When Asiana Flight 214 from South Korea crashed onto the runway at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, hundreds of flights into that airport were canceled, stranding thousands of travelers at airports across the country.
The Asiana crash came right in the middle of a holiday weekend, disrupting airline networks. And it occurred during a weekend when many flights were intentionally overbooked.
What happened next to all those stranded travelers offers a revealing window into how airlines view their passengers.
The fate of each traveler trying to get back to San Francisco depended almost entirely on their "status": how the airline computer systems calculated their potential future value to the airline. When there's a disaster or bad weather closes an airport, available seats are doled out based on a customer's status on the airline, not how far they have come or how long they have been struggling to get home.
The scene inside Newark's United Airlines terminal Sunday afternoon bordered on chaotic. At Gate 113, a huge crowd of people pressed up against the desk trying to get to San Francisco. Half a dozen previous flights had been delayed or canceled in the past 24 hours.
Imran Qureshi was stuck at Newark after flying in from the United Kingdom on Saturday.
"There is no way to go home," he said. "I have been going to every flight — which leaves every hour — to see if I can get on a standby but apparently the airline has policies to overbook every flight. So if they have overbooked their flight, people on standby have no chance at all."
The flight Qureshi was hoping to get on had close to 100 passengers waiting on the standby list and no free seats. United was bumping between six and 12 confirmed passengers off most flights from Newark to San Francisco on Sunday, adding to crowds in the airport.
Related NPR Stories
The Two-Way
San Francisco Crash Victims Identified As Chinese Girls