- A San Francisco cardiologist flying out of New York on Saturday said passengers were "shocked" to find a nearly-full flight after they believed United had barred passengers from sitting in the middle seat on their aircraft.
- United had said in an April letter to passengers that it was "automatically blocking middle seats to give [them] enough space," though its website says that's not a guarantee — only a "likely" scenario.
- A United spokesperson, who said the flight was not full and there were 128 people on board, said the company was taking several other steps to keep passengers safe.
- The spokesperson said the company was not reducing the capacity of its aircraft and would book a flight to capacity if demand existed, but said the majority of their flights were less than 50% full.
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A San Francisco doctor shared a photo of a nearly-full
Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University California San Francisco told Business Insider he had spent the previous two weeks at a new New York City hospital working in a COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU). About 25 medical professionals were flying back to San Francisco on Saturday, he said, after working for the past 14 days at various hospitals in New York.
The doctors and nurses flew round-trip free of charge under a United partnership with New York City to bring in medical professionals amid the ongoing pandemic, which has hit New York harder than any other state in the US.
"They were very kind and the way out was lovely — as lovely as you could expect it to be," Weiss told Business Insider.
But things appeared different when he and his colleagues flew back on May 9, so he tweeted about it.
"I guess @united is relaxing their social distancing policy these days? Every seat full on this 737," he tweeted Saturday alongside a photo of the passengers. As of Monday, the photos had racked up more than 9,000 retweets and 27,000 likes.
—Ethan Weiss (@ethanjweiss) May 9, 2020
Charles Hobart, a spokesperson for United told Business Insider the Saturday flight was not full and had 128 people on board. The aircraft that had a maximum capacity of 150, he said.
On its website, United lists several "temporary changes" it made to practice social distancing onboard its flights, including the limiting of seat selection "so customers won't be able to select seats next to each other or middle seats where available."
"We're also alternating window and aisle seats when seats are in pairs," the website read, adding that it could not guarantee that customers would be seated next to an empty seat, but "based on historically low travel demand and the implementation of our various social distancing measures that is the likely outcome."
But in an email United sent to passengers at the end of April, which Weiss shared on Twitter, the company's chief customer officer seemed to take a more definite approach to the middle seats on United's planes.
"We're automatically blocking middle seats to give give you enough space," Toby Enqvist, said in the April 30 email. The email listed other precautions, including requiring all employees to wear face masks on board and making masks available to customers.
Weiss said after speaking to other medical professionals who had recently flown between New York and San Francisco, he expected the flight would be busier than his April flight to New York City. Still, he and his colleges were surprised to see the number of passengers in the boarding area, and eventually, some of those passengers filling the middle seats on their six-hour flight.
United customers can't select the middle seat during the pre-flight period, but it can be assigned later, a spokesperson said
Hobart said the company had mechanisms in place that prohibited customers from selecting middle seats during the pre-flight period, though "additional customers" could still be assigned to the middle seat if there was a demand for the flight.
"We don't guarantee that there are going to be open seats on our aircraft," he said. "We have flexible rebooking policies, so if a customer is concerned — they're on an aircraft, they see that it's more full — we'd ask them to reach out to us and we can do to get them on a different flight."
Weiss said he had not been presented with the option to rebook and wasn't aware that any other customers had been. He added he had not heard gate agents, flight attendants, or the pilots mention anything about the crowded plane to him or other passengers and though he didn't feel the flight was the "end of the world" for he and other medical professionals traveling, he noticed both fear and frustration from other passengers.
"I think we were all prepared with somewhat proper PPE," he said. "The other people who were flying were very upset. There was definitely a lot of anger. I was surprised that it didn't deteriorate in a more significant way, but everyone just eventually calmed down and took off and that was that."
Boarding the aircraft, which he said had been more efficient due to United's new temporary policy to board the plane from the back of the aircraft forward, was also "very awkward" because people assigned to the aisle or window were surprised to find someone had been assigned to the middle seat next to them.
"It set up a difficult dynamic," Weiss, who said he treated the crowded aircraft like a "COVID ICU" and wore his PPE for the majority of the flight, said.
Had the gate agents communicated that there were more passengers than they had anticipated — or even a provided warning that passengers would occupy middle seats on the flight, Weiss said he and other passengers may have felt better prepared.
Hobart told Business Insider that United was not reducing its capacity, and would fill all seats on a plane if there was a demand for a flight, though he stressed that demand had been "historically low" and most flights were "well below half-full" with open middle seats.
He said there would be "rare" instances where flights would be "more full" than others, like the flight to San Francisco on Saturday, but it "often depends on the route and the frequency in which we're able to operate that particular route."
He also pointed to the company's other safety measures, like its cleaning of each aircraft between flights, its boarding in reverse order, and it using an "electromagnetic sprayer" on all planes at the end of each day.
As CNN reported, companies across the airline industry have issued mixed responses for how to practice social distancing aboard flights as passengers return to the skies.
Frontier Airlines incited backlash earlier in May when it said passengers could pay an extra fee to block the middle seat on their flights, though it later reversed course, announcing May 6 it would block the seats from being sold for no additional fee.
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