Originally Posted by kevinsac

Was anyone else on UA 975 yesterday, IAD-SFO (777)? (I was in 2A....had my FT tags. Sorry if I missed you.)

Boarding started on time and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Then the captain made an announcement … I did not listen carefully, but he mentioned something about damage to the cargo hold when the incoming flight was being uploaded. Before we could leave the gate, they were going to have to unload and reload and redistribute the cargo for our flight. A 30-minute delay led to a 60-minute delay and so on.

Finally, we left the gate and headed to runway 1R for take-off. But we immediately went to the penalty box – I assumed we were waiting for clearance from IAD departure or the folks at SFO.

Then the captain made another announcement … he still was not sure the weights and balances were accurate, so we wanted them to check again.

Finally, we got the “all clear,” left the penalty box and lined up, and almost immediately we started our take-off. But before we had reached full thrust, he pulled back on the throttles. I assumed the UA 777 that had just landed on the runway had not fully cleared the runway and he was going to go-around and start over.

Instead, he let the initial power carry us back toward the terminals. He then made an announcement that he had received an urgent call indicating that the cargo was NOT properly distributed and we’d have to go back to the gate again.

Wow…talk about a last minute correction. Granted, we only were about 1,500 feet down the runway. But after all that back-and-forth, checking and double checking, the final panicked call came as we already were rolling down the runway. I’d like to think the balances were off just a little and it would not have impacted our ability to fly. The guy next to me said “I guess someone is not getting a Christmas bonus this year!”

Finally, after another hour at the gate to re-distribute weight, we departed more than 3.5 hours late.

One of the agents in SFO told me that about 200 pax missed their connections … and all local hotels were booked solid. United was not offering overnight accommodations to anyone. But that is a whole different story.