United sued. Accused of kicking off wrong Asian passenger

An Asian American woman is suing United claiming the airline denied her boarding because it mistook her for another Asian passenger.

According to the travel site, These Golden Wings, a gate attendant pulled Jacqueline Chiao aside as she was trying to board and accused her of pushing a United employee earlier that day during a verbal confrontation that allegedly turned physical. The employee told her she would not be allowed to board.

The whole incident started many hours earlier when a storm forced the flight to divert to Baltimore while enroute to Washington, DC and sit on the runway for five hours. During that time, a male passenger began experiencing chest pain while sweating profusely.

The lawsuit claims a flight attendant dismissed the man’s symptoms “as just a panic attack.”

One of the man’s co-workers, Christine Kim, got up and got into a tense argument with the attendant accusing her of not assisting her co-worker.

Eventually the passengers were allowed to deplane. When the flight received the all clear signal to depart, Chiao became puzzled when she wasn’t allowed to reboard. She then concluded she was being mistaken with Kim and told the attendant she wasn’t the one who got into the earlier argument.

Several of her co-workers came to Chiao’s defense and backed up her story. Eventually all four of them were denied boarding, One Mile at a Time reports.

Kim was also denied boarding, reported Live and Let Fly, when she approached United and told them it was heard that got into the argument.

United unsuccessfully tried to get Chiao’s case dismissed. In the meantime, an off duty United employee has come forward to back Chiao’s version of the story.

The case is similar to other racial profiling cases. In one case, These Golden Wings reports a whole group of Black men were denied boarding because of a body odor issue when only one of them had a BO problem. The group of men did not even know each other.

Two Orthodox Jews were also kicked off a flight although they also did not know each other and only one of them was involved in the alleged unruly behavior.