CaptainMiles

Bit of a mild festive environment at the gate: balloons and cupcakes.

There are some suits here presumably for some speeches and such, but they started pre-boarding without any festivities. No speeches.

After pre-boarding and before general boarding, one announcement: "Good evening ladies and Gentlemen. This is United's inaugural flight to Lisbon. Come help us celebrate with a cupcake." There will be many cupcakes left over, come on over to D5 and help yourselves.

it's a full flight.

Any other FTer on this flight?

CaptainMiles

Welcome aboard this special flight with the same cheap warm "champagne" in the same plastic cups. Still a nice touch to come around and give it to everyone (in BF, not sure about Y).

cesco.g

Thanks for the feedback. What equipment is operating. I can tell the sCO BF seats.....

JOSECONLSCREW28

75B.

hangpilot

Which elementary school decorated the cupcakes?

UTex09

Cupcakes are cracking me up!

CaptainMiles

sCO 752. There is an interesting story to this. Initially this was supposed to be ship 3115. That ship's schedule for the day was:
UA484 IAH-IAD
UA484 IAD-IAH
UA321 IAH-IAD
UA168 IAD-LIS

The first flight went smoothly on schedule. But then UA484 IAD-IAH got into maintenance delays. STD was 12:40. First they delayed it to 12:50, then 1:10, then back to 1:00, then 1:30, 2:15, 2:30, 2:45, 3:15, 3:35, 3:55, 4:15, 4:45, 5:00. Eventually let the gate at 5:02. Those nasty rolling mx delays, when they think that something is a quick fix and it turns out not to be.

At some point in this mess someone in ops got nervous about the inaugural flight, and swapped it to ship 3136.

I was actually flying UA321 IAH-IAD and then UA168 IAD-LIS, and was counting on it being the same ship. Even had the same seat on both flights. No luck keeping the same ship. No luck even getting to IAD in time for the inaugural flight with those delays. So I ended up flying IAH-DCA and hopping over to IAD to catch my original UA168.

Lol. I didn't ask. But when one the guys in suits saw me photographing the cupcakes he tried to steer me to the more nicely decorated ones, eventually not finding any nicer than any other and giving up with "they were all custom hand made".

cesco.g

Glad, you at least made the inaugural, which probably took some proactive intervention of your side. ^
Always interesting to hear "the rest of the story".

lixiaojuventus

I think the most interesting thing is that they actually ferried the ship 3136 in from EWR! It must be a very rare case that EWR-IAD is operated by a 752.

CaptainMiles

The flight was a pretty regular flight, no media frenzy or anything like that. The captain announced that it was the inaugural flight, which caught quite a few pax by surprised. Guess they had not noticed the balloons and cupcakes before. It was also the captain's first flight to LIS, and he was looking forward to it. It was a Dulles-based crew, so no wonder it was their first time to LIS. One of the pre-flight video quiz questions was very apropos for the flight.



We were off the gate 7 minutes late (22:22, versus 22:15 scheduled). Weather at KIAD was fine (METAR KIAD 260152Z 15003KT 10SM BKN250 21/13 A3012 RMK AO2 SLP197 T02060133) and we taxied to runway 30 and took off at 22:34. Normal takeoff and climb out. The first third of the flight was quite turbulent. They started dinner service, but had to suspend and even retrieve glasses because no liquid would stay in the glass. Had to get new tablecloth too because it was spilled all over. Turbulence then calmed down and they proceeded with the normal dinner service.

The route was the typical mid-north track, off of Nova Scotia to 45ºN and across the pond.



The approach into LIS was the EKMAR 2B arrival for runway 21 (METAR LPPT 261100Z 22010KT 9999 FEW026 SCT034 19/11 Q1013). Good approach and landing.




Taxiing to the gate we got the water salute by the airport fire department. Well, not quite water, some gunky red stuff. Always fun, oohs and aahs and clapping by the passengers.





We parked at gate 141, the closest gate to immigration for the shortest possible walk. Disembarking they had some local greeters giving out Lisbon tourist maps, a commemorative inaugural Portuguese custard cake (yum), and most special a Fernando Pessoa impersonator reading poetry. Quite a pleasant welcoming crew.





Thanks to UA, the crew and the LIS welcoming party people for a nice inaugural.

Xyzzy

That flight was fairly full, too! It had the capacity of at least two of the RJs that regularly ply that route...

Thanks fr sharing!

CaptainMiles

My intervention, and great assistance by two excellent UA employees.

Linda at the UC in IAH spent a solid 45 minutes working exclusively on my case. She first tried to find the real scoop on the rolling delays of UA484 by calling the gate at IAD, calling the club at IAD to have someone walk there and check it out in person, calling IAD ops to get their scoop ("the captain wants us to deplane" was not the answer we wanted to hear), calling IAH ops to find out whether they had another aircraft and what their plan was (they had no other 752 or other suitable aircraft, so they'd have to wait for ship 3115 to come in or swap it out for some other type much later or cancel). In the meantime, she held an F seat for me on the DCA flight, and called down to IAH baggage to have them pull my bags aside for a last minute decision on IAD versus DCA.

Meanwhile, Kevin in baggage handling found my bags, called back the Club saying that he had them aside and was standing by for a last minute decision, and when the decision was made to go to DCA he then rerouted them and called back to confirm that the bags were going onto the DCA plane. Really nice touch from a guy that we normally don't interact with.

Speaking of bags, this was fun. I had checked three bags, tagged all the way to LIS, rerouted to DCA on the same original tags. I picked them up in DCA and rechecked at IAD. At IAD they insisted on putting new tags even though my original tags were still attached and said LIS. So they ripped the old tags and put on new ones, and I ended up with 6 claim stubs.

Upon landing in LIS I get this email from United:
It's amazing that they only lost 2 of the 6. Somehow they got 4 of my 3 bags to LIS. They truly exceeded expectations!

cesco.g

Great support by UA staff indeed!
Funny bag tag story. Properly done, IAD check-in should have voided your first
set of tags, though.

LIH

Great post and thanks for providing all the photos. I'm sure that whomever within ops was told to keep an eye on that inaugural LIS flight had quite the day...

drewguy

You're entitled.