Arnold: I was recently denied a seat on an airline flight for which I had a confirmed reservation, because the airlin...

Ravi on May 31, 2019

@Roses,

Happy to help.

We know that Arnold got kicked off an overbooked plane flight. As a
result, he missed his meeting. Arnold wants compensation even though
the flight he was supposed to originally be on actually got canceled.

Jamie doesn't think the airline should have to pay Arnold. She reasons
that even if he hadn't been denied a seat, he would've missed his
business meeting anyway.

We're looking for an answer choice that justifies Jamie's response to
Arnold. This is a strengthen with a sufficient premise question. The
prompt gives us the first part of the answer, and we need to pick the
answer choice that has the rest of it.

Jamie's rationale is that Arnold shouldn't get compensated because his
original flight got canceled anyway. If we stated that if one is
bumped from a flight that gets canceled anyway, the airline doesn't
have to pay that person, we would justify Jamie's conclusion.

Bumped from flight that got canceled anyway - >Airline doesn't have to pay

However, the prompt gives us a sufficient condition for when an
airline is obligated to pay a passenger.

Airline has to pay - >

Interestingly enough, if we take the contrapositive of our anticipated
answer, we get

Airline has to pay - >Bumped from flight that didn't get canceled.

Now we know what we're looking for in the answer choices.

(C) says, "only if the passenger would not have been forced to take a
later flight had the airline not overbooked the original flight"

(C) is exactly what we anticipated. With the first part of the prompt
that we've been given, (C) states that an airline is obligated to
compensate a passenger who's been denied a seat on a flight for which
the passenger has confirmed reservations only if the passenger would
not have been forced to take a later flight had the airline not
overbooked the original flight.

(C) can be mapped as

Airline has to pay - >Bumped from flight that didn't get canceled

This matches our anticipation.

Arnold's original flight was canceled and wouldn't have worked, so
according to this, he shouldn't get paid. (C) is the correct answer.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any more questions!