<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by MBS PremExec:
Checking the current flight schedule from my home, MBS (Saginaw) to ORD, I see the following (Randomly chose May 29, 3 of 5 flights for the day):
UA 7467 Dep 6:00a, Arr 6:05a (1 hour 5 mins)
UA 7269 Dep 9:15a, Arr 9:15a (1 hour even)
UA 7255 Dep 7:40p, Arr 7:45p (1 hour 5 mins)
The other 2 MBS-ORD are about the same, as are the eastbound ORD-MBS flights, somewhere between 1:00 and 1:07.
The schedule loaded for summer shows the following (Aug 29, 3 of 5 daily flights, MBS-ORD):
UA 7269 Dep 10:40a Arr 11:10a (1 hour 20 mins)
UA 7525 Dep 1:31p Arr 1:47p (1 hour 16 mins)
UA 7255 Dep 6:19p Arr 6:55p (1 hour 36 mins)
The actual airtime on this 222 mile route runs between 32-38 minutes (keep in mind all of the above reflect a 1 hour time difference between MBS and ORD). When this was a mainline UA route less than a year ago, it was never scheduled more than 1:02 minutes for as long as I can remember. I verified by phone reservations that these are still non-stop flights.
I see this as one thing by ACA and United...These flights run so notoriously late that they are attempting to become heroes when they arrive as early as an hour ahead of time during smooth operations--I have seen a gate-to-gate flight of 40 mins before. Is this just a complete farce by ACA/UX or is it just me? I know that they are less than confident in the performance of ACA, but disallow me to make tighter connections (sometimes a blessing, I know) by scheduling flights up to 50% longer than they realistically should be? Can't they just schedule more ground time between flights and not have me wasting even more of my time?
This just seems very odd, and not right somehow.</font>
ORD doesn't have a bank structure like they do at IAD, which means you can wait a long time for connecting flights or that the connecting flights don't time very well like they do at IAD. Because gate space is insufficient, aircraft are scheduled to come in, turn, and leave all day long, resulting in several small pushes of 5 to 10 aircraft. You see a nasty padding on that last flight because of congestion. Once I had the opportunity to speak to a ramp controller that coordinates the departing and arriving flights on the F and G concourses. ACA has one of their larger pushes at 7pm consisting of 7 departures. Air Wisky and Eagle on the G concourse all have pushes at 7pm, making that the busiest part of the day on the ramp. In order to compensate for the fact the plane may push out or arrive on time but then have trouble getting to the gate (or "in") on time, they've got to have some way of compensating for that strong possibility of a delay. Where you complain that you can't book a tight connection (you really shouldn't at ORD anyway) others would then complain that if the company knew the ramp got congested a lot, why are they allowing tight connections people have a strong chance of missing?