flag stop - san-iad red eye makes "flag stop" in CLE
 

Tonights SAN-IAD redeye has become a SAN-CLE-IAD with CLE as a flagstop to let off 65 Cleveland passengers. (San Diego played Cleveland yesterday so there are passengers trying to get home.)

They've booked an extra 45 minutes into the flight schedule. Let's see if that holds.

Flight preparation... odd choice of coding.

Disrupting a redeye like this, >24h after the game ended, seems cruel. The morning or midday flight, ok weird but helps some pax, but shortening the redeye? Ouch.

How does something like this come about? Were 65 people bumped off a previous flight/delayed due to the game and missed their itinerary? Or did 65 folks just show up with a wad of cash and say "would you mind making a brief stop en route to let us off?"

Wow! I have never seen this before. 45 mins. Good luck with that.

I have never heard this term before -- flag stop? Like when someone flags a train or a bus to stop somewhere on demand?

Just because of the sheer number of people it becomes a real option?

Pretty sure the term refers primarily to train or bus stops where they only stop if they need to drop off/pick up passengers. Definitely unusual for a plane, there must have been some extenuating circumstances that lead to this decision.

Flag stop = where the bus or train is not scheduled to stop unless the station master puts out a flag to alert the driver, etc. to do so. Greyhound used to have them in small towns all the time. With UA, however, it's more like rewriting the timetable on the fly.

"Flagstop" is also official airline terminology. It rarely happens these days, because airplanes today have much longer range.

Look into airline route maps from the 1930s (and probably into the early 1950s), you will see that "direct flights" often stop at multiple cities down a line, just like railroads. I'm not sure how true this is: Dallas had always had more scheduled airline service than Fort Worth (this part is true), but airlines often made flag stops in Fort Worth to pick up and drop off passengers.

Into the late 1960s actually. As a kid I flew from Fort Smith to STL on a Frontier Convair 580 that must have stopped three or four times en route.

Obviously it'd dramatically increase elapsed time, but I wouldn't mind a flight that stopped at a few different airports to pick-up/drop-off a few along the way, provided that the turnaround times were relatively short and I didn't have to get off the plane. Take off/landing and taxiing are the best times to sight-see!

Makes sense to me
 

UA has 65 seats SAN-IAD, and that many pax which need to go to SAN-CLE. Not enough to justify an extra section (if you can somehow find the equipment and crew and the repositioning works). If you don't get the pax out, you have to find them all seats the next day and maybe put them all up in a hotel. So you put in a flag stop. Slight inconvenience for IAD pax, getting in at 6:30 instead of 5:30. Appease the IAD pax with drink chits or some miles or $25 vouchers for the inconvenience, you still save a lot versus a bunch of hotel rooms. Doubt that happened except for those who complained.

Important question: if you're on SAN-IAD, can you claim miles for SAN-CLE-IAD with 500 minimum for CLE-IAD?

Apparently the SAN-CLE route has been flown during the holidays as recently as 2013.

OP here...

CLE passengers were suppose to fly SAN-DEN-CLE. The SAN-XXX went mechanical and they would have missed their DEN-CLE. Instead, UA decided to hold them in SAN and put them on this SAN-CLE-IAD flight.

There was no indication that this extra leg was put on. The only way I realized was when I mentioned that the Dulles flight wasn't on the departure board.

Arrived into Dulles an hour late. We didn't refuel in Cleveland which was convenient. No word of compensation. I did pay $300 extra to fly the non-stop versus a connection on AA.

For a situation like this, my impression of UA's attitude is that it will not proactively offer compensation in order to minimize the amount paid out. Instead, it expects you, the pax, to initiate the email. I would make the same points as you have above, but from my experiences, I expect little more than ~ 5,000 bonus miles. YMMV and good luck.

i will say that is nice that they were able to do that. i get being inconvenienced by an hour, and hopefully nobody missed connections in IAD. if so, then yes, compensation should be awarded.

flag stop - san-iad red eye makes "flag stop" in CLE
 

I was wondering if a flight was delayed/canceled somewhere else.

I remember several years ago, maybe about 2007, I was on the last ORD-CVG of the night. I was on the blue line to the airport, and got an email about its cancelation. I called in for rebooking, and they put me on the AA flight instead. After landing, I was surprised to see a UA flight from ORD on the board landing a few minutes after mine. Apparently, they decided to have the DAY flight make a stop in CVG.