The NY Times reports on one of the traveler's perennial annoyances--overbooking. From the article, here's a statistic that, if true, is quite remarkable.
US Airways had revenue of $11.56 billion last year and would have lost out on $1 billion or more of that had it not overbooked, the company said.
The article does not mention the sort of situation that I recently came upon. For one reason or another, my flight got moved to another gate. I believe it was because the aircraft on which we were scheduled to depart had not yet arrived. This meant that we would be departing on an aircraft that was originally intended for another destination.
The problem was that the aircraft was already fueled for that destination which was quite a bit further away.
Since this was a commuter airplane (Saab 340 for those who would recognize that), weight and balance is more of a factor. The extra fuel put us over the desired weight. We all boarded the plane, but after they weighed it, they asked for a couple of volunteers to leave and fly the next day. Enough folks took the bait, and they weighed us again. We were still overweight so they asked for more volunteers.
At that point, it occurred to them that they should just wait until the bags of the bumped passengers were removed as well and weigh us again. This they did, and no others needed to be bumped.
Unfortunately, cases like that do not fit neatly into their computer model.
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