U.S. airlines have been attracting enormous amounts of negative, but well-deserved attention recently. What’s going on, and what should be done about it?

The most notorious of these outrages is all too well known. In April, the airline dragged a paying, seated United Airlines customer off an airplane so that an employee could take the seat instead. United CEO Oscar Munoz finally got it together, backtracked on his lame initial statement, and told a congressional committee that he realized how badly his airline had screwed up and explained what it was doing to repair its policies. Time will tell about that.

But to think, their old slogan was “Fly the friendly skies.”

More recently, a Delta customer was told that a seat he had purchased for one of his children, but that was occupied by a different child, was no longer his. As the situation escalated, he and his wife were threatened with jail time and losing custody of their children.

And then there were the thousands of stranded passengers and many canceled or delayed flights because Delta’s mid-20th century communications system failed.

Let’s state for the record that the airlines are within their “rights” in the first two of these incidents, by virtue of their passenger agreements that cover aspects of flying on their planes.

Passenger agreements run to dozens of pages and contain all the fine print necessary to allow an airline to pretty much treat passengers any way it pleases. United’s Contract of Carriage Document, for example, takes 37,531 words covering 63 normally formatted pages to explain what it can do with and to you. Every publicized incident likely makes it longer.

That’s as long as two or three chapters in a good book. How many people actually read these things? Is this document even easily available to people booking a flight?

United’s document states, in part: “Each United Carrier reserves the right to … change or modify any of its conditions of contract with or without notice to ticketed passengers.” If you have read this tiny piece of those 35,000 words, you have been forewarned that United can have its way with you — and you apparently have no recourse, no matter how stupid, violent or unfair the airline’s actions may be.

While airlines have the right to do what their agreements state they can do, they first and foremost have an obligation to treat their customers with respect and deference. They ought to bend a little sometimes, because it often makes more sense to treat people well than to strictly follow the rules, especially with passengers that airline personnel have allowed to board a plane. A good rule to follow is: Just because you can do something does not mean you should do it.

Far from that ideal, however, the United and Delta incidents demonstrate that airlines tend to view passengers more as cargo than as customers. Now that we’ve established the problem, how did this idiotic situation come to be?

The “Economic Letter” of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from January 2002 provides some insight into how the airline industry changed from 1975 to 2000. When airline deregulation began in 1979, it started an increase in passengers that tripled by 2000, while average fares dropped by about two-thirds. So, in 2000 there were three times as many passengers as in the 70s paying a third the price per ticket (in 1983 dollars).

With more people flying at fewer dollars per ticket, filling every seat became very important. Thus airlines adopted the practice of deliberately over-booking seats. This means that no-shows don’t prevent every seat from being filled, thus maximizing revenue per flight, but it also means that there are often more passengers at the gate than there are seats on the plane. The need for revenue also explains the explosion of extra fees and crazy rules.

However, over-booking also means that a lot of people don’t board their chosen flight, unless some passenger fails to show — or is dragged off a plane. Perhaps ticket holders are aware going in that they risk being placed on standby status or some other similar situation.

As bad as it is to not be allowed to board the flight you paid for, it’s far worse to have bought a ticket and be seated on the plane — with your luggage also on the plane — and be asked or told to vacate the seat because the airline needs it for an employee.

If the airline needs seats to move employees from place to place, they should reserve them prior to letting paying customers be boarded. That’s just common sense. If they can’t do that, the employee should wait, not the customer. Taking paying customers out of a seat on a plane they have paid for and already occupy is not what you would call a smart business plan. How much bad publicity do these airlines need?