Yeah, what goodeats21 said. Great post, thank you.

Great post, FAB, thank you.

Houston can be really bad this time of year. In May I flew DEN-IAH and the captain ordered the flight attendants to their seats about 10 minutes before landing. The FAs were not able to to the seatbelt fastened/upright seatback walkthrough. They went on the PA system and said we were on the "honor system" and if the person sitting next to you was asleep, please wake them up and ask they fasten their seat belt and put their seat on the upright position. I thought it was kind of funny.

This is a two-way street. The regional has no obligation to wait if your mainline flight is delayed.

The mainline. You bought the ticket with them. They are the ones contractually obligated to get you to your destination.

Regionals get paid by the flight. If they don't operate, they don't get paid. They also have to operate within the guidelines of what they major has provided. So, if the major says, "You're going to take a 3 hour flow delay so that I can get my flight in on-time," then you do it. If a flight crew ultimately ends up timing out because of it, and those passengers get stranded, then unfortunately, the only one at fault is the major.

In relation to the main topic of MX, the mainline is aware that MX will and does happen, regardless of who operates the plane. The obligation is still on the mainline to get you from point A to B. Here in the U.S., there's several options to achieve this goal. I mean, you could be like that one UA flight in Europe a couple months ago that ended up being delayed on MX for a few days, with no recourse.

FWIW, I've had incidents on DL where a Connection carrier has had an issue, and the meal/hotel vouchers I've been issued had instructions to send them to X carrier, not DL. It's been a couple years since I've gotten a voucher like that, though.

Yup, that's how DL rolls. Not sure how UA accounts for it behind the scenes, but I took a DL VDB the other day due to INOP seats on the RJ. Sure enough, that's faultable, and the DL mainline agent printed the hotel and food vouchers billable to Compass.

Indeed, there are situations where that's appropriate. I've never even seen a voucher, let alone what to do with one, so I'd only be guessing as to how/why/when you'd get one. I'm mainly focused on operational aspects.

I saw the same thing last month on SkyWest operating as DL. I looked up the below info about OO:

UA - 1,018 UA flts a day on an RJ flying OO. Are you serious? That's fine if the flts were 1 to 1-1/2 (maybe even 2) hours, but come on.

So what are the "fall below certain performance levels for a period of three consecutive months".

If these numbers meet UA's standards - those levels are set too low. Come on UA.

You'd have know what standards they are looking for, and why they are like that. With hubs like SFO and ORD, who constantly see delays, I see no reason why they wouldn't give some relief. That said, from the data I can see, though, It's pretty bad when DLC's worst performance average is still higher than UA mainline's best.

With a mechanical cancellation and numerous non-weather delays, some long delays, from personal experience and from flight status notices in the last couple months, I've also been wondering if there's an operation/communication/organization melt-down at United.

I am looking at other airline options.

BOLD = mine

I asked about which airline is responsible because last week I had 2 UX problems between SBN and ORD + return.

On a regular day UA has 5 round trips between SBN - ORD. The problem is that the flights are split between 2 different regionals (SkyWest & ??) and the ground/gate staff is contracted to a different airline (Envoy / AA - I think).

For the past two weeks the UX schedules at ORD & other hubs have been a mess (weather, crews timing out, rest, in the wrong city, etc.).

So from what I understand, when UX strands passengers at a hub or at the spoke airport - especially late at night, it is UA that pays and is responsible for re booking.

No wonder UA is losing money!

There's a lot of factors that can lead to an approach that seems "fasther than normal" coming in. It may be real or perceived. However, in your case: the 737-900 has the same wing area as a 737-800, but more weight because of the longer fuselage. Thus to provide the same amount of lift (lift is exponentially related to airspeed), the 737-900 has to fly at a higher airspeed than a 737-800 or an aircraft with a similar weight to wing-area ratio, so depending on what you're used to flying, a 737-900 may feel faster - because it is faster - if you fly in other aircraft types much more frequently.

A high cross-wind can result in a faster approach as well. The tail/rudder can only provide so much yaw-moment at the regular approach speed, so the way to make the tail/rudder more powerful to be able to counter-act the cross-wind is to fly faster.

A rough landing can be because of a wet runway. In a nutshell, you "slam" the aircraft into the runway to transfer the energy of the plane to the ground.

If the aircraft is coming in fast for one or some of the above reasons, it is likely going to be a rough-landing. A "greaser" would actually be worse in those situations.