Last night the red eye going from LAX into EWR flew an old version of the 757 with just basic recliner seats in business, (as well as a very dated IFE and no wifi). The pilot calmed some passengers down by telling them it was because the original plane was broken and the only alternative was canceling the flight, but it was still pretty disappointing for those of us that paid for business not to have a lie-flat seat on a flight getting in at 5am.

Sorry they've got ~15 flights/day slated and there wasn't a single suitable a/c to swap in while they repair that one overnight? BS, and BS handling by UA. :td:

Yesterday's UA824 ended up being a 764 - the booking website had it listed as a 757 but the seatmap was correct. Halfway through the flight I got an email apologising for the substitution of a non-PS plane and offering a $175 e-cert…

I'm at the SFO club and noticed that today's 8am SFO-EWR flight is delayed 7 hours due to aircraft maintenance.

Well, the nice thing about hourly service is that it looks like lots of folks bailed on that flight for other ones. The 9am and 10am flights went out full, while the 10:45am flight is delayed a couple of hours. Meantime that 8am flight now is mostly empty when looking at the seat map.

The 10:45 SFO/EWR is listed as 1hr 45mins delayed, aircraft maintainance.
Flying on Tuesday connecting to MAN. Getting a little worried as this seems to be getting too frequent.

Perhaps we need a new thread to track all these delays on the new SFO/LAX EWR p.s. route. Just based on spot checking the past two days:

Sunday 11/15

• UA994 (10am SFO departure) was delayed by 1.5 hours
• UA535 (11:30am SFO departure) was diverted to OMA and arrived 2.5 hours late
• UA751 (3:50pm to LAX) was delayed by 1+ hours
• UA275 (6:26pm to LAX) was delayed by 1.5 hours
• UA512 (8:58pm to LAX) was diverted to PIT and then cancelled

And on Monday 11/16 as others have pointed out UA223 (8am SFO departure) was delayed by 8 hours and UA1919 (10:45am SFO departure) was delayed by 1.5 hours.

Also on Monday:

• UA443 (12:35pm SFO departure) was delayed by 2 hours
• UA824 (4:35pm to LAX) was delayed by 2+ hours
• UA418 (5:35pm to LAX) returned to gate and showing a 2.5 hour delay
• UA1469 (9:00am LAX departure) was delayed by 4 hours. This was the continuation of the diverted/cancelled UA512 from 11/15.

I'm traveling mid-Dec on a SFO-EWR-ZRH-DEL flight in J. UA LX LX. Reading about these reliability issues has got me a little bit worried; our connection in EWR is only 1h44min. It's followed by two flights which I cannot miss to get me to Delhi.

Do you think I should attempt to change the earlier flight to give myself some room? How much room do I need?

Or should I attempt to take the SFO-ZRH direct (originally routed through EWR for the extra PQMs + RPU p.s. promo)? According to great circle mapper, taking the EWR detour adds ~670 miles, so *1.5 for J, that'd cost me 1k PQM. I'm at a total of 103k PQM for the year, so I can probably afford the 1k loss. Are there any ways I can make this change without paying extra considering I'm on a cheap P fare that cost me ~$2700 round trip?

In December you could also be dealing with some WX with EWR and not only the fear o MX.
Even for chasing miles I would have not connected at EWR. I would have flown SWISS the whole way through.
EWR-DEL flies at 8:50pm. I'm assuming you are on the 6:55pm EWR-ZRH?
If you got in at 7:30 you could ask UA to put you on the EWR-DEL and hope there is still a J seat open at that time.
Also LX flies EWR-ZRH at 10:05pm arrives in ZRH at 11:40am which would give you 1h to connect to your original ZRH-DEL flight.

I'm on 12pm SFO-EWR, landing right after 8pm in EWR. Then 10:05pm LX EWR-ZRH. Not too worried about the ZRH connection because even if worse case I miss my flight to Delhi, I won't mind the extra day in ZRH, and should be able to get my hotel situation sorted out without too much pain. Plus, LX tends to be a lot more reliable than UA p.s.

Just called the 1K line and they waived the change fee and moved me to the 9am flight which gives me 4h45 to connect - which I feel a lot safer about. They wouldn't move me to a red-eye or to the SFO-ZRH direct (due to different start date). Is there any chance I can SDC to it later?

When you were going through the flights on Sunday and Monday were these all MX cancellations/delays or were some weather related?

Not a bad idea, as you will need to change terminals and re-clear security.

To get some perspective on how bad this is I compared yesterday's on-time performance of Delta to United. I also looked at the number of flights each had.

United flew 55 ps flights yesterday. Delta flew 32 flights on the same routes.

Looking at the above there were 6 major delays on United out of that 55 flights, or 11%. I'm thinking the UA443 2 hour delay out of SFO perhaps lead to the 2 hour delay from EWR-LAX at 4:35pm due to aircraft availability?

Anyway, Delta's delays of more than 30 minutes:

DL450 (2:35pm to LAX) departed 90 minutes late but arrived 51 minutes late
DL1162 (9:25pm to LAX) arrived 35 minutes late

Delta's 2 delays represented 6% of the flights and were minor compared to the duration on United.

What does this mean? I don't know. Just more data. I do feel a little better knowing that United does 55 daily flights on the routes and so some delays are to be expected.

I was on UA1919 yesterday. The delay was mechanical, the intercom between the pilots and the crew didn't work.

There may be a pattern, but I don't see how p.s. or SFO-EWR enters into the pattern.

I didn't see any weather related cancellations. There was at least one due to delayed inbound aircraft and even one about difficulties refueling (is that an often enough occurrence that it gets to have it's own category).