leisure warrior

It's 7pm and I'm sitting with my friend in the HNL UA Club, awaiting flight 148 (HNL-IAH) originally scheduled to depart in 10 minutes. It's not on time of course.

Yesterday (28 hours prior to departure) I got an e-mail stating that the flight was delayed until 1:25 am (~6 hours) due to delay of arriving aircraft. Odd, I thought, how do they know the arriving flight will be delayed so far in advance? So I did my homework and traced the origin of the flight (aircraft 3055) which was showing on time from Brazil (Rio, I think) to IAH that night, and then continuing IAH-HNL today - also on time.

Suspecting a glitch, I waited and traced the aircraft routing again today - finding that the IAH-HNL leg (149) left about on time and was expected into Honolulu about 15 minutes late. OK, it's going to be late, but how does a 15 minute late arrival translate into a 6 hour late departure? I called GS to see what was really happening, and was put on hold while the pleasant representative called HNL. The answer was that it had nothing to do with the arriving aircraft, but rather the crew that was to man the departing flight would "time out" before departure and so could not staff it?!?!

I guess that's a reasonable explantion, but given the official website explanation listed the extended departure delay to a VERY exaggerated claim of delayed inbound aircraft, I must question even that explanation. Nonetheless, it seems a complete operational failure that UA knew that there was a problem over 24 hours in advance (28 hours for my e-mail, so they knew even before that time!) yet were unable to find a crew to avoid a 6-hour late departure.

And to think that we flyers are so stupid not to realize the chicanery. As I was checking in at the UA Club, another gentleman was asking the same questions I had asked - having himself traced back the origin of the flight.

Very poor United - again...

murphyUA

I'd call it good planning to get the flight delay out to customers so far in advance. Flight crews don't grow on trees.

Also, a crew delay or a late arriving aircraft delay are both "UA's fault", so it really makes no difference.

gradsflyer

HNL doesn't have a full crew base, I think we do have some FAs based here, but not any pilots as far as I know so even with 24 hours it would be very difficult to get a new crew here in time. Since the delay wasn't weather related as mentioned it was UA's fault and you should indeed be due compensation of some sort if you ask.

skimthetrees

They couldn't fly out a crew from SFO or LAX? HNL is not that far from the mainland. With 28 hours notice I would think they could get some crew positioned. It is an operational failure.

mbarreto

So 28 hours out you received a notice that your flight would be delayed? Wow, that's good planning! ^ United!

No one likes delays, but it's better to learn about them in advance then when you get to the airport.

dsquared37

Every time I've been notified of a delay UA still asks me to be at the airport in case of an on time departure. So I'm wondering what the benefit of being notified is?

ORDnHKG

Maybe that's the case, since SFO/LAX-HNL is a 4.5-5 hours flight, that would explain OP's 6 hours delay flight. That sounds about right.

Wayside

He crew is a PMCO 757/767 crew. They are currently based in IAH and EWR. Short of re-routing a crew already on a trip, it is a bit of a logistical challenge to get pilots to HNL to work the flight back to IAH.

njcommodore

UA 145 (IAD-HNL) was cancelled on 3/26 which likely contributed to the crew being out of place.

Plane-is-home

I thought they grow on trees considering how many employees are still furloughed.

halls120

Of course, if management had put a priority on combining the sCO and sUA workforce, getting a crew over from SFO or LAX wouldn't have been as big a problem, would it?

villox

Sounds like the only failure here was miscoding the delay as awaiting aircraft as opposed to awaiting crew. Of course since the crew were likely being flown in they're probably both correct

CALMSP

dont know of any flight attendnats on furlough. sCO is hiring flight attendants.

Often1

Maybe it's better if carriers stop coding the reason for a delay and simply post "DELAY." I do want to know whether a delay is due to WX/ATC or to a unique issue such as MX. The former means broader problems while the latter is hopefully confined to a specific aircraft.

But, the fact is that the system works quite well. OP got notice at roughly the time that the delay became apparent. It would also be great if a crew were positioned to fly out to HNL so that the return could be minimal, but unless somebody here has access to UA's system and can say with certainty that there were a couple of spare pilots trained for the ETOPS 757 hanging around, the delay appears to have been minimized.

MrMarket

Am I completely off-base thinking that the OP has a point given that the delay out of IAH was minor? That means that the staffing for the flight more than a day out was guaranteed not to be able to turn on-time. In such a logistics intense business not being able to fix a pretty simple timing issue with greater than a days notice is fairly sad if you ask me. Beyond the OP's specific experience, to me it betrays a pretty stark lack of basic sophistication from an operations perspective. I highly doubt that the decision was a pro-active "this is the least worst outcome, delay the HNL flight 6 hours". I'm willing to be it was more "we have no ability to affect the outcome with only a full day's notice... I guess the HNL flight will just have to be dealyed 6 hours".

To me those are very different scenarios from an operational point of view. There are plenty of slim margin logistics intensive businesses that can do a lot better. Many of them unionized with their own esoteric work rules.