United to Stop Using Police to Throw Out Passengers on Overbooked Flights, Says CEO

April 12, 2017

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz said the company will cease using police officers to remove passengers from an overbooked flight following the forceful removal of Dr. David Dao in Chicago on Sunday.

“This will never happen again,” Munoz told ABC News on Wednesday morning. “We are not going to put a law enforcement official onto a plane to take them off … to remove a booked, paid, seated passenger. We can’t do that.”

He said the problem was caused by a “system failure” and a lack of “commons sense” from employees in the situation.

He added that he does not have any plans to step down as CEO over the incident that has sparked outrage around the world.

“It was a system failure,” Munoz told ABC. “We have not provided our frontline supervisors and managers and individuals with the proper procedures that would allow them to use their common sense.”

“They all have an incredible amount of common sense, and this issue could have been solved by that,” he said. “This is on me. I have to fix that, and I think that’s something we can do.”

United Continental shares have closed 1.1% lower at $69.93, and fell as much as 4.4% on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Social media users around the world, including in the United States, China and Vietnam, are calling for boycotts of the third largest U.S. carrier by passenger traffic and putting an end to the practice of overbooking flights.

Two online petitions, one on Change.org and another on Care2: ThePetitionSite, calling for Munoz to step down as CEO has racked up more than 127,000 signatures altogether on Wednesday morning.

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