United Airlines drags a person off a plane and keeps raking in record profits.
On the surface the outrage over United Airlines forcibly removing a man from a flight after he refused to "voluntarily" give up his seat for a United employee looks like just another case of airline overbooking gone awry.
Overbooking is necessary, the story goes, because sometimes passengers don't show up
for their flights. The practice allows airlines to recoup their lost revenue while keeping flights affordable for everyone. Yes, some people will inevitably need to be bumped involuntarily, but profits are thin, we're told, and so this practice is necessary.
"The nice way to look at all this is, the more effectively airlines can fill their seats and generate revenue with the seats they have, the better it is for all of us," aviation consultant Samuel Engel told Marketplace in 2015. Southwest puts an even sunnier gloss on the practice, saying it "creates booking opportunities for Customers who really want or need to be on a flight that is showing full but likely to depart with available seats."
As it turns out, however, America's commercial airlines are currently enjoying near-record profits, according to the International Air Transit Association, an airline trade group.
According to the IATA, North American airlines have raked in over $20 billion in profits for each of the past two years. They expect that number to dip, slightly, to around $19.5 billion next year. "2017 is expected to be the eighth year in a row of aggregate airline profitability, illustrating the resilience to shocks that have been built into the industry structure," the IATA writes in its annual analysis.
