A San Francisco federal judge has declined to dismiss a proposed class-action alleging United Airlines charged premium prices for "window seats" that had no actual windows, allowing the case — which could cover more than one million passengers — to proceed.

U.S. District Judge James Donato has refused to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing United Airlines of selling "window seats" that had no actual windows — allowing a case that could cover more than one million passengers to proceed in San Francisco federal court.

The suit, Brenman et al. v. United Airlines, Inc. (Case No. 3:25-cv-06995-JD, N.D. Cal.), was filed August 19, 2025 by five named plaintiffs — Marc Brenman, Aviva Copaken, Sean Minyard, Robert Monroe, and Cindy Pawlowski — who say they paid a premium to select window seats and boarded to find a blank fuselage wall. Judge Donato's order denying United's motion to dismiss appears as Dkt. No. 40 on the CourtListener docket; the precise filing date of that order has not been independently confirmed by The Dissent. SFGate, citing Reuters, first reported the ruling.

United's motion argued that in airline industry usage, "window seat" denotes a position along the fuselage wall — not a contractual promise that a window will be there. The plaintiffs' opposition brief called that reasoning a "heavily lawyered argument" that "flouts the plain meaning of the word 'window.'" The asymmetry in United's own terminology is hard to argue past: aisle seats remain reliably next to the aisle.

After the original complaint was filed, United updated its app and website to label the affected seats "No Window." Plaintiffs' filings called the timing "revealingly" abrupt — an after-the-fact disclosure that the original labeling never provided. The proposed class could exceed one million affected passengers, per the amended complaint. A parallel suit against Delta Air Lines is pending in federal court in Brooklyn.

The class has not yet been certified, and the case remains at an early stage. What to watch: a class certification motion and any discovery that quantifies how many seats United sold under the "window" label while knowing no window was there.