AVIZ

Per UA flight 84 scheduled for this afternoon is delayed until 5:45 AM tomorrow (Sunday), due to local curfew. The twitter video tells a different story, gate agent states “Pilots are refusing to fly”

There are rockets hitting Southern Israel but that’s typically something UA operations would rule on. Seems odd for a pilot to wait until boarding to decide that he/she don’t want to fly to that region. Certainly some questions here that need to be answered.

Lux Flyer

Pilots can refuse for multiple reasons that are almost never nefarious, as much as the person posting to twitter wants to try and make it out to be. If a pilots refusing a departure it's usually out of a safety interst or preventing further disservice to passengers . Frequently happens when they find a mechanical issue during their preflight checks (which are still ongoing even when boarding is happening), or in this case there appears (based on the delay notificaion) to have been a high probability concern given the ongoing ground/airspace congestion in EWR that they wouldn't actually get off in time to meet TLV curfew restrictions that could be imposed, in which case they would either be diverting enroute (yuck), or have a tarmac delay to just return to the gate when it becomes too late to take off (yuck). Both of which are a worse disservice then refusing the departure during the boarding process.

Edit to also add: might be poor form for them to have announced it as a refusal, since that is going to be interpreted differently to the general public than the airline/pilots/dispatch. General public hears refusal and takes it as "pilots just don't want to do it" or are being subordinate, whereas pilots use that term to send a clear message to dispatch that they don't feel it is appropriate to operate the flight as scheduled and will be hashing out the exact details with them. Frequently see it shown around when maintenance wants to defer something, but pilots don't feel it is safe to operate with that maintenance deferral so they "refuse" the aircraft.

bmwe92fan

Thank goodness UA "voluntarily" reduced their flights to EWR -- but clearly it hasn't been enough to help out the 2 flights a day to Tel Aviv.... Weather was not an issue today -- just poor operations.... OP forgot to mention that the plane for a 4:25pm departure arrived over 2 hours late -- from Athens -- at 6:15pm in another terminal -- or perhaps that was their attempt to rescue the flight? Either way UA messed up and gate staff blames the pilots -- Typical EWR....

clubord

Very well said.

It's the exact same pilots that are taking this flight out in the morning, they are not refusing to fly.

AVIZ

How would you know that it’s the same pilots ?

Regarding curfew issues, 84 lands mid morning. 90 which took off on time lands in the late afternoon.

I’m not pointing fingers (yet) but something does not add up.

Lux Flyer

Presumably they're either on the flight, or like a handful of people here know someone at the airline who can provide that information.

Your right, the thing that doens't add up is that the delay notification story only tells the most recent reason for the change in flight time. What is missing is that the initial updated departure time they had input was 7am (this was loaded in the system for ~5 minutes) which gave a new estimated arrival time of around 12:30am ~30 mins before the landing curfew would take effect, given that small window they rolled the delay back to a 5:45am departure to avoid cutting it so close to the landing curfew. The side effect being, the delay notification message only sees that a change was made to avoid a curfew - not the original reason for the delay.

As for the original delay, it appears there was concern over the situation in Israel around the time of departure given the increased rocket activity, and a discussion occurred between the security department, operations and the pilots about whether it was safe to operate/depart the flight and they all agreed it would be prudent to delay the departure while they monitored how things developed in the coming hours. Clearly United felt more comfortable with things by later that night as they released the 11pm departure from EWR, but apparently the "refusal" to depart while there were safety concerns being discussed just got translated to "refusal by pilots"

So in response to the original part of the post, "There are rockets hitting Southern Israel but that’s typically something UA operations would rule on".

Sounds like UA operations did make the decision, and the gate agent used a poor choice of words to describe the discussions that were ongoing behind the scenes (probably as they didn't have any further insight at the point they made the announcement either).

Ghoulish

Please get to the point of whatever it is you're implying.

If not for a legitimate reason, security or mechanical, than what?

awayIgo

I am writing from Israel! There is NO curfew in Israel. The airport is open and functioning. The pilots appear to have had their own agenda. Creating a blaming a “ curfew” means United has no responsibility to the passengers. This should be a class action suit for due compensation.

Ghoulish

What agenda? The desire not to carry passengers into a unstable situation with rocket filled skies? Lack of confidence in equipment condition? Refusal to accept overtime?

Sue?

Ok, time to stop being so obtuse, say what you mean.

LarryJ

Looks like there was a mechanical issue that resulted in an aircraft swap which initially delayed the flight. The decision to delay to the next morning would have been made by the Captain, Dispatch, and Corporate Security, likely on a three-way call.

I don't fly to TLV so am not familiar with any landing curfews that the airport may have.

HNLbasedFlyer

So - no conspiracy theory?

Ghoulish

Thanks for clearing that up Larry.

In the absence of facts, some seemed to be fine slandering the crew while quickly reaching for that most powerful status of all, victimhood.

dblumenhoff

There is a regularly scheduled arrival from WAW that is scheduled to arrive at 3am, so it would surprise me if there is a curfew.

Perhaps they didn't want to fly on Tisha b'av (Jewish fast day and day of general mourning last night and today)

clubord

I'm a pilot for United and have access to information internally that the public does not. After seeing the formation of this thread, something just didn't add up to me as well so I spent a minute looking into it.

As mentioned upstream, there was an initial delay, tail swap, and a maintenance item that popped up causing cascading delays. Without getting into the minutiae, a more realistic headline for this situation would be "Pilots refuse an AIRCRAFT to fly." Like I mentioned before, it is still the same flight crew as yesterday operating this flight. Whatever MX issue and/or airspace constraint was resolved and the aircraft is currently on its way to TLV.

I too am unaware of any curfew going into TLV but I don't think its out of the realm of a possible temporary airspace restriction being imposed by the government considering there were active military operations and rocket launches being conducted near Gaza, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Simply put, there's no "conspiracy" or willful injustice being done by the crew and this situation is not nearly as exciting as the keyboard warriors on Twitter or this site may infer.

Allan38103

Are you saying that sometimes/often FT readers get their facts wrong and post senseless opinions based on false information? I’m shocked.