IMRU

Crew timed out yesterday on UA 4821 SAF to DEN. The inbound had only a 50 minute delay. That’s certainly not enough time to turn the plane and fly back. Wonder why UA didn’t cancel it earlier. Cancelling it 30 mins after arrival really limited alternatives - particularly from ABQ since no one could make the last flight to IAH.

goodeats21

4821 sounds like a flight number for a United Express flight. If so, there is much less proactive notification from United when compared to a mainline flight.
The Express operator is the one that tracks their own crew's hours / legality / etc, When they decide the flight is no longer able to operate, that is when they would notify United, who would then in turn update the UA systems.

I am sure others have more specific details, but your experience tracks with mine on Express Flights. Also why when they are trying to track down a crew for a flight at the gate, it is always a bit of a cluster as they have to go through the various Express operators to figure out what is going on.

IMRU

Oh it's definitely an Express flight - CommuteAir. Honestly, your comment makes a lot of sense in a number of ways. I've been doing this now for 20 years, and even though I know that these Express flights are a different company, it never made it through my brain that a lot of the weirdness is caused by the fact that you have the express operators making their own decisions and saying to United "Oh, by the way...." The locating a crew rings true - that I've had happen at least 10 times. Thanks!

jsloan

50 minutes isn't enough time to turn the plane and fly back, but it's more than enough time to turn the plane. The crew has to be legal for the planned length of the flight as of the time that they go wheels-up. So it's entirely possible that the crew would have been legal if the inbound had been on time, but went illegal due to the delay. It's also possible that something in the flight path changed and they were going to have to take a much longer path than normal to get to Denver, or they found that they were going to need to delay the flight another hour, which would have made the crew illegal, so they were proactive.

In other words, there's not nearly enough information available to judge whether or not UA's actions made sense or could have been meaningfully improved.

st530

Noticed that tonight’s LIM-EWR flight (UA 887) is canceled due to crew not having sufficient off-duty/rest time required by federal law. Yet the crew came in on the inbound EWR-LIM on-time (8 mins late) the night before, 27 hours before the scheduled return. How could this result in insufficient off-duty/rest time?

Lux Flyer

Could be an issue of one crew member becoming sick/ill/unable to operate for some reason, which then adjusts the duty limitations for the remaining crew (given the flight length this is likely an augmented 3 person cockpit, so if one of pilots becomes unavailable it could be coded as a crew rest issue since while there is still a crew, their duty day wouldn't be sufficient to operate). Could also be other things such as if they had an extended delay getting to their lodging (even though the flight was basically on time), or if something happened at their lodging that prevented them from getting adequate rest while they were there, etc.