United MileagePlus (Consolidated) - Aircraft schedule implies a delay even if in-bound flight is a bit early?

I was looking at my connecting flight for tomorrow (1183 IAH-DCA) which is scheduled to depart at 2:35pm and of course this far out flight status shows it on-time. Out of random curiosity I asked where the aircraft is coming from and it shows as 1138 PHX-IAH departing PHX on time at 9:43am and arriving IAH on-time at its scheduled 2:29pm. That is 6 minutes before my flight departs! So at the moment they are scheduling an aircraft on a pair of flights that will guarantee a delay even if the in-bound happened to be early? If true it is no wonder that UA's on-time performance is in the tank. Really odd.

.... So at the moment they are scheduling an aircraft on a pair of flights that will guarantee a delay even if the in-bound happened to be early? If true it is no wonder that UA's on-time performance is in the tank. Really odd.or they might just use a different sircraft for your flight?

or they might just use a different sircraft for your flight?

Certainly possible but their current plan is to plan a delay. So at least at this point they are committing to a delay but not bothering to tell anyone. It will be interesting to see what they actually do. I'd understand it better if they had the aircraft designator unassigned but as I understand it the data that shows there is the actual plan. I was chatting a lenght with an agent at DEN last week who used to work in IT prior to UA outsourcing and he said that he could see a few segments back and a few days forward for any airframe's plan which is what we see a sample of. So the forward plan sort of suggests that these aircraft assignments are meant to be real, even if they sometimes change. Anyway - I just find it odd and worth telling folks about. ;)

These things change all the time.. In tracking this, especially more recently, I notice more often than not the scheduled aircraft, based on the where is this aircraft coming from feature, changes at least once, and sometimes more, within 24 hours of flight.

Yeah- the "where is this aircraft coming from" is notoriously likely to change if you're a day before. By the morning of the flight your taking *most* of the operational adjustments (aircraft changes, etc) will have been done overnight and you'll be more likely to have good data. But then as soon as things start going wrong in the schedule, it all starts to shuffle around again. ;-)

Well as of this morning the schedule holds and now my outbound shows as delayed for "late arrival of aircraft" for an inbound that is on-time. So it remains a "planned delay". The good (?) thing is that my 1st flight of the day is now delayed so I should misconnect but might just make it since UA so nicely planned the delay on the 2nd flight.:D This is one screwed up operation right now - hope they get their act together soon.

Well just to complete this story - the IAH-DCA flight really was the plane they said it would be and so was destined to be delayed by virtue of the planned schedule for the airframe. Bizarre. However, the happy news for me was that my inbound was late due to the crew getting in late the previous night and I managed to run the 2 gates at IAH and still make my connection. So perhaps there is some strange sense to UA's madness! :D

My inbound a/c today changed 4 times over the 4 hrs or so I was tracking it

Be aware that the "where is this aircraft coming from" on the United mobile app is far from consistently correct. I have had a lot of need for tracking airplanes lately and have noticed that during any kind of irrops event, the mobile app is wrong about half the time compared to the internal employee access computer system. And even that isn't always right because in the dynamic environment of irrops at an airline (first time Jeff, et al, has ever heard of this????), communications between one department and another are different than if you add a third, fourth, fifth department.

Basically, nobody is communicating effectively so there is always "old news" mixed with "new news".

Pretty strange to watch from the inside. Reminds me of watching a guy in a canoe heading for the falls, and when you try to tell him, he tells you to mind your own business.

FAB

Well UA did it again today on my return! I was going DCA-ORD to connect ORD-PDX this afternoon. I looked at my DCA flight early this morning and it was planned for (and used) an inbound from ORD (fine) but that inbound depended upon an arrival from MEX planned with a sub-30 minute turn. Now this is truly ridiculous because the MEX inbound goes to the International terminal and the ORD-DCA flight leaves from B. So the geniuses in fleet planning planned less than 30 minutes for arrival at M, unloading, moving to B, reloading, and departing. Indeed we wound up nearly 75 minutes late for the aircraft to then get to DCA. Only because my ORD-PDX flight was also operationally late inbound to ORD from BUF did I make my connection. I thought management just told everyone that they were going to fix scheduling aircraft to improve on-time performance? Schedules like this suggest just the opposite - what kind of way is this to run an airline operation!?!

Same issue for me - not as tight (and inbound a/c likely to change), but there is a 6 minute window between when the flight is scheduled to land and when boarding of mine begins.

EWR in the afternoon in the summer? With T-storms in the AM? Not gonna happen.