IAH-OIL-TRASH

No details on nature of disruption - yet.

Disruption prompts United Airlines flight to Los Angeles to land at Honolulu airport | Honolulu Star-Advertiser (staradvertiser.com)

Fanjet

Wouldn't ANC have been a closer airport to the flight path?

TomMM

Limited options?

mduell

Pretty tough for the other pax... landed 7am, their original continuing segment was going to be a redeye to LAX but that was cancelled, so now the plane isn't leaving until Wednesday morning. I hope a bunch of them could be reaccomodated on the Tuesday afternoon 77W since everything else is NB that are probably tight on available seats.

Diversion https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...805Z/RJAA/PHNL
Original continuation https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...810Z/PHNL/KLAX
Rescheduled continuation https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...840Z/PHNL/KLAX

No, at the diversion point they were 300nm+ closer to HNL than ANC; the eastbound TPACs tend to fly pretty flat to make the most of the winds. Not to mention better staffed at HNL than ANC.

WineCountryUA

Not a UA crew station, no replacement crews, fewer routing alternatives for passengers and HNL was closer or no more

uastarflyer

Completely understand and agree with the sentiment

But OTOH…Hawaii

mahasamatman

I think you mean eastbound.

J S

From Flightradar24, it looks like nearly 3 hours from when they turned toward HNL to when they landed. That is a really long time to be in the air if the person was dangerous (not that they had any other options).

prestonh

Flat relative to what? Mercator? Great circle? This flight was pretty much on the pacific track prior to diversion which had a partial circle component to it.

HNLbasedFlyer

Flat relative to great circle. Flight plan was not a great circle routing. A partial/kinda circle that still made it closer to HNL.

prestonh

Technically great circle is 'flat' distance wise on a sphere. So I'm not sure I understand what flat means in this reference

HNLbasedFlyer

Flat across the globe

docbert

According to flightaware they diverted at 37.8167,-175.3333.

Great Circle Mapper puts the distance as 1,541 miles to HNL, and 1,950 miles to ANC.

HNL is 200 miles further from LAX than ANC, but in a divert thats not really the concern, especially given the much better support available in HNL.

Lux Flyer

Yeah looks like crew timed out and they're waiting for them to achieve adequate rest before continuing as opposed to ferrying another crew in to operate a recovery flight (either don't have crew to spare [at least a few probably need to be language qualified given this originated in NRT] or want to incur the cost of displacing passengers to deadhead a crew).

Probably few, if any, could be reaccommodated. Hawaii flights are full, especially that given up until this past Sunday it was the go to booking destination for people who wanted to get away but not have to deal with COVID testing/risk testing positive before their return from vacation. Also feels like daily UA is cancelling at least one flight from one of the islands which doesn't help when capacity is already filled on their routes.

Mixed bag for the pax I'm sure. For the ones who needed to be somewhere, sucks. For the ones who are flexible and not in a hurry to get back, it's great, essentially a free day long vacation in Hawaii, especially as UA provides amenities for everyone since this was a diversion.

zeus2120

Surprised they diverted to HNL for that. How much further would it have been to just continue to LAX? 3 hours to get to HNL and 4.5 to get to LAX? 3 hours is still a long time.