MSPeconomist

The 747 has the capacity to scoop up a bunch of otherwise stranded passengers. It can also generally fly in worse weather than narrow body aircraft.

Once I experienced PMNW pulling its old spare 747-200 from the hanger at MSP to send it down to ORD on a late Friday afternoon when flight after flight on the ORD-MSP business oriented "FastTrack" service had been cancelled. I was very happy to have a way to get home that day. My automatically generated upper deck seat assignment (I had had a free elite upgrade on my original flight that was delayed and then cancelled) was icing on the cake.

The weather problem that day was extremely strong cross winds. The 747 could land safely in these conditions, but other aircraft could not.

Lani1

Great switch of A/C but long day for those traveling Friday on West Coast

goalie

Back in the day when I lived on the United Shuttle, I was flying SFO-LAX but SFO was schrod with wx and the accompanying irrops (including 2 SFO-LAX flights before ours canceled) so a 47 was rolled out and swapped to our flight to accommodate those from the canceled flights and my flight

oldtimer

This is the beauty of basing in SFO where UA has the ability and readily to bring/substitute a Jumbo, 747 in this case.

As I recall in 2015 or 2016, I rode on the upper deck of the 747 from SFO to ORD. I believe UA was ferrying the 747 to ORD for the transpacific flight.

drosen85

Not as amazing as many of you are imagining -- but still pretty cool. ;-) Began with the realization that the aircraft had been swapped. Most all other flights to SoCal cancelled (ONT, SNA, BUR). On time departure soon moved to 60 minutes late. Then a gate move from deep in terminal 3 to INTL. Then boarding the roughly 400 people and I'm guessing a massive luggage move.

We were in Polaris Business Class -- I only mention this because a recent SFO-Denver in a B777 really was Polaris-esque (new pillows, blankets). Not to LAX! But we did have the snack baskets and were all able to double dip.

Cook taking off on 10 Left. And really cool landing on 6 Right at LAX. And we did do a complete spin around after an aborted landing attempt.

But, the real bummer was a 60 minute wait to get a gait that could handle the 747. Brutal.

iflyuaaa

for such a short flight, i'm guessing that boarding takes longer than the flight. i'm guessing waiting for bags takes longer than the flight. etc.

mauiUAflyer

On a related note, when Aloha Airlines went belly-up, HA had to take up the slack, and so subbed in a 767 for the usual 717. It took 45 minutes to board, for a less-than 30 minute flight...

cesco.g

Consider yourself "relatively" lucky. The last 744 return LAX to SFO, scheduled dept around 10 p.m. landed at SFO at 3h30-ish a.m.+1 !

Everybody truly earned their CPU on that one.