As a result, airlines have little incentive to reform themselves.

“Airline executives will tell you they don’t view themselves as being service companies,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “They want Wall Street to view them as industrial companies, and they want consumers to view them as transportation providers. Customer service is just not what the airlines are about.”

You can see this in United’s initial response to what happened on Flight 3411. “I apologize for having to reaccommodate these customers,” Oscar Munoz, United’s chief executive, said in a statement dripping with all the warmth of a ransom note.

In a letter to employees, he repeatedly suggested that the customer, not the airline, was at fault. After all, the passenger was offered a bountiful $1,000 in United vouchers for his trouble. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. As a United spokesman told The Times, the passenger was “asked several times, politely,” for his seat before anyone beat him up.

It took two days — and a plunge in United’s stock price — for the airline to offer a real apology. “I want you to know that we take full responsibility and we will work to make it right,” Mr. Munoz said in a statement on Tuesday.

Can technology improve how airlines work? Some people have ideas for how that may happen.

One of them is obvious and sensible: customer reviews. Last year TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that has become indispensable for hotel bookings, began rating airlines. Its new rankings, released this week, show that over all, airlines get an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 from customers.

Emirates and Singapore Airlines are rated the best in the world; two American airlines, JetBlue and Alaska, made TripAdvisor’s Top 10 list. But Delta was the only major American airline to receive TripAdvisor’s seal of approval. United and American Airlines did not meet the site’s minimum threshold, though Bryan Saltzburg, senior vice president for TripAdvisor’s global flight business, said that the two had been improving.

One can imagine how such reviews could prompt improvements in airlines. If instead of just price, travel search engines included prominent warnings from reviewers — “This airline might give you a bloody lip while kicking you from your seat, 1-star!” — that could alter travelers’ calculations in booking.