mecabq

This is a non sequitur. There may be "a market," but UA has to consider many factors, principally the costs and benefits of different possible mixes of classes of service, and also brand positioning of the airline, and alternative uses of the equipment. They wouldn't ditch F just for fun.

There are analysts looking at these things all the time within the company; of course they make mistakes, in the sense of decisions that they later reverse, but that does not mean ipso facto that the decisions were not rational given information and constraints at the time.

I also don't understand what's inherently worse about a 737 experience than a 757, especially given the poor condition of many (pre-UA) aircraft. I also agree that any service is better than no service, and more frequencies are better, on routes that I would like to fly.

lhrsfo

Clearly UA is positioning itself internationally as the cheap airline on the route - captive customers and bottom-fishers only. As such, UA needs much less capacity on any international route than its competitors, hence the 757. Personally, I don't mind the 757 TATL (even though it flies significantly more slowly than BA's and VS's planes, but then I fly from LHR which doesn't have the range issues. But, however loyal its captive customers are, arriving 3 or 4 hours late consistently because of fuel stops will lose even its core base of customers.

chris1979

Given financials / economics are a main driver behind decisions, am wondering how much such an unplanned stop to get extra fuel costs / wipes out in terms of route profit?

I've seen some numbers before but assume that there's charge for landing, the extra fuel itself, missed connection costs, a/c and crew working longer / not being able to do another run, etc,

Thus wondering if an unscheduled stop says wipes out the profit for such a route for a few days / a week (making this up - not suggesting it)? So if there were one once a month, it would reduce profitability by 25% or so and if it happened once a week, it would turn the route into loss-making (generally assuming average / normal loads)?

TWA Fan 1

There is one more aspect to the economics of the situation, namely what planes UA has available to fly TATL.

CO had a large fleet of business class-equipped 752's and used them to fly TATL, primarily on "long-thin" routes.

But ultimately, the decision to fly a 752 IAD-CDG is not purely based on the profitability of this route (it's likely the route could be profitable with a larger a/c), it's based on UA's calculation of where a bigger plane (such as a 763) might be more profitable.

In some respects, that's fair enough, but that doesn't change the fact that, under certain weather conditions, the 752 will require a fuel stop on certain routes, which is an inconvenience for passengers and adds cost to the airline.

In fact, a few years ago, CO issued an infamous memo to pilots which scolded them for making "unnecessary" fuel stops on westbound 752 flights, hinting that such stops would impact the pilot's profit sharing, and implied that the company was encouraging the pilots to declare fuel emergencies at EWR so as to skip the landing queue.

And, in fact, an unusually high number of these fuel emergencies had been declared by westbound TATL 752's landing at EWR.

The pilots' union leaked the memo and an investigation was conducted by Frank Lautenberg which revealed that CO's own Chief Certificate Officer believed it was imprudent to fly 752's on the longer TATL routes.

At least now, the pilots do not feel pressured to continue flying without refueling.

tuolumne

And there it is right here.

CO had a shortage of international capacity, and as such, started poaching the pmUA widebody lift almost immediately for their own routes which were undoubtedly underserved. That's what happens when you expand beyond your means and don't keep up with an appropriate fleet, or in other words, what happens when you cant see beyond the short term and place profits ahead of all else. Typical CO, not surprising.

spin88

You are right. Its not an emotional decision. PMCO was a small company, and it had a certain number of captive elites, it did not have enough reach to fly certain routes with a wide body and it also did not have/buy the wide bodies to do routes that it could have done with widebodies as its fleet planning did not anticipate the spike in overseas lift that was needed. As such it stuck 752s on the routes and since they were not subject to COMPETITION they were able to do a nitch product. However, in doing so CO passed up much high value traffic that went to other airlines not flying 752s to main (not secondary) cities.

With the merger they immediately upgaged the flights using PMUA equipment, which is what they should have done before, just CO had done a piss poor job of fleet planning (inefficient 762s, now sent off to the desert and few larger 764s, no 763s)

The problem was that they then tried to use 752s to replace the UA AC they had pulled. They lost lots of corporate traffic, and also lost the US GOV contract on certain routes. They faced competition out of IAD.

