cyberjet

HAL 9000 reports that it has picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit: it's scheduled to fail in 72 hours.

califcoast

Thanks for the morning chuckle

alenguy

I had a similar situation occur. The 5:15am AUS-IAH flight on 6/24 was canceled 5 days out. The original routing was AUS-IAH-LAX-HNL and got rebooked automatically on AUS-SFO-HNL. Not bad, but I called and got them to change it for free to AUS-IAH-HNL so I could take advantage of the 777 flight. All flights and corresponding changes in first...

I'm also curious to know what happened to the plane so far out...

exerda

Comparing UA IT to HAL 9000 is an insult to HAL.

channa

This is an excellent outcome. This route is served by UA, DL, AS and VX.

If you don't like what UA put you on, ask for DL or AS, and take that instead if the have a comparable flight to what you booked. Or if fares are reasonable, refund your ticket and buy what you want.

But to answer your question, it's very likely they have some out of service planes and figured they'd minimize inconvenience by whacking a flight with a light load and shuffle their schedule around a bit. Some highly competitive routes have excess capacity on them (this is one of them) and are more likely to fall victim to load-based cancellations than others.

cyberjet

For obvious reasons, an EVA from the aircraft is HIGHLY discouraged.

J.Edward

Yesterday I got a heads up from United Tripit Pro alerting me my late SFO > IAH flight (the 7pm-ish departure) was canceled three days in advance due to "operational difficulties".

Mister Nice

Sounds like either 1. Not enough in service airplanes to fly the schedule
or 2. A lack of available crew time as we approach the end of the month

REPUBLIC757

This happened to me in January when I was supposed to fly LAX-IAH-ATL. IAH-ATL was cancelled for the same excuse "operational/weather in our network" but there was no weather in either IAH or ATL, but rather a blizzard in EWR.

After several phone calls, they put me on LAX-SFO-ATL. There were hardly any seats available on that particular day.

dmodemd

Be careful, allow a little time for it to settle. I once got an alert the night before for an afternoon SEA-IAH flight to be delayed 6 hours for "maintenance". The inbound aircraft showed no delay. SEA isn't exactly a maintenance base. I rebooked to another flight and the next morning I double checked and the original flight had returned to on-time status so I was able to switch back (and get back my F upgrade).

I spoke to others on the flight and they all got the same alert. Some acted on it and some held their fire.

I don't know if it is due to alerts being sent out on temporary crew/aircraft re-allocation or are real issues. It is hard to make the call to switch flights while you still can or stand pat and hope it gets reinstated... but by that time your options may have evaporated.

Loren Pechtel

Even if we are flying Eva Air??

PDXbased1K

I was booked on UA 1964 on Sunday 6/28 SFO-SEA connecting onto LH to Frankfurt. Of course this cancellation blew that connection and now I've been rebooked on the UA flight from SFO-FRA. I generally try to avoid UA at all costs so this is truly a bummer. Also, our connection in FRA to Aegean went from 2.5 hours to 1:10. Lets see if UA can actually operate a flight on time.

As an aside when I called regarding the cancellation email I received the agent argued with me for about 5 minute that the flight was NOT cancelled. Only after checking with her "support desk" did she recognize the flight cancellation and graciously offer to waive the change fee for new flights.

I was so concerned with finding new flights that would make our Aegean connection that I didn't even ask the agent why it was cancelled (to be honest nothing really surprises me with these guys anymore. I did tweet United and received the following curt response though...

Sorry about that. We are taking out certain aircraft that need a full overhaul which takes 7-9 days to complete.

This airline is just one operational disaster.

kirkwoodj

Great minds think alike ^^

BearX220

I would not call that a very respectful response. How dare your booked travel plans interfere with our overhaul schedule.

mduell

You just have to wear the space suit: