David R Byler says:

I was once that doggy in the overhead bin. Well, not exactly, but close enough. To cut a horror story down to just the part about the airline – I had flown out to Vegas for a special event which went exceptionally well. But then, in the midst of a morning after from hell, I had had a stroke. I survived without permanent damage to anything. The hospital wanted to cut me loose and send me back “home” to my own doctors. To get me home safely, I had to be on oxygen. The hospital organized all that with the airline which then refused to accept their own paper work filled out by the hospital certifying the need for the oxygen equipment. While the paper work was being worked out all over again, the airline wanted to charge me a fee for rescheduling my flight. We went through that exercise twice, each time accruing more charges. When I finally was accepted on a flight, I had to find my way to my seat handling a piece of equipment bulkier and heavier than I was in physical shape to handle by myself, but I managed to get to my seat finally anyway with help from fellow passengers. The flight attendant then began to insist upon untethering me from my oxygen equipment and placing it into an overhead bin because it was too large to go under the seat and “you can’t have this on the flight.” This, in spite of the airline having the paper work approving my equipment. Some guy who looked “official” told me that I had to do as I was told. I told him and the flight attendant that, in that case, they needed to be sure and have a body bag to fit me when we landed. They relented, eventually. When we landed, the attendants et alia abandoned me on the plane to find my own way off. Blessedly, it was a small airport and an official from another airline finally came half an hour later with a wheel chair to get me to the lobby of the airport where my ride was waiting and had been asking everyone what had happened to me. In this adventure, I sensed a certain lack of training and a certain lack of communication. I don’t think the attendants knew they had a “medical needs” passenger nor do I think they understood what attending to those needs might entail. Don’t think they had a clue – and for that, I blame the airline, not the attendants …

John Reece says:

Well, I saw a picture of the family at the gate and it looked like they were pushing even the most generous carryon limits. None of the bags that could have been the dog carrier looked like it would have fit under the seat.
Perhaps the crew bent the rules up to a point and then said “enough”. OTOH by charging for even one checked
bag airlines incentivized pushing carryon limits.

Michael W. Perry says:

I had a similar experience working on the nursing staff of a children’s hospital—an obsession with niggling rules that ignored what really mattered. I was faulted for insisting in the nursing notes that an eight-year-old girl dying of cancer and abandoned by her family needed “someone to stay with her at night.” I did all I could, spending 45 minutes I could barely spare rocking her to sleep. But when she woke up again, I could not do that again. I had six other children battling leukemia that need my attention. And yet I was faulted for even raising the issue.

Imagine for a moment an administration from the CEO down to the lowest level of administration over the flight attendants that is incompetent. Those in the airlines executives suites want to dictate that a certain set of rules and policies will be rigidly followed. For them, that is “running a tight ship.” They then select underlings who will do as they’re told almost mindlessly, and so on down the line. When I asked a nursing school professor why a hospital would hire stupid people as head nurses, she replied in a instant, “Because they want someone who will do what they are told.”

That, I suspect, is what is happening at United. The airlines administration is demanding that its dictates be followed to the last letter. The seatbelt signs stay on because none of the crew want to take responsibility for what will follow if they turn them off and there’s some turbulence. The result is that those in the lowest levels of supervision over the flight attendants are so stupid, they demand that from those under them stick to the rules in situations where that is disastrous. The flight attendants that are so rattled, much like the nurses I worked with, that they lack the flexibility to deal with real-life situations. They’re sticklers for the rules because they fear being fired if they aren’t.

I hope you get my point. Don’t blame the flight attendants. If that were true, every airline would be as bad as United. Blame administrators who give flight attendants no breathing room.

The experience I endured was such a disaster, shortly after I resigned and in the space of just a few weeks, some 20% of the hospital’s floor nurses quit en masse. And if you know nurses, you know it takes a lot to make a nurse leave a children’s hospital, leaving kids in the lurch. If you’ll like to understand these unhealthy work environments from the inside as well as hear of a solution, read my Senior Nurse Mentor, in which I describe and offer a fix from bad nursing morale.

In the case of airlines, they need a go-to person that flight attendants can call with messy situations. That person would have the authority to override these often stupid policies and rules, sparing the flight attendants.

Some airlines do encourage good sense over rigid rules. I was on a cross-country flight in which an elderly woman across the aisle from me had a heart attack. The flight attendants responded marvelously. They brought her oxygen. They called an airline physician via satellite phone, and they found a physician assistant on board to assist. There was enough reasoned decision-making that the flight continued. When the plane landed in Seattle, we were asked to remain in our seats while medics, who were waiting for the plane, took her off. It was so professionally handled, I commended the flight attendants as I left the plane. They were treated as responsible and had responded responsibly.

–Michael W. Perry, medical writer

Fen says:

Hang on a sec. You want to call out the other passengers who didn’t want to be frog marched of the airplane onto a no-fly list and courtesy cell at Gitmo, fine.

But what about all these other stewardesses? You mean to tell me all these airline employees walking back and forth through the section with the whining suffocating puppy had not a lick of common sense or common decency between them?