Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
Right, I thought it was a very weird way of wording this. What other US carrier is even offering any international scheduled service from Houston, other than Southwest (from Hobby)? And they are probably not going to fly their 737s to Japan any time soon.
It's like the announcement for the first ever flight on a US carrier from the mainland to Manila. Except that United themselves flew the very same route, SFO-MNL, in the late 90s and discontinued it when the Asian currency crisis hit.
There are not many, if any, people in management at UA who have been around UA a long time. A UA management employee recently said to me how they continue to break new ground, even flying twice daily to TPE and ICN. I explained that for a long time UA flew twice daily to TPE, a non-stop to SFO and a connection via NRT (and briefly NGO in place of NRT). ICN was 2-3X daily, non-stop to SFO and 1-2X daily to NRT. That ground, too, had already been broken.
Maybe not knowing their past allows them to keep an open mind to future opportunities as they look to "break new ground". Anyway, it is working for them. Take the wording of all these announcements with a grain of salt.