Originally Posted by
Toronto1970
I felt that UA did a really good job handling a delay of last night's red-eye SFO-YYZ.
Flight was scheduled to leave at11pm. Captain came off the plane around 10:20 and announced to the boarding area that upon inspection of the plane, they found that there had been a bird hit and the plane would have to be taken out of service and they were looking for another plane to take us. (Most of the sentiment around the gate area was "poor bird")
Within 20 minutes, they had found another plane for us, and directed us to the new gate. New departure time was now midnight. United brought carts of snacks and water to the new gate for the delay (remember, we are only talking a 1 hour delay here).
And through this UA sent very descriptive texts about the delay (even mentioning the "engine issue caused by a bird strike".)
Bravo to United for handling this really well.
Other than maybe the snacks, I would chalk this up to pure luck that (1) there was another plane available that could be used instead and (2) it made sense from an overall system standpoint to repurpose that plane for this flight and not some other (such as luck that there were no other flights with broken planes with higher system priority).
Other than those elements of good fortune, this same exact scenario with United identically following exactly the same protocols and procedures would have ended up in a UNITED IS HORRIBLE I'M WRITING MY SENATOR threads.