jp12687

So I was reading that UA has fallen in "quality" mostly based on on-time statistics.

To me this is something UA could fix. How often I see a plane that is supposed to turn around in 45-50min including a full re-cater, new crew, cleaning, etc.

Its just not realistic. Especially because often boarding is supposed to start 15-20min after the plane arrives. They are setting them selves up for failure and just dont understand why.

jsloan

Keep in mind, UA’s trying to meet a schedule that was expected to have about 30 additional narrowbody planes by now. (The 737MAX were expected to be delivered throughout 2019 and continuing into 2020, IIRC). They’ve cancelled relatively few flights and are trying to make up for those planes by turning others more frequently.

It is absolutely realistic to turn a 737 in 50 minutes, anyway. I’ve seen it done many times. However, it doesn’t leave much accounting for a delayed inbound, so you do end up with cascading delays.

CO_Nonrev_elite

Agreed, Southwest is turning 737’s in a lot less than that hundreds of times per day

jp12687

they must not have the horrid catering scheduling ability UA has. Never ready and always takes forever

JimInOhio

UA is worlds better than AC in this regard. They try to turn planes in 30 minutes and often don't have padded schedules to go along with it. That said, UA often schedules boarding for a 739 at T-40 (or is it -45?). They can't disembark and clean an aircraft in the remaining 10 minutes.

jp12687

exactly and by the time they actually start to board it takes them much longer and its a delayed flight.

aacharya

Have you flown WN?

lhrsfo

EZ and FR manage to do 30 minutes regularly for their 737/320s at the outstations. Of course, they have a much more efficient boarding system and they double cater the flights.

WineCountryUA

Catering pretzels is a lot easier.

mctaste

southwest has catering?

BB2220

The drop in on time has corresponded with the roll out of connection saver. I’m sure UA will take a 5% hit in one time to save tens of thousands of connections. I don’t think the decrease is due to any other fundamental operational changes.

jsloan

That doesn’t even come close to making sense. 5 basis points is a huge amount of change.

ConnectionSaver was billed as program that would be used on the last flight of the day, when it would not delay the on-time arrival of the connecting flight. Keep in mind, in airline parlance, “on-time” means “arriving no more than 14 minutes past the scheduled arrival time.” People would be up in arms if ConnectionSaver were routinely delaying a plane full of people 15 minutes or more. And when you consider that half of all flights are inbound to hubs (no connection saver), and many aren’t the last flight of the day — the only way for this to be accurate would be if UA were holding nearly every single flight in the late banks by 10-15 minutes. It’s just not reasonable.

rj_flyer

Personally I could care less how late we leave as long as we arrive on-time. That said, I have seen this issue and I fly at least 4 times a week though all of the hubs except for SFO.

I also routinely take last flight outs and we’re on time, I think that during peak periods, Monday morning and Thursday afternoons, things do slow down but they do get things back on track by the end of the day with shortcuts and pushing the throttles up a notch.

milepig

In all fairness, neither does UA for a typical Southwest length flight.

RoyalFlush

They call it provisioning. Ice, sodas, water, beer, wine, liquors, snacks like pretzels etc. It's all in-house.
Some of my most recent WN sectors include BWI/LAX and DEN/FLL.

Today's Southwest is hardly the Southwest from 2010, 2005, 1995 etc.