Interesting reading all these maintenance issues wonder how UA takes care of its fleet. Do other airlines have all these issues.

 

The majors typically have, on average 0.5-1% or so, daily cancellation and over 10% maintenance delays -- UA has over 4,000 flights delay.
UA has roughly 300 long haul daily flights (back of the envelop guess), cancellations are probably a bit higher than fleet average as margins are less.
In other words, these are not abnormal number cancellations / delays

 

Wonder how many issues are caught on day of departure or written up on previous flight. How many spare aircraft are available at the hub airports

 

It is not realistic to have spare aircraft of every type at each airport. UA has 8 widebodies types (many, seating capacity aside, are not interchangeable and neither are pilots) and 8 narrowbodies types. 5 hubs (while not all hubs use all types, each hub uses multiple types)

 

UA817 DEL-EWR 789 cancelled due to maintenance.
UA855 LIM-IAH 752 cancelled due to crew time out.

 

UA892 ICN-SFO on Sunday 24 March cancelled due to a warning light on the cabin pressurization system at takeoff. Rescheduled 24 hours later as new flight UA3043. I was told by a passenger on my flight that Monday's UA892 was also cancelled due to maintenance, so at least that 1 passenger from Monday's flight was on my rescheduled Sunday flight. I saw that there was no regular UA892 on the airport screens when we flew out on Monday.

We were put up overnight at the local Howard Johnsons/Days Inn at Incheon, reasonable clean but very small and very spartan rooms. Shuttle provided but no food that day except free hotel breakfast the next morning and a $25 airport food voucher for the next day.

My wife and I were booked in paid business connecting to paid seats in First on the US domestic connection. Because of the rebooking, we got downgrade to economy, not even Economy Plus. I saw open seats in First but we were just put on the standard upgrade list where I was 15th or so because we're just Platinum and not 1K so of course didn't get it. I would think that because we were bumped to this flight and had paid First Class tickets we'd get priority but I guess not.

Not being greedy but what would be fair compensation to expect for this? The loss of the day is a bigger deal as I work for myself and lost a day of work/income.

some other details: UA892 was a scheduled 5:05 PM departure and we taxied out only to have to return to the gate for repair. After a 3 hour delay in our seats we pushed back again and were in line to take off when the pilot announced we'd been ordered to return even though the system was fixed. He wasn't very happy about it. After a bit of a delay we deplaned from the front first and were standing in the jetway when we were ordered back to our seats so the ground crew could coordinate our overnight delay. so back to our seats for another 90 minutes on the plane. We were lucky we got to the hotel early as they deplaned from the front as the check in lines were ridiculously long later. By the time we got to the hotel all restaurants nearby were closed so we had to go to the local convenience store to get something to eat as it was about midnight. Not something I ever want to go through again. The only pluses were the ground staff did as good as job as can be expected and we had a really great FA crew, same crew the next day when we eventually flew out.

 

UA50 MAD-EWR 764 diverted to BOS. Flight left 5 hours late then diverted due to crew time out.
UA114 PPT-SFO 788 cancelled due to maintenance.

 

But an extra day with your wife = priceless!

 

Very sorry for your bad experience. Did you try calling UA reservations to see if they could put you into the available F seats? Given the long delay (which sounds mechanical) and the downgrade on the domestic sector, I would expect in your place at least $500 per person in vouchers, though YMMV. UA definitely goes through phases in terms of how generous they are with compensation, maybe the recent FAA involvement will make them more generous? Good luck.

 

There are interesting happenings on SFO/SIN. UA1 on Tuesday, ship 3980 (N24980) was canceled due to a technical issue. The ship would have performed UA2 on Thursday; however, that flight is now covered by ship 3961 (N29961). According to Flightaware, it would have performed SIN/SFO at 11 pm on Wednesday as UA3866. UA28 is going out as usual on Wednesday on ship 3976, so that flight didn�t lose out! As far as I can tell, #3961 has been sitting in Singapore since March 17: lucky for me, I hope. Let�s see what happens on Thursday!

Edit Maybe I should be worried about tomorrow: where will they get the crew to operate UA2? When I came over on UA1 on Monday, they were looking for three volunteers in Polaris to give up their seats for $3k. They needed them for pilots. They ended up involuntarily downgrading passengers. I didn�t think about it at the time, but presumably they would have used them for UA3866. If they were rescuing the plane from SIN, a cabin crew wouldn�t have been needed, right? Maybe Monday�s UA29 will be the crew for us tomorrow.

 

Very interesting observations. N29961 was doing maintenance at SIN so luckily there was an aircraft to do UA2 tomorrow. Hopefully a crew is available to do it.

 

It is definitely a stroke of luck. I suspect they would have canceled the flight already if they didn�t have a crew. The ship performs UA758 (SFO/DEN) later on Thursday afternoon; there are no changes there either, so fingers crossed.

Also UA3866 seems to be a ferry flight number. I see on Tuesday it was used on ORD/IAH; the plane was empty.

So, I looked up UA3865 to see what I could find and it was a flight from HKG to SIN tomorrow, Thursday, that was scheduled to arrive at 1300: it was canceled. The aircraft wasn�t specified, but I wonder if they originally planned to use it for UA1.

 

Extra day in Tahiti 🎉

 

I have a head scratcher. I noticed that a 788 was flying as UA3781 on SFO-LAX-BWI last night and is currently in the air as UA3774 on BWI-SFO. The usual LAX-BWI redeye on a 737-9MAX ran as usual as is the usual morning BWI-SFO flight. The seat map for both 788 flights showed completely empty. Any thoughts on what these flights could have been for?

 

fairy? but for what idk