Originally Posted by
djohannw
I am traveling with United today from Boston to Newark, and when I checked in online with Lufthansa yesterday, the system spit out only my boarding pass with sequence number 4. For my traveling-companion no boarding-pass fopr that segment came out, so we had to wait for physical checkin today to get her boarding pass. Much to my surprise the that one showed sequence number 189 - on a plane that seats 120 people.
Can this really be true that the flight has almost 70 more people booked and checked in than there are seats, or has this number just no meaning vs. an almost accurate headcount at time of checking in that it has with Lufthansa? Flight shows "Full" on united.com in both classes, and Y1 on Expertflyer.
"Direct flights" share a sequence number for every operation of the flight on the same day. My guess is that your BOS-EWR shares a flight number with some other flight on the same day.
UA does not have enough flight numbers for all its daily flights to have a consistent, unique number, so they re-use and re-shuffle a lot of flight numbers daily — today's BOS-EWR may also be today's EWR-CLE or EWR-MCO or EWR-LAS or DEN-BZN…
Your "189" means that you are the 189th person to check in for any UA flight which operates today which has the same flight number as your BOS-EWR.
EDIT: Based on the details you have posted (BOS-EWR, today, A319, sold full or oversold) I'm guessing the flight in question is UA654, which is F1 C1 A1 D1 Z1 P1 Y0 B0 M0 E0 U0 H0 Q0 V0 W0 S0 T0 L0 K0 G0 N0 . This flight doesn't have any other direct segments on 16 Jan. I have NO EXPLANATION for you as to why you are the 189th person to check in for this flight. Yes, an A319 only holds about 120 people.
The only other fact I can offer you is that if you cancel your check-in and re-check-in, you get a new sequence number. So if there were some 70 aborted/cancelled/re-run check ins, that would explain the behavior you're seeing here; but why someone would offload the entire plane and re-check-them-in, I do not know.