I'm not about to figure it out myself but aren't there tens of millions of MP members out there? So say if a flight has 200 people are 100 are MP members. So 5K miles x 100 people = 500,000 miles. And that's just on one delayed flight.

Yikes, UA could be giving out millions of miles every day and even if only 25% of those miles are redeemed, it's a huge future liability.

Then again if they only gave 1Ks on the flight the 5K, then it's fairly minimal. My wife is a 1P but she was on an award tkt and got nothing.