saxman66

To make it simple, a crew base or domicile, is where a crewmember works. All trips begin and end in someones base. They also have many amenities that any other office would have. Support staff such as admin, chief pilot's, and chief flight attendants. Crew lounges, maybe a nap/quiet room. Computer terminals to check schedules, weather or anything else. A satellite base probably won't have all the aforementioned amenities. They'll begin and end their trips in the satellite base, but there may not be full time staff there. The crew lounge might just be a small closet sized room with a chair and maybe a single computer to check things. If a crewmember needs to talk to their boss or other administrative type things, they'll have go or call up people in their full actual base. So in this case, SAN would be a satellite of LAX, meaning an FA's boss would be up in LAX.

It costs a lot of money to have a full crew base, so the airline has to weigh how much it would cost in hotels vs. having a crew base there. My old regional use to overnight a ton of crews in one very expensive city. We really wanted them open a base there, but they wouldn't because it was cheaper to pay for hotels then to open a base. Eventually they opened a base in that city, because it eventually just made economic sense as the number of flights to there skyrocketed.

EWR764

Pretend for a second that the confusion as to what the flight attendant was referring hasn't already been clarified... SAN lacks the airfield capacity and United doesn't have the real estate to develop a full-fledged hub operation. Still, SAN is one of the few non-hub markets where United is the largest legacy carrier (consistently #2 to WN), so there's at least some merit to the notion that United has the kind of base at SAN that could theoretically support some non-hub flying.

jhayes_1780

AirbusFan2B