FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - India/Pakistan 2019 conflict impacts UA to India,DEL suspended 5 Apr 19 until 5 Sept?
Old Jul 15, 2019, 7:52 pm
  #177  
emcampbe
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Originally Posted by villox


Just a guess, but recently Pakistan extended the closure until July 26. It might mean that United feels they need a minimum of 3 months to restart operations. So I wouldn’t expect it before Oct 15. But who knows.
Also guesses on my end - they’d certainly need some lead time to get the flights back - scheduling crew, re-scheduling aircraft, etc. I’d think 3 months is way more time than needed - Id be surprised if they'd need longer than a month for that. Given this all just happened, maybe they’ll roll back the re-start dates to sometime in late Aug/early Sept.

the things that I could see that might be a factor in not doing that is getting the sales they need - given they’ve offered everyone refunds - many who probably have already taken advantage. If they can’t fill the planes again, they may not want to send them. Maybe they could allow those that we’re booked and refunded to get those seats back at the existing price if they re-instated some of the flights - I don’t know.

Other thing that could affect it is perhaps they have re-allocated aircraft schedules based on this and they may not want to go back on that. I was thinking maybe some of the aircraft are backfilling for some of the MAX cancels, though it’s rare to see the ex-CO 777s running domestically - I don’t think I ever have. However, maybe they’ve now scheduled earlier maintenance / Polaris mods with the extra frames.
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