lincolnjkc

First anyone has the detail as to what happened with the ship operating UA770 today (N17719) -- I'd love to know. Originally it was delayed 5 hours JAC-ORD "to service an oxygen mask", then it got to ORD and was further delayed to "service the exterior of the plane"

Thanks to an agent in the UC I got myself rebooked onto 702, beating 770 by over an hour but still arriving home ~3 hours later than planed.

UA770 scheduled 2:35-5:00 actual 7:13-9:15
UA702 scheduled 5:57-8:19 actual 5:52-7:51

The initial 2 hour delay for 770 was posted before I left the ground at SMF at 7am this morning and then got worse as the day went on.

Since both flights were scheduled as 73Gs and the inbound for 702 arrived at 2:25 -- the question for any ops experts is why not just flip that frame to 770 -- which then would have had maybe a ~45 minute delay (basically as quickly as they could turn the frame) and had the original inbound not required additional maintenance on arrival 702 would have seen a similar delay/slightly shorter delay. (I got the "boarding" notification for 770 maybe 5 minutes after I put my butt in the seat for 702 -- though I understand they later deplaned due to the new MX issue).

All of the normal reasons I can think of don't apply here -- both aircraft are the same type/crew complement, both aircraft are RONing in Cleveland (presumably seeing some line maintenance while they're here) -- so why not shuffle the birds?

I was chatting with one of the pilots on the walk to the baggage service office to do the missing bag report and they mentioned that they were also surprised the plane didn't get "stolen"

wh6cto

Since no one else has commented, here's my guess:

If the aircraft were swapped, the inbound JAC-ORD arrived at 17:37, and UA702 departure was scheduled for 17:57, assuming 45 min turn, that's 17:22 departure (25 min late). And as you state, UA770 would be delayed ~45 min. So that's two flights delayed, instead of just one. On the other hand, keeping the aircraft on UA770 would result in just one flight delayed, with no cascading delays on the aircraft--perhaps they saw this as the best option?

I also wonder if there's a policy of confirming any repairs made at outstations once the aircraft arrives at a hub? That would be another half hour delay on UA702. And if a problem is found, then further delays would happen.

In any case, "stealing" an aircraft in a manner that delays the other flight is probably something they try to avoid.

Of course, there's the other possibility that operations just didn't see this option. While you're looking at just one route, they are looking at all of them. They may have been dealing with issues that actively needed attention, while this one already had a solution (even if we consider it sub-optimal).

Again, this is a total guess on my part.

lincolnjkc

Any supposition is welcome especially since I'm not really counting on anyone from WHQ or @UNITEDinsider chiming in (though it would be awesome)

I'd love to see the raw flight data for this; based on the scheduling I don't think that's what happened here -- the scheduling for 770 rolled pretty much in lock-step with the JAC-ORD with ETD approximately 30 after ETA. From what I understand the subsequent delay in 770 happened after the aircraft was at least partially boarded which I doubt they would have done if they need to verify MX (also the original delay was "service an oxygen mask" the subsequent delay after arriving at ORD was "service the exterior").

Incidentally, since the JAC-ORD flight posted a 5 hour delay well in advance and since JAC is an outstation I'm assuming that at a minimum they had to wait for a part (if not a part+maintenance person) to arrive on an inbound flight (possibly UA2019) rather than the actual amount of time it took to execute the repair.



It happens all too often on my flights home from ORD I can count at least a half dozen times where I've seen an aircraft swapped out from my "on time" flight to save an otherwise delayed flight (either bringing it to on time or cutting its delay to a shorter delay than my flight now has)... that said, my view of the operational world doesn't (typically) include downline impacts -- which I'm guessing play a bigger role. (The majority of early evening flights into CLE seem to RON &/or visit the line maintenance facility here, where I imagine other spokes are more likely to turn back to a hub)

True; yesterday seemed to be a calmer-than-usual day for ORD Ops but it's not a very transparent process so any number of more important/dynamic crises could have been playing out simultaneously.