cyberjet

A retired 747 could taxi back and forth to connect the gates airside in style.

username

They can always re-hub NRT until SFO gets enough gates It is kind of crazy to be running into this at their prime Pacific Gateway that is strategically important to them.

LarryJ

But you'd have to stow everything and sit down. You can stand on a bus!

emcampbe

It happens at other airports, though. Seen it at EWR for sure. Sometimes, my departures have been ontime despite the inbound arriving in B. Not every flight has a tight turn.

Being in the midwest with most of my travel domestic, I don't connect in SFO much, but most of my ORD/IAH/DEN mainline connections this year have had me on aircraft that have had turns of 2+ hours. My last trip was to SFO, and my outbound plane from SFO also was on the ground for 2 hours, IIRC.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

Just tow it back and forth. Remove the wings, convert the forward main deck to a UC and the upper deck to a Polaris lounge. West Coast Moon buggy.

nnn

And surely we would have threads on FT complaining about the boarding order.

spin88

and the "coffin" sUA 2-4-2 J seats...

gengar

EDIT: Sorry, posted incorrect info.

PenaltyBox

I would put all the LAX flights in A for several reasons.

1. You could have dedicated LAX-only gates grouped next to each other making it more efficient to accommodate any stand-bys or IRROP issues.
2. The competitive LAX market would have very short taxi times to get to the departure runway (1L/R 90% of the time) More ontime/early LAX arrivals.
3. LAX probably has the lowest percentage of domestic connecting pax since most pax can take a N/S to LAX either on UA or another carrier. Even if a connection is missed, LAX has enough frequency to get you on the next flight in less than an hour.
4. Int'l arriving pax will need to go through security anyway and the G to A walk is no worse than G to E/F.
5. UA could have LAX-only gate agents that frequent LAX pax could work with exclusively. Great customer relations opportunity.

Long Zhiren

I'm a little surprised that nobody's yet mentioned *A partners COPA and Avianca. They occasionally flew out of Terminal A in recent years. Do they still do that? It was a little sad for *G's not to have any lounges to wait in.

aCavalierInCoach

I'd venture to guess that they have a bigger problem with o/t arrivals into sf when there is flow control versus on time departures down to SoCal.

Boraxo

I'm not sure that's true. Every UA flight I've taken SFO<->LAX recently has been a connection. For those of us @sfo (and I'd wager LAX) the latter is often the best option if your TATL or TPAC nonstop is sold out. Or sometimes the fare is just much better.

Of course, this validates your point about frequent service, which is what makes the connection attractive. But if I want to fly O/D from Bay Area to LA I will normally take WN and avoid LAX like the plague.

Lani1

Get your walking shoes on !

WineCountryUA

The Air Train is generally a faster way to transfer from T3 to the A gates.

EWR764

An interesting thought, but UA moves a lot of connecting traffic between LAX and SFO, especially to the Pacific network (ex-SFO, MEL for LAX).