For starters, airlines, like farmers, are dependent on the weather -- albeit one wants clear skies and the other prays for rain. But the impact on passengers who need a timely arrival at a destination is the same when the planes don't fly, whether it's because of lack of crew, "mechanical difficulties," severe turbulence, or iced up planes and snow covered runways.
Then there are the lost bags, TSA screenings, and flight delays. Passengers buy a time-specific arrival. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they sleep on the floor of an airport overnight while the airlines try to sort out the cancelled flights, lack of crews, and backups in the national system caused by one airport's problems.
Wall Street's pressure for ever-increasing airline profits has encouraged the substitution of pretzels for meals, narrower seats and less leg room, extra charges for everything from bags to specific seats -- and the overbooking that results in bumping paying passengers from flights. (Fortunately, regulations prohibit the sale of "standing room only" passage.)
Load Factors and Bumping Passengers
Selling seats on departure-specific airplanes is a business similar to restaurants and motels. A grocery store may have fewer sales during severe thunderstorms, but the gallon of milk it doesn't sell today will be sold tomorrow. The revenue lost from today's empty airline seat, motel room, or restaurant table is more often gone forever than simply time-shifted to the next day.
No-show paying passengers contribute to this airline problem.
The airlines' response -- to sell more tickets than they have seats -- is not entirely irrational (though there are preferable alternatives and modifications). But predicting how many additional tickets should be sold is an inexact science. So they error on the side of selling too many, and then apply a marketplace approach to the paying passengers they refuse to board: How much money would it take to satisfy a bumped passenger with flying later -- or not at all? Usually something like $400-$800 is enough.
There are some questions regarding what happened prior to departure of United Express 4311 from Chicago to Lexington, Kentucky, on April 9. Was the flight overbooked, or was the problem only created by a last-minute need for four seats for United crew members? Did the passenger in question board, get off the plane, and re-board? What is unambiguous, because documented on videotape, is that he was on the plane, sitting in his seat, when he was forcibly removed from his seat, dragged down the aisle, and taken off the plane by Chicago O'Hare security.
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