Can't Make That Mistake These Days – United Airlines is Reportedly Subject of Lawsuit for Kicking Wrong Asian Woman Off Flight

Alberto Lo Bianco. Shutterstock Images.

One Mile – United Airlines is facing a discrimination lawsuit, as an Asian woman claims she was kicked off a United flight simply because she was mistaken for another Asian passenger seated several rows away from her (thanks to PYOK for flagging this).

This incident happened on August 29, 2024, on United flight UA1627, scheduled to operate from Las Vegas (LAS) to Washington Dulles (IAD). The flight departed at 9AM local time, and was supposed to make the 2,065-mile journey to Dulles Airport.

There were several realtors onboard, who were returning from a conference in Las Vegas. At least two of those realtors were Asian women, who knew one another and worked together. However, they weren’t seated together (they were seven rows apart), so for all practical purposes, they were separate parties on this flight. This will be an important detail in a bit.

Due to bad weather, the flight had to divert to Baltimore (BWI). This was a super unpleasant situation, as passengers ended up being stuck on the aircraft on the ground in Baltimore for roughly five hours, due to the lack of available gates. 

As you’d expect, passengers became restless. One of the female Asian realtor’s colleagues started feeling unwell, and was sweating profusely and suffering pain in his chest. The passengers claim that the flight attendant was quite dismissive about his medical condition, and wrote off the symptoms as a panic attack.

So one of the Asian realtors confronted the flight attendant over her rudeness, and received a “snarky” response. Eventually, passengers were able to deplane, before once again being allowed to board the aircraft again, around midnight. As the second Asian realtor attempted to board (who had nothing to do with the above situation), she was told that she wouldn’t be allowed to fly, due to accusations made by a flight attendant.

Putting two and two together, she concluded that she was being denied boarding over the earlier interaction between the first Asian realtor and the flight attendant. So the belief is that she was incorrectly identified based on her ethnicity, despite sitting far away, and reportedly spending the entire delay reading her Kindle.

Look, I'm sure there was a time in the United States where if an Asian woman verbally berated a flight attendant before a plane was deboarded, when it was time to get back on the plane, refusing entry to any old woman from east of India would suffice. As long as the ratio remained in tact, nobody would bat an eye. But you can't be making that mistake in 2025. No sir. Not on a flight from Las Vegas to Washington DC. When you're working a flight from one large racially diverse U.S. city to another, you gotta respect the continent of Asia. And you gotta think United Airlines employees who deal with passengers on a daily basis would have interacted with their fair share of different Asian women. You gotta have your head on a swivel for the possibly of multiple on the same fight. 

Now if this were a flight from Jackson, Mississippi to Bismarck, North Dakota... maybe that's a different story. I mean WHAT would be the chances? That flight would be a black & white cookie, with MAYBE one person of Asian heritage traveling to act as moderator for whatever annual Black-White Unity Summit must be happening for that flight to even exist. But pretty much any other flight in the world, you gotta be thinking that multiple people born in the same country continent could in fact be traveling on that plane. 

Honesty the craziest part about this alleged incident (if the account of this story is accurate), is as much security as there is at airports, that'd an airline could even end up in that situation without being able to rectify things by looking at I.D.'s. As far as I know, United Airlines assigns their passenger's seats. If there's a woman berating you in row 27, you'd think it be pretty damn easy to determine exactly who that person was. And the minute the second Asian woman who had nothing to do with the altercation was denied entry, that she could whip out her I.D. and boarding pass to very easily prove she's a different person entirely. Not to mention simply point to the other Asian woman, who may or may not at all look strikingly similar to her. 

You'd have to pay me so much to be a gate attendant for a major airline. Situations like this are just bound to happen when you ask people who aren't paid enough money to be in a position of power. A position of power over people who are oftentimes really fucking pissed off at what you're telling them. Either the employees aren't really qualified to handle a crowd of upset passengers, so they get rattled and make rash decisions (i.e. kicking every Asian woman they see out of the airport). Or they LOVE wielding that power in the one area of their life where they're granted it, and the moment one passenger gets unruly, they make power hungry decisions (i.e. kicking every Asian woman they see out of the airport). I sure as hell couldn't handle it. The minute the airline I worked for started screwing over passengers through no fault of my own, but I'm the one taking the brunt of it for $21 an hour, I'm picking up my loudspeaker phone, inviting the entire airport to suck my balls, and walking straight out of there. You gotta pay me more than that to eat shit for a major airline. No thank you.