That said, since Hawaiian Airlines enjoys a near-monopoly on interisland travel, air fares are not cheap. A round-trip ticket between Hilo and Honolulu can often run over $300, even though the distance between points is only 220 miles and the flight itself is only 45 minutes long.

Contrast that with a $600 round-trip coach ticket on Hawaiian between Honolulu and San Francisco or Oakland (the airline serves both airports with daily flights), which is 2,400 miles and five hours in length per trip segment.

Airlines likely reap an enormous profit on those short-haul routes where they're the predominant or only game in town. A few years ago, we had to pay $250 each for a one-way ticket on Alaska Airlines from Fairbanks to Anchorage, which is the equivalent of Hilo-Honolulu in distance and flight time.

And in 2015, I forked over $175 to American Airlines to fly from Miami to Tampa. Three months ago, I booked a $456 round-trip ticket on Southwest Airlines for my (computer-illiterate) uncle between San Diego and Las Vegas.

Further, none of these trips involved last-minute decision-making; they were all booked weeks in advance. Not everybody has the time, luxury or opportunity to drive to their destination, even if it's only 300 miles away. And that's where the airlines get you.

The airline's operations management at ORD, who are responsible for flight crew scheduling, should have known well prior to the flight's departure that four seats on that particular aircraft would be needed for purposes of crew repositioning / redeployment to Louisville. And if they didn't, well, it was their responsibility to know it. There's no valid excuses for not anticipating and addressing just such a requirement before the point of no return, so to speak.

As such, it was the scheduler's responsibility to block off those four seats for crew use on that flight's passenger manifest far earlier in the day that it was, so that any issues resulting from the prospective displacement of passengers could be handled in a more professional and competent manner, either at the lobby check-in or the gate itself, and resolved to everyone's relative satisfaction well prior to boarding.

Why wait until passengers are boarded and seated on the aircraft itself, before finally acting to seat those four non-revenue crewmembers at the obvious expense and indignation of the company's paying customers? That's just an invitation to trouble and not surprisingly, that's exactly what United got for its operations management's logistical neglect and / or incompetence.

More to the point, Dr. Dao had purchased his ticket, checked in, boarded the aircraft, and taken his seat that evening with every expectation of being back home in Louisville some 60 minutes hence. Unbeknownst to him, however, United Airlines had decided to convey the burden for solving its own crew scheduling problem to the passengers, as though they were supposed to decide amongst themselves who has to stay behind in Chicago.

How exactly, then, do you perceive the good doctor to be in any way at fault here for management's decision to treat its own self-manufactured dilemma as something akin to an episode of "Survivor"?

You have a history here, McBain, of going well out of your way to disproportionally fault civilians in any particular confrontation with authority figures, but in this specific instance, that propensity of yours is totally misplaced and completely inappropriate.

The blame for this wholly unnecessary fiasco is entirely on United Airlines. Its corporate management needs to man up here and take ownership of what happened, and further implement some concrete steps and procedures in order to greatly mitigate the likelihood of just such a recurrence in the future.

And if the prospect of a multi-million dollar settlement with Dr. Dao is what's required to light a fire under United's corporate a$$ and compel UAL CEO Oscar Munoz to acknowledge his company's own indifference and incompetence in the face of an obvious problem, then so be it. Otherwise, where's the incentive on the company's part to actually improve its performance, if any failure to do so doesn't necessarily hit it in the pocketbook?