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Imagine you are a juror watching a video of an airline passenger being dragged off an airplane because the airline needed the seat for an employee. You might, as the woman in the video is heard screaming, “Oh my God, this is wrong, look at what you did to him,” as the middle-aged passenger is hauled through the narrow aisle of the regional jet.

United Airlines, so far is keeping mum about the decision to involuntarily remove four fare-paying passengers from Sunday’s Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville. Republic Airways of Indianapolis actually operated the flight under contract to United. But it was United gate agents apparently who made the decision to call law enforcement to forcibly remove the passenger who refused to give up his seat.

One thing is abundantly clear already though; this as-yet-unidentified traveler has a heck of a lawsuit.

“It’s pretty outrageous,” said Jim Keindler an aviation lawyer with Kreindler & Kreindler in New York for 34 years. (And where, full disclosure, I worked as an accident investigator from 2001-2008.) Kreindler has seen just about everything over the course of three and a half decades representing air travelers, so when I saw the video, I called to ask what he thought.

“That’s a compelling suit,” he told me explaining, “For United to decide an employee’s presence is more important than a doctor seeing patients is pretty wild.”

News accounts of the event indicated that the traveler refused to give up his seat because he was a physician with patients to see on Monday morning. That argument seemed to hold little weight as three law enforcement officials boarded the plane, pulled the man out, apparently causing his head to strike an armrest before dragging him off the plane.

Inexplicably he returned to the airplane before it departed Chicago, appearing disoriented and in need of a doctor himself as he repeatedly shouted, “I have to go home, I have to go home.”

CAR – Here’s the video showing passenger being forcibly removed from plan: