Yeah, the misconnects are a killer now that flights are flying out fuller than ever. On last Saturday's 3:20pm DTW-LAX flight, I SDC'ed to a earlier flight on a 767 with 13 FC seats open 3 hours before departure and saw I was 1 out of 2 on the upgrade list so I figured the upgrade was in the bag.

However, when I got to the boarding area 90 minutes later, I saw the 13 open FC seats turned into 0 and I was 1 out of 3 for 0 open FC seats.

When I asked the gate agent what happened, it turned out there was a ton of misconnects on the earlier DTW-LAX flight and the 3:20 only had a couple open coach seats left so the misconnects were directly placed in FC.

While waiting in the boarding area, I chatted up an older couple with their grandson and they confirmed the story when they said they misconnected and all three of them got bumped from coach to FC on my flight.

Times like these I wish Delta still had the old NWA platinum guarantee where you get an extra 1k miles when not upgraded .