Case Study : United Express Flight 3411 Incident

1. United Airlines is owned by the UAL Corporation and was incorporated on December 30, 1968. The actual company was formed may years before this actually in 1925 and was a private mail carrying service between Pasco, Washington, and Elko, Nevada, and from these humble beginnings they formed a were able to start a company that would come to be a global leader in the airline service. From the 1960’s to the 1980’s the company had 6 different presidents and started to expand and venture into different aspects of business other then airlines and were unable to have any success. These companies that they purchased were not a success and were later resold.

On June 1, 1999, an American Airlines McDonnel Douglas DC-9-82 (MD-82), tail number N215AA, crashed the end of Little Rock National Airport in Little Rock, AR after leaving runway 4R at approximately 2350 central daylight time (NTSB, 2001). The aircraft left Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport at approximately 2240 with two flight crew members, four flight

This led the NAACP to issue a national travel advisory black people warning them of the discriminating and disrespectful policies of the airline. According to NAACP, there has been a pattern of prejudice which has been going on for months. Now, they have finally taken action against it by issuing a warning before booking and boarding

and other parts of the country. We tried to contact the American Airlines by phone, after 45min of waiting in line to speak with a representative we talked to an agent, but she wasn't able to find a flight that would take us to Chicago anytime soon so we decided to head to the Phoenix airport anyway, in the hopes that we can be rescheduled, put on another flight, still hoping that we can get home tonight, even if it was on a non-direct flight. We had jobs to get to next day, Tuesday was scheduled as a full work day for us, and our car rental reservation was expiring that evening so didn't want to extend it

Observed flight 5990 to DFW at gate B4 being worked by Piedmont agents Chelsey and Jeannette. Agents used many of the elevate behaviors before boarding by greeting customers with a smile, listening to their needs and offering customers options. Agents did not ask if they could be of further assistance. A correct Welcome announcement was made which included information for Basic Economy customers. Several minutes later an announcement was made advising customers they had to “hold off” boarding followed by an apology. Nice job! Boarding began within 10 minutes after the delayed boarding announcement. Agents followed the correct procedures when boarding an UM. The dual lane sign was positioned against the wall and was not used. The sizer was

The airborne times of United Airlines flight 448 from Albuquerque to Denver on 10 randomly selected days are shown below. You may assume that the flight times of all such flights are normally distributed. (10 points each)

The reservation agents at United are a having a difficult time with Continentals system although they have gone through an excessive amount of training for the system they are still having a hard time mastering it. ("United airlines issues," 2012)

union action. Due to the recent pension cut plan Super Jet is under heavy pressure from the employee unions at United. Any small incidence can become a trigger for delayed flights.

Recently the Department of Justice filed an Antitrust Lawsuit to Block United Airlines monopolization of takeoff and landing slots at Newark Airport in New Jersey. The Justice Department believe if this transaction is approved it would further United’s dominance at Newark, New Jersey,

I called another AA telephone number and spoke with Dennis who was a reservation agent in Phoenix. Dennis was extremely understanding, apologetic and sympathetic as I once again relived our horrific experience. Dennis put me on hold as he explained the situation to one of the supervisors; sadly the supervisor was not interested because it was related to a past travel. Although he explained the entire incident they would not speak with me. Dennis once again apologized and attempted to speak with another supervisor whom also said that due to it being a past travel that customer service would have to handle it even though they did nothing about

2. The London based Airline could have verified their passenger list and should have identified Prof. McPherson as a Gold card member and a loyal customer and should have taken any one of these actions based on the situation:

United Airlines currently operates nearly 3,000 flights per day on United, as well as United Express. This amounts to more than 200 domestic and international destinations from hubs in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Denver. United is known as one of the largest international airlines that is based in the United States, with global air rights in the Asia-Pacific area, in Europe, and in Latin America. (United Air Lines, 2009)

Other airlines had claimed that they had not received any call from Northwest Airlines regarding the situation nor asking any help from them. Also, the situation could be mitigated if Northwest Airlines had integrated stairs on their planes. Spirit Airlines had in fact safely deplane their passengers using the integrated stairs. The passengers were then immediately taken into waiting rental car company buses to the terminal. The Northwest Airlines could borrow the appropriate mobile passenger stairs from another airline to mitigate the situation, but they had not considered to do so.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 severely affected the airline. On the morning of September 11, 2001 the Federal Aviation Administration suspended all commercial airline flights and Southwest did not resume flight operations until September 14. During this time Southwest canceled about 9,000 flights. After flights were resumed, revenues were severely impacted and ticket refunds increased. To aid the airlines affected by the terrorist attacks, the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act provided some compensation to qualifying United States airlines to help compensate for the losses (Southwest 2005).

With 1988 operating income of $801 million on a revenue of $8.55 billion, American Airlines, Inc. (American), principal subsidiary of Dallas/Fort Worth-based AMR Corporation, was the largest airline in the United States. At year-end 1988 American operated 468 aircraft on 2,200 flights daily to 151 destinations in the United States, Bermuda, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, France, Great Britain, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, and West Germany.