The sight of a passenger being dragged across the floor in an airplane only because the airlines has overbooked a flight is the new form of institutional arrogance. The staff of Kentucky-bound United Express Flight 3411 asked passengers to volunteer to get off the plane because they had overbooked. Despite the $1,000 compensation being offered in return, no one volunteered, which is when the staff picked up 4 people randomly and asked them to get off. While 3 of the passengers got off the plane, the fourth one, a doctor, refused to and told them he had to be home urgently to attend to his patients.

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What followed was a violation of human rights and an exercise in institutional might. The man was violently dragged out of the flight, his cries of refusal ignored as he kept saying, ‘I want to go home, I want to go home.’ He ended up with a bleeding lip, even as other passengers watched in horror. 

@united @FoxNews @CNN not a good way to treat a Doctor trying to get to work because they overbooked pic.twitter.com/sj9oHk94Ik

Was it just incidental that the man was Asian? Why didn’t they pick someone else if he didn’t want to go? A doctor who wanted to go home because he had patients to attend to was meted out this merciless treatment, and for what? Because they had to make space for their staff on the plane. 

@Tyler_Bridges @united @FoxNews @CNN Asian medical doctor rushing home to see patients gets knocked out and dragged out for declining to give up seat to United employees. WTF.

And just when you thought the airline would realise its mistake and apologise, the company’s CEO Oscar Munoz sends his employees an email that makes things even murkier.

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Even if it’s a private airline, it’s working in the public service sector and it can’t treat passengers like their personal property. When we talk about the sense of entitlement people with money or power exercise, it is this too. Organisations with money and power who serve in the public sector cannot use arm-wrestle tactics to get their way with customers.