Its latest innovation, introduced this year, is not any improvement to customer service, but “basic” fares-tickets without assigned seats, that put the holder into the very-last boarding group, and also ban carry-on baggage. Overcrowding, poor treatment, and invidious discrimination form a toxic combination. But it led, in the short term, to a giant mess, forcing the carrier to adopt ever more extreme policies, transforming it into industry leader in the abandonment of basic decency. Combined with Continental, United became the world’s largest airline-and vastly more profitable. All the while, it operated in a relatively normal, if not particularly profitable, way. Before then, United had been, variously, a regulated carrier the world’s largest firm owned by its employees and, from 2002 to 2006, in bankruptcy. United’s 2010 merger with Continental marks the turning point. But the overload and discrimination are a toxic combination the human costs, to state the obvious, have become apparent. It is a strategy that (along with those nasty baggage and change fees) yielded almost $10 billion in profit over the last two years. The scandal is the predictable byproduct of a relentless obsession with filling planes to absolute maximum capacity coupled with open and invidious discrimination in the treatment of customers.

Endless sky hunt down