Kacee

No idea where your numbers are coming from. UA863 arrived 1:40 late on 3/24.
I would imagine because UA told him they would be transferred.

Lux Flyer

Probably from the OPs original post that makes it sound like the delay was only an hour based on waiting for a part for that long. If I hadn’t looked the flight up I would have assumed that as well.

buckeyefanflyer

I am not a fan of large hubs with long walks to far concourses. We need more smaller hubs to reduce congestion and offer more connection opportunities.

AA should have kept STL, RDU, and BNA
US should have kept PIT
DL should have kept CVG and MEM
UA should have kept CLE

Cites that could be smaller hubs

MCI, CMH, and IND

These days need lots of connection time. One hour won’t work at some airports

jsloan

Those hubs closed because they lacked profitable O&D traffic. Airlines make much more money on O&D than on connecting traffic. Travelers don't seem to want "more connection opportunities." They want more nonstop flights. If anything, UA has too many hubs and should close down a couple and consolidate more.

zombietooth

I've had this happen multiple times at SFO. It's a horrible airport for connections. I remember that we were connecting from PPT once, and were an hour late. Somehow, when we got to the gate for our flight to the East Coast, the door was miraculously still open. We scanned our BPs only to find that they'd already given our paid F seats away. I didn't even know they could do that with the door still open and boarding in progress. It was a big let-down and my wife was really PO'd.

Kacee

OP also reported a long wait for a gate, and docbert then confirmed the taxi time was over 30 minutes. All information that's easily available from various public sources.

This blame the victim stuff is garbage. Delays are a part of air travel, but OP has a right to be upset at how UA handled this one. Particularly since departure of the EWR flight they were not allowed to board was delayed by 15 minutes.

JimInOhio

If a redeye flight across the country can't be held for a few minutes when 15 passengers show up right at the scheduled departure time then something is really wrong with how the operation is being run. Saying the crew might time out is bogus. What if they had a 15 minute mechanical delay which happens frequently? Would that have caused a full cancelation due to timeout?

LarryJ

Based on the limited information available, I'd guess that it's more likely that the flight wasn't held because arriving aircraft were stacking up waiting for gates, as did the OP's inbound flight.

jsloan

They're allowed to do it if you fail to appear by T-15. They're not going to upgrade people into the vacated seats after the door is closed -- the GA does that, and she presumably didn't want to be trapped on board.

There are many factors that go into making that decision,. Most of them we don't have any access to -- for example, where was that plane going next? Was there any incoming weather that could have caused problems along the way? etc.

It's possible -- no, not because it was planned that way. But suppose that they had originally scheduled a crew that was going to start their duty day with that flight, but someone called in sick, or they got stranded in Tulsa the day before and weren't able to get their required rest time in, or whatever. The replacement crew might have been toward the end of their duty day. And, yes, a 15-minute mechanical at the end of the day can cause a cancellation.

UA has an entire team of people dedicated to making a highly complicated system run so smoothly that most days we forget how complex it is. Blithely calling them incompetent, when we only have access to maybe 5% of the information that they do, just seems silly.

ShortShorts

They **certainly** have the IT capability. They were doing NLP on email complains in 2018 - they absolutely could have done so.

exerda

Had a lengthy delay into IAD recently, where we got in at least 2 hours late due to WX and MX (pilot explained they had to get flaps inspected due to the way the inbound landed, itself due to snow and ice conditions). Pax were in a panic as many were almost certainly going to be stranded overnight--it didn't help that upon arrival at IAD, the marshaller wasn't there and we sat for another 15+ minutes. Several had international connections in the late bank. In the end, the only flight they held was MCO which had something like 15 pax connecting; GRU was still boarding when we landed, but all the other international flights had already departed.

I always take "they're going to hold your flight" with a huge grain of salt. We had MX delay us 4 hours into ORD in January, and we and several other pax on the flight were connecting onto the HND flight... FAs had been telling pax that flight and several others were likely being held, but as we taxied in, I saw the HND flight close--we missed the connection by about 5-10 minutes, sadly, and got stuck at ORD for 23 hours. While it would have been nice to see the flight held, my guess is it would have impacted ex-TYO UA ops the next day to hold it.


That's rare IME as the GAs typically look at where you're coming from and gauge your likelihood of making the flight before giving your confirmed seat away. I've had it happen maybe 2-3 times ever with UA--the most annoying was when the GA said, "Well, it was a free upgrade anyway, so it's not like you're out anything." But I also recall a massive DEN-ORD delay where we landed, ran to our gate (taking the tunnel and yelling for people to stand to the right on the escalators and walkways), and were the last 2 pax to board... and still had our (paid) F seats! That was a case where I really had expected the GA to say, "There's no way they can make this connection."

More common for me is the GA goes ahead and closes. I've had that happen many, many times, including ones where my inbound arrived only 1 or 2 gates away and I was in row 2, so the GA could have easily seen I'd make it... but closed the door early. Several times my bag made the connection and I didn't in these cases (ugh), including being stranded overnight in DEN and ORD on a couple of occasions.

FlyfromDenver

I have flown in and out of KOA a number of times, particularly in the past few months. My take is that 777s only started really flying in for the spring break times so a bit unusual and I would give them a break on that. As for the cleaning crew and the United folks at KOA, they work their butts off. If you expecting EWR or IAH, it's never going to happen. If the facilities are underwhelming, maybe it's not your kind of place. BTW, if you want food, pick it up from Pine Tree Cafe - left at the light south of the airport.

Travelers heading home from KOA on United via a connection beware. It is a route we shall never take again.

I live in Denver so no connecting and you could have connected through here. But otherwise, enjoy Southwest. (I have friends who have had issues on AA and Delta)

findark

Upset, sure, but like a lot of these complaints it reads like a fairly common situation (has probably happened to all of us at least once) that could happen on any carrier, ending with the conclusion "don't fly this carrier, because they did this to me".

Earlier this month it took me well over 24 hours to get from MSP to LEX due to weather and I would have been "abandoned" overnight in ORD if I hadn't proactively run to a gate and gotten on a different flight. Except that time it was Delta.

IRROPS happen.

mduell

Would it have created additional delay? What downstream impacts would that have? We don't know.

And when the winds weren't as forecasted, there was no gate delay, and/or the connecting flight also became delayed and you ran to your scheduled departure gate only to find out you had already been proactively rebooked onto a later flight? "Knowing" you're going to misconnect is a pretty fuzzy thing.

The rebooking line at the airport is a customer choice; you can also call on the phone or use the app for faster service.

Or a recrew. Some flights, especially the last ones of the day, do run pretty tight against duty time limitations. In this case I think it's more likely they wanted the gate for an inbound flight, but it can be a lot of things.

MatthewLAX

I bet I know the gate agent at SFO...