Kacee

It's a good bet that UA operations considered holding the Hawaii flights but determined not to, in part based on the availability of seats on multiple later flights to the islands, including two HNL-bound widebodies.

sannmann

My IAH-SNA flight was held two weeks ago for ten minutes for three passengers connecting from DCA, including me and my gf. Then again, UA should have never designated a 34 minute layover at IAH as a legal connection...

mahasamatman

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

pseudoswede

My sister asked about the 12:50pm HNL flight, and they said no.

Often1

OP doesn't even know if the misconnecting pax were off-loaded in order to avoid an oversale. UA, just like AA & DL, overbooks knowing that some pax will misconnect. At T-15, those seats might well have been given to people waiting for seats. No real point in holding a flight when there's no seats left anyway.

Once the flight is fully boarded and closed (and I don't mean the cabin door), the Captain takes the inputs for passenger count, baggage weight and fuel load and together with the dispatcher, calculates weight & balance. Add a passenger and the process starts again.

Thus, it's not 5-7 minutes, it's the 10 minutes after the 5-7 minutes. Add to that a little bit of congestion on the ramp and it's easy to turn a couple of minutes into 30.

And what about the aircraft waiting for the departing flight to push? Those 200 passengers may have connections.

There are a ton of considerations and Ops puts them all together. What seems easy isn't and certainly isn't always the right thing to do.

I kinda doubt the GA's were laughing at the misconnecting pax. If anything, it's a hassle for the GA's to rebook everybody, so a tad on the paranoid side.

bajrbajr

"needs" and a few minutes of "inconvenience" are not the same thing.

besides, all airlines have been padding their schedules to avoid DOT fines for being late... by much more than the 5-10 minutes these passengers would have needed to make a connection. Many flights I'm on arrive as much as 30 minutes early. Hold the flight for a few minutes and it still gets in on schedule!

exerda

It would be nice to think the GA at least checked inbound pax and called ops to see about holding the flight, but somehow I doubt that happened.


Almost every single one of my flights since the summer has been delayed to wait for bags to be loaded. Captains sound quite annoyed by it, too--that ramp staff took so long to load them, that is, not that they were holding to load the bags.

Yet even then, my bags miss the flight rather frequently. As I've reported in the appropriate thread, I've had several 2-3 hour connections the past few months which I made but which my bag did not.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

Too many have a simplistic view of operations. "Gee, just hold the plane"! Maybe there was another plane waiting for the gate. Maybe the pilots were in danger of timing out if they delayed. Curfew at destination airport. Etc. etc. etc.

The cut-off is 15 minutes before departure. Sometimes they can hold the plane, sometimes they can't. I've both benefited and lost out. It happens at other airlines, also. The decision to go/no go is not always the decision of the GA.

Baze

Come on, lets not interject logic into another bashing of UA.

kettle1

To the OP: Let me get this straight, you were not one of the affected passengers? From your post it appears you were not. What were your "two cents" of knowledge to add to this? If you were one of the DEN connecting passengers, I misread.

If you were not - mind your own business. Miss-connects happen at every airline daily. OPS controls what time the door is shut.

What exactly were your "two cents" of knowledge?

Again, if you were one of the displaced passengers - raise hell, but that will not get the door reopened.

As for the GA's laughing, that is another matter and should be addressed by UA management.

BlackMountain

The bags issue is an interesting one. Sure, you can hold a few minutes while a connecting passenger runs over, but if they had checked bags that are going to misconnect anyway, the airline then has to deal with that. It seems like the gate agent can see when a connecting passenger arrived, and has a feel for how long the hike should take, but may not have as good an idea regarding that person's bags. And a plane camping out on a gate that an arriving plane needs is a big deal, maybe the biggest issue of all. Having personally had a connection go wrong while sitting in the penalty box at O'Hare waiting for a gate, that is hugely frustrating.

I'd take this in the stuff happens category, and the agent at the gate should hopefully handle the situation in a diplomatic way. Unfortunately, IME gate agents who are closing a flight are at a sort of customer service enthusiasm low point. The flight is closed, they can't get this person onto the plane, and there is nothing that they can do for them that customer service wouldn't do - and re-booking and confirming the next flight for them, right then, could be easy or could take 15-20 minutes, especially if the customer is really needy/particular/routing creative. This guy/gal who comes running up 30 seconds too late is just no longer their problem, as of 30 seconds ago. So, the customer gets a shoulder shrug and a brush off, because the agent just wants to close the station and either get to the next flight or take a break, which they probably need badly. This is at least my perception - maybe some of the insiders could say whether the agent has any specific responsibility for "servicing" passengers who show up after door close.

mduell

UA shows a number of standbys cleared and went out with empty seats.

dank0014

So you mean to tell me that airports and ATC should also build in these buffers and reduce air traffic by nearly 40-50% in major markets like ORD NYC SFO etc. Airlines schedule takeoff slots and missing it means you have to sometimes wait until they can fit you in. It is not as easy as just building in another 5 minute buffer. Trust me, I hate when this happens but the impact of holding flights is more complicated than many of us can understand - I don't even know them either.

PushingTin

I'm guessing none of them were GS.

channa

What fines for being late? They have to report every flight and how it came in, but they're not fined for delays.


They always say no. Knowledgeable UA customers know to push back.