United will see that the root cause of this incident is a cultural problem among their Chicago ground staff and fix it.
In the meantime, I’ll just continue to avoid flying to or through Chicago when flying United, and when I don’t have any other choice, I will pray that the gate agent doesn’t summon security to beat and remove me from the plane simply because I have to get home.
Josh Brodbeck lives in Denver.
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