Kacee

Statistically, a flight is considerably more likely to be delayed ex-EWR than ex-JFK.

And SFO-DEN is much more likely to be delayed than OAK-DEN.

That said, not sure that comparing delay percentage for a single flight tells us anything of significance, statistical or otherwise.

cestmoi123

If anything, adjusting for airport skews things in UA's favor, since EWR's on time departure figure (72%) is below that of JFK (78%), so UA, flying out of EWR, is facing a tougher environment than NH, flying out of JFK.

I'm not saying NH's on time performance is in any meaningful way worse than UA's for US-Japan, but the data certainly doesn't support the assertion that NH's is meaningfully BETTER, either.

There can be other reasons to prefer NH to UA (in non E+, NH has 3 inches more pitch, for example), but on-time performance isn't one of them.

jp12687

i bet they asked the one person it affected who paid a lot of money to fly on a plane with IFE.

it sucks but i wouldn't be happy flying on a plane 13+ hours without IFE.

exerda

I'm sure lack of IFE would have annoyed some pax. To me, though, schedule is more important than IFE; I bring a book and my laptop.

Don't we routinely hear people criticized for not bringing their own food? So why not criticize people who don't bring their own entertainment?

Delaying a plane for IFE seems silly, even for a flight that long. That particular delay probably caused missed connections in NRT, and as it also delayed the return NRT-IAH flight, missed connections the next day in IAH.

AA_EXP09

as well as SFOHND/NRT on both UA and NH.

weero

No mathematicians among us here? The sample size depends entirely on the (null) hypothesis. If your claim is that the majority of the passengers wanted to fly with a crippled IFE, then a sample size of 6 gives your a very small residual for the null hypothesis.
However to uphold the OP's original statement that all pax wanted to travel the sample size is entirely insufficient.

I would not want to sit in coach for such a long ride without IFE. But of course UA cannot check the birds before putting them into service. This is why these things don't happen on SQ or CX but on UA. Either outcome is pretty devastating.

cjermain

Here's the thing that UA and airlines in general don't seem to understand: taking a minute to honestly explain the situation to the passengers can head off most or all of the negative feelings in a situation like this.

If the pilot comes on and says, "I'm sorry, but we need to deplane everyone to fix the in-flight entertainment. Now I know that while some might think it's a bad idea to delay the flight to fix an entertainment system, it's actually a safety issue. We don't want to take off until we have a good idea of what is wrong with the system, so we can be sure that it is safe to fly" then people will be very forgiving. Or if the explanation is that this is the last chance to fix the IFE for the next 48 hours because of where the flight is going, the say that; people will be forgiving.

There's often this inexplicable reluctance to explain what is going on, and in the absence of information, a large group of annoyed people will make up their own reasons, that will almost certainly include assertions about how stupid or uncaring the airline is.

cestmoi123

Fully agree. While I don't think it's helpful for the pilot to say "the XK47-19 discomputational module in the starboard kawoozie nacelle is showing 43 milliquarks while the limit is 41, so we need to remove the ishkibble housing to replace it," just explaining in basic laymans terms what's wrong, and being honest about how long its going to take to fix, is always better than being opaque.

kirkwoodj

That's all I needed to hear!