Return of the wide-body jet, SFO-ORD and ORD-SFO?
 

It appears that UA flights using a wide-body jet, SFO-ORD and ORD-SFO, have returned.

Beginning in mid-August, and it appears daily through the rest of the calendar year, a B777-200 with lie-flat seats in GF and BF is scheduled to be used for an afternoon flight, SFO-ORD, and an evening flight, ORD-SFO.

I hope this is true, along with many UA fliers! I miss the internationally-configured B767-300 (and the B747 from years ago) on flights in between ORD and SFO. :)

Good for us, not good for UA. Don't they have somewhere more productive to put this one?

These must be 1 of the 2 unconverted 3-Class 777 (looking at the seatmaps) -- can not be use TPAC/TATL now that UA has announced all lie flat for those routes. Presently using on the NRT<>HNL but fall may be lower demand period.

Could be a cost cutting exercise.

I noticed in DEN on Friday an Airbus departing for YEG, normally an RJ route. If mainline narrow bodies are being used for hub to non hub routes, then wide bodies have to be used for hub to hub.

There's also a couple IAD rotations in the schedule.

Upcoming heavy metal domestic non-Hawaii at SFO:

edit: ignore the ellipsis, it's some stupid phpbb issue

Is that a one-day BWI-SFO 744 service I see on 8/1? I haven't seen one of those on a domestic route in a while. Have I been missing them?

I loved the 747 they were running between the two a few summers ago. I somehow got on one that got canceled twice and replaced with the new config. Some of my favorite upgrades ever.

The flight number (1892) indicates it's a military charter.

No it's an IPTE 772 with lie flats in J.

Now that they aren't rotating these aircraft into MX for the conversion, it's likely that they have some excess capacity in their 777 international fleet.

This is great news, but it looks like the 757's are slowly leaving.

This is probably a rotation flight, the flight comes on from SFO, in time for an FRA flight.

I speculate they will be doing this to fill the void left by the HI birds getting refurbished.

Since all the non ER IPTE 777s are flying out of ORD/IAD to Europe and SA they will have to do something to fill that slot in SFO when the domestic 777s go in for refurb, so a non ER IPTE 777 from ORD or IAD makes sense.

So maybe HNL-ORD-FRA and back either via ORD or IAD.

Well when CO took over they said UA was stupid to be using international birds hub to hub. Since it was done by UA, they stopped it...


And UA did this, added a tag as (1) they had unused time on the AC, or (2) were rotating planes so they were in KSFO where UAs main maintenance base was.

Adding a domestic tag using an international aircraft is very economical if you can fill the plane. The CASM using a 772 or 763 is better than flying two (or three) A320/319/737s. I think after a while the CO folks looked around, someone said "why are we running 3 narrow bodies at the same time?" and actually figured out that what UA was doing made sense for their network, fleet, and maintenance locations.

CO was never good at fleet planning, had a small second tier network, and it has taken them a while to realize that they are no longer running "Air IAH/EWR"

This is untrue. PMCO would often run their international birds Europe-EWR-IAH-South America to increase utilization. And if you are talking about solely domestic hub-to-hub flying; that would seem to be sub-optimal use of two isle metal capable of longer routes.


SunLover

On what are you basing this assertion? Their fleet utilization numbers were among the highest in the industry IIRC.