Originally Posted by
mre5765
But that's not the weird part. When we get there, a gate change is announced for the SFO to SEA flight. The gate is moved from the gate X, the gate our SJC to DEN flight is going out of, to gate Y, the gate our SJC to DEN flight arrived at. In other words, the Denver passengers got the good plane, and the Seattle passengers got the plane that was going to fly low over the Pacific coast (presumably a long ways away from all those tall dormant volcanos that line the coast).
I had a similar issue happen to me on a FLL-DEN flight. We had to wait for the inbound equipment for FLL-ORD, and the plane scheduled to fly FLL-DEN flew FLL-ORD.
The reason as it was explained to us was due to the elevation and atmospheric conditions in Denver, our captain was not willing to fly with a particular deferred maintenance issue on the original FLL-DEN plane.
I don't know enough about planes to provide more specifics, but just because a plane isn't fit to fly a certain route doesn't mean it can't be safely deployed on another. Your example shows that GAs need to be particularly sensitive when explaining these kinds of issues.