I have a flight on Turkish (booked with UA miles) leaving IAH at 8:55pm on a Saturday in August. My current plan is to take a positioning flight on Southwest from PDX to HOU, which lands at 2pm. That's a 7-hour buffer. Will take Uber from HOU to IAH. Some people have suggested I use UA for my positioning flight, since I'd have a little more leverage over the whole itinerary if anything goes wrong. Not sure how true that is. I'm looking at the WN flight because of timing and affordability, mainly. But there are other options. I haven't done a positioning fight for an int'l departure before, so I welcome additional thoughts/advice.