Originally Posted by DELee

Ok. As a West Coaster, if I have to travel East and have to do stuff at work, I'm going to take the last flight out that gets me in the same day/ish and is _not_ a red eye. As an example, I'll take the ~4 PM Pacific LAX-IAD non-stop and get in around midnight Eastern. Between the 4 PM and the red eye flights starting around 9 PM Pacific, there's nothing on UA.

I personally would consider getting into the East Coast after midnight if UA offered a 5 or 6 PM (or later that's still not a red eye) but they don't.

On the return, I'm usually looking for the latest flight(s) out of the East Coast that will get me home by either midnight Pacific or perhaps 1 or 2 AM. With UA discontinuing their long time ~10 PM Eastern IAD-LAX non-stop, now I'm looking at either taking the latest non-stop flight out of IAD (~7 PM Eastern) or starting a series of maneuvers that require a tight connection either in EWR, ORD, IAH or DEN if I don't want to fight afternoon Beltway traffic to get to IAD (flying out of DCA or BWI instead).

I think UA is missing a bunch of loose change by not having a later bank of flights out of the East Coast for us (biz type) folks who are not wanting to fight evening traffic and would fly non-stops to the West Coast departing between 8 and 10 PM Eastern. Maybe because of MAX, they're now short mainline planes but they've pulled a whole lot of non-stop flights from IAD and left nothing in return.

David