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Enclosed herein is a check ... as a contribution to the support and continuation of your website www.untied.com.

Over the years I have found the information posted to be interesting to read/browse, useful in content and reference, and relevant with regard to my United Airlines experiences and those I hear about from friends and colleagues. Additionally, I have posted a couple of my painful experiences and feel that I would be remiss if I did not contribute in keeping this public service alive.

I applaud you on your website and your valiant effort to hold United Airlines accountable for nothing more than the basic levels of professionalism and service that a company should provide.

Best regards,
David Schiller

Why should you donate?

By way of background, I have maintained these pages pretty much single-handedly since September 1996, when the material first went on-line as the United Airlines Poor Show pages, on my personal home page when I was a student at the University of Toronto. My effort was both a hobby and a mission -- to make big corporations like United Airlines aware that they cannot treat their customers and employees like dirt without consequence.

There is, of course, a financial component to maintaining such a web site: web hosting and domain registration fees, which were initially over $300 annually, have fortunately come down to about $125 for the last few years. In late 1998, I posted a request for assistance to keep the site alive. One individual made the excellent suggestion that readers might offer token contributions to help fund the site, so I provided my address to which donations could be sent. The response was incredible: within a few months, Untied.com had raised enough funds to remain in operation for several years. The tally now stands at approximately $800 collected from a total of 43 readers, hardly a windfall, but enough to keep the site running on its own for a few years. Untied.com may well have been the first reader-supported web site in existence. Naturally, I am most grateful for everyone's assistance and am heartened to learn that there were a significant number of readers who consider this site to be performing a valuable service and wish to see it continue.

Since the beginning of 2002, I have borne the cost of maintaining the site almost entirely out-of-pocket. Following the bankruptcy protection filing of UAL, the long-term value of keeping the site alive is questionable, although the continued flood of email from passengers and employees alike, pointing out the continued disservice, arrogance, and disregard for safety, certainly merit further attention.

Readers should note that the amount of effort to maintain the site, add material culled from news feeds, US Department of Transportation statistics, UAL employees with horror stories of their own, not to mention the many passengers who have been mistreated, is enormous, and I have not been able to do as much work on this as I would like. It was my hope to hire a student on a part-time basis to turn Untied.com into a truly serious website with a real database of all the passenger complaints and employee stories, and use this as a vehicle to pressure further the "unfriendly skies of United" into making substantive improvements in its customer and employee relations. However, the realities of my modest fundraising efforts showed that at best, I should simply aim to keep the site alive from reader contributions.