Originally Posted by
764toHI
Are the segment runners mostly expats or locals?
Locals. I doubt the ground crew at UCB speaks much English if at all but it's not important, they just do a ID check and print out boarding passes.
There used to be a similar route by SC ("Shandong Airlines", which accrues to CA, but nothing else, so it's no use to me) that does an occasional PEK-UCB-INC-UCB-PEK 4-segment run every day, leaving early in the morning and coming back late afternoon. Lots of FFs "follow the plane" and do the daily rotation with the crew, from what I have heard. 4 segments in F would yield 12 qualifying segments on CA (for ~$600), so *G can be obtained in a weekend or two. It has been discontinued though. But it does show that UCB is a magical segment run airport for frequent flyers around here... I hear in the early years things were much harsher and some were stuck by the check-in deadline enforcement, but nowadays everyone's on it so there's even time to pop out for a quick smoke, they'll wait.