They did not plan to give up what they gave up in business (much like they did not intent to take the post 3/3 hammering they have taken at LAX, and to a lesser degree ORD and SFO with corporate accounts and high value fliers bailing).

It was a bad business decision, and like a lot of the cross-fleeting ended up being a bad operational decision. It hurt the brand and hurt business unrelated to this route. Revenue performance is not up, its in the toilet.

That you can't see that says a lot.

UA had been barely competing on the PS routes, and had clearly let product quality slide. That escalated post the merger, the soft product in C/F went down hill as did maintenance. Part of this was that the new CO management wanted to kill PS. Having looked at the books they were convinced not to do it, but it took a while and things festered. I recall one discussion with a CO exec who expressed amazement at the number of premium fares on UA, the CO folks had never seen it, no one was paying full F on CO.

I think that the CO folks were unused to competition, and the idea of a F product (and having to spend the money) did not appeal to them. I think that they also saw AA in distress, and nothing else on the route.

Today DL has a much better transcon product that UA BF (and has added SEA to the mix), and AA is doing new planes with F/C, and VX has joined the fray. My guess is that UA is giving up traffic, and of the type they will regret over time.

hobo13

Kind of like if SkyWest all of a sudden decided they were going to add Hawaii service...

1KPath

[QUOTE=uastarflyer;20087724
So lemme ask you this: Were they misguided when they made the switch or misguided on the reversal? Or were they genius both times? [/QUOTE]


A very good question! Our organization was one that suffered with the Gander(and others) 1-stops last winter to CDG...seventeen flights and 53 employees in F and C diverted, delayed and poorly treated with the "new" UA IRROPS policies.

We met with senior UA executives on three occasions concerning the situation...The first time they apologized but indicated that the choice of the 757 was correct! In the second meeting (necessitated by our Governor General being stranded in Gander for two days!!) the UA VP sent to soothe our feelings indicated that there was a shortage of Int'l aircraft on some sCO routes so a decision was made and it was, perhaps, short sighted...and that when the 787 came online, things would improve tremendously. It was at this point that we were able to get a waiver from the Feds from flying US flag carriers on this route (due to the unreliability of UA per the documentation submitted)...and we started flying AF. A month later, UA sent two senior VPs to meet with and lure us back...offering us extensive "personal benefits"...and admitting that the choice of the 757 on the IAD-CDG route was short sighted and that the decision process of matching aircraft types to routes was in the process of being changed!

SIGH! All I can say is that AF has been very good to us...and that UA has lost us (and any number of our "friendly" competitors) on this and many other routes!...and as for our Governor General, his personal policy is "anyone but United!"

scosprey

Ok, I'll bite. What's a Chief Certificate Officer? Someone under Fred C. Abbott, SVP Flight Operations?

andrewwm

Yeah because it was totally CO's fault that the 787 program was delayed 4 years

Moreover, the IAD-CDG flight wasn't switched because of fuel stops (other routes had much higher divert rates) but because pax didn't like the narrowbody.

And additionally, do you have the same comment about AA? In the last 5 years they converted a number of 757s to TATL configuration - are they, as you put it "place[ing] profits ahead of all else. Typical [AA], not surprising."

cv11nyc

I'd like to know as well. As a union member in said pilot group I certainly do not recall any admission of the 757 being the wrong type from any company rep such as he claims. The memo was leaked to the press, because a low level VP wanted to express the company's desire for captain's to not carry extra fuel.

thomwithanh

Didn't somebody mention on here a few months ago that their TATL flight ex-EWR was listed as a Q400? Turned out the flight on was listed on .bomb with the wrong equipment code but IIRC a few of us were throwing around the idea that it could be a sign of things to come.

BTW... the CR7 can almost make it from California to Hawaii.

UA-NYC

Yes, AA flies some 57s to 2nd tier markets, just like UA. The difference is that you won't see them on NYC-LHR and other prime routes, nor will you see them running them at the operational limit CO-style.

thomwithanh

They're used on truly "thin" routes, such as JFK-MAN.

njcommodore

The government contracts have nothing to do with the 757 diversion issue. As someone pointed out up thread there was a waiver granted for foreign flag carriers, but UA didn't lose any gov contracts over it.