When a thread is based mainly on one-off anecdotes, as opposed to what people experience most of the time, then it will give a far more exaggerated impression of variance than truly exists. If we look at the experience of the majority of passengers on the majority of flights UA takes everyday I think we will kind much less variance than is suggested in this thread, and that the product UA delivers is by and large relatively constant across the system in this regard.

This thread is based more on reporting of outlier events, so, by definition, cannot give an accurate perception of the airline on a whole. Flyertalk by its very nature consists of people who fly a lot and this in their travels they necessarily will encounter atypical events - we can all tell stories about such events we witnessed on an airplane but doesn't mean they are common or indeed routine. If this thread reported what each of us experienced with regard to service stops for turbulence on our last five flights it would be very boring indeed and would highlight that a lot of this discussion is much ado about something that occurs rather infrequently (when the denominator is all UA flights).