NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- So what should United Airlines have done?

The airline has admitted it was a mistake for police to forcibly remove a passenger who refused to give up his seat on a crowded plane. Video of the passenger being dragged up the aisle of the plane has been played nonstop for three days.

United's CEO has apologized and said it won't happen again. But how could it have been prevented in the first place?

The easy answer is that United should have offered a lot more money until it found a volunteer to give up his or her seat.

"It's just a financial solution," David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, said Wednesday on CNN's "New Day."

Other passengers say the airline offered $800 before choosing people to give up their seats involuntarily, and then sending in law enforcement when one man wouldn't move. United says it increased the offer to $1,000 and didn't get volunteers.

"If they had gone to $1,000, $2,000, whatever it would have taken, people would have raised their hands," said Neeleman, now CEO of the Brazilian airline Azul. "There would have been a stampede to get off the airplane at the right price."

United hasn't provided details of how it makes offers to passengers, but CEO Oscar Munoz said Wednesday that United policy denied the crew the flexibility they needed to find fliers who would voluntarily give up seats.

Federal law says airlines don't have to pay more than $1,350 to passengers who are bumped involuntarily. But that doesn't stop the airline from offering more to persuade volunteers.

Munoz told ABC's "Good Morning America" that the airline would review its rules to make sure crews were given the power to use their "common sense."

Other airline veterans agree the situation should never have gotten to the point of removing a passenger against his will.

"It seemed such a crazy escalation for what was essentially a relatively simple issue," Ben Baldanza, the former CEO of Spirit Airlines, told CNN.

Munoz said the airline would never again use police to remove a paying passenger who is being bumped.

"To remove a booked, paid, seated passenger -- we can't do that," he told ABC. The airline has pledged a full review of its procedures by April 30. Munoz said airline employees would be given more flexibility to deal with similar situations.

"They all have an incredible amount of common sense, and this issue could have been solved by that," he said.

When airlines have to bump a passenger off a flight involuntarily, it usually happens at the gate, not on the plane. That's what happened to almost all the 40,629 passengers who were involuntarily bumped from U.S. airlines in 2016.

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