United Airlines threatened to remove Business Class passengers if they didn't give seats to crew

Passengers travelling on United Airlines flight 923 from Los Angeles (LAX/KLAX) to London (LHR/EGLL) on Sunday were allegedly threatened to be removed from the flight if three of them did not give up their business class seats and moved to extra legroom coach.

As per reports, due to a problem in the onboard crew bunk facilities, the airline wanted three of the Polaris Business class cabin seats. As per both FAA guidelines and the United flight attendant contract, the crew must be able to get ample rest on a long-haul flight to be able to attend to critical phases of the flight. Since the flight was ten and a half hours long, the crew asked for volunteers who could vacate the seats

A passenger told the media that gate agents informed the passengers that crew rest areas were in operational due to a problem and the maintenance personnel hadn't been able to fix it.

However, in this case, passengers had already boarded the flight by the time the engineers noted that the problems with the bunk area could not be fixed. There were no spare seats so gate agents got on and asked passengers to volunteer. They offered them $1,500 in travel credits plus 75,000 miles for the inconvenience.

But no one volunteered and so they arrogantly warned everyone that the entire plane would be deplaned if no one came forward. One of the passengers told reporters that this “came across as a threat, both in their wording and the tone.”

The airline then later offered $2,500 in credits, after which three people volunteered. The incident led to the flight being delayed by 54 minutes.

A similar incident happened with United sometime back when it was about to take off from India. Due to a weight and balance problem, the first seven rows of passengers in business class were forced to move to coach.

However, a lot of them “were already in their pajama's, watching movies” and got angry. The rearrangements could not be accomplished within 20 minutes, and so the flight had to be cancelled.