United I stand

/
I travel a decent bit for work. I'm no road warrior, but I'll travel at least 6 times this year, probably 8. And I have at least 1 personal trip on the books. 2 of those trips I'll be flying American because they get me to South America the easiest (One World is better because of LATAM airlines). The rest of those trips will be United. There are several reasons why I've always flown United, am still flying United, and will continue to fly United.

  • I live 20 minutes from Newark-Liberty, their east coast hub, and I don't want to go over an hour to JFK to stand on principle.
  • They are the cheapest also because of the hub and I'm not in the business of costing myself money in some kind of solidarity. I have a home and a family and I'm philanthropic where I can be, but paying more for the same makes no sense to me.
  • I've been flying United since I was a child (well, it was Continental) and I've never seen anything that remotely resembles the event early this week. Over 400,000 flights worldwide each day. United is one of the big players. Safe to assume there are a solid 20,000 flights by United each day. That's about 219,000,000 flights since I became aware of airlines and this is ONE such incident. Odds are in my favor
  • United didn't do anything wrong other than ask this guy to leave. The dragging and all that - done by Chicago PD's airport security, NOT United. 
  • I don't see a problem with United asking him to get off. It's an inconvenience and maybe there was another way, but this is how it played out. It sucks. You get off and deal with it later. Flailing your arms and screaming like a banshee doesn't solve anything.
  • Even if United shouldn't have gotten themselves backed into a corner, they did. It was a mistake. They'd have left him there if they could. They have no vendetta against customers or doctors or Asians (as some news outlets have opined). Shit happens and life moves on.
  • The best reason of all... all the angry morons out there will stop flying United and will bring their "at least we won't get our asses kicked on this Delta flight" snark to other airlines, leaving me in peace.
Or in 6 days, we'll all be fired up about some other inane thing, waxing intellectual like we're experts who were present for the event and setting the world on fire over it for 6 more days until... oh look, a squirrel.