Where are the empty UA seats?
 

...and why do I never see them? Assuming load factors remain in the mid 60s, then you would think that at SOME time in all my flights I would enter an echo chamber of a cabin. Or perhaps just a 1/3 or 1/2 full tube. But, every single flight I've taken since 1/1/2002 has been 90% or greater capacity. Haven't seen an open middle seat next to me in ages. Had one for a blissful 15 minutes yesterday, ONT-DEN, and then a non-revenue ramp manager from Chicago plopped his 325 pounds in the center seat.

Yesterday was a Sunday PM flight, but I travel a lot on Wednesday afternoons, Friday afternoons, and Tuesday afternoons, in that order.

Someone tell me: Where are the empty flights? Are they all concentrated from 2-3 PM on Saturday afternoons?

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Brian/\/\

Try Wed night ORD-DEN on the 7:45 flight. Last time I actually took it (usually standby on an earlier flight) there were about 10 passengers in Y on a 767. F class was full.

SAN-ORD AT 9 am was only 2/3 full on both a Friday and a Thursday. Ditto DEN-SAN at 5:20 on a Tuesday. My US flights out of SAN to PHL or PIT have always been 100% full, even the red-eye, since last November schedule cuts.

SFO-SEA is always stuffed to the gills, but usually SFO-ORD is, at best, mid-packed.

Many people claim that UA's moves to alienate its elites are not having an effect by pointing at how full the flights are.

My theory? It's all those people burning miles, baby!! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Non-revs do not count in the load factor. I don't know what % of all seats are occupied by non-revs on average, but there probably are some flights out there with a 50% revenue load and another 25% non-rev.

Basically part of this is a variant of the doctor's office fallacy... even if most of the day the waiting room is close to empty many (or most) people can leave the doctor's office thinking that it was full because it was full when *they* were here (because more people were there when it was full rather than when it was close to empty).

The same way... more people will think loads are high because more people are on the high-load flights than are on the low-load flights. I think there was a thread a while back that tried to make this statistical analysis more concrete if you're interested.

[This message has been edited by ravi_n (edited 03-18-2003).]

Here's one way to think about it:

Airline JJ operates 99 flights. The load factors for each flight are as follows:
1, 2, 3 ... 97, 98, 99.

JJ's overall load factor is 50%. About 3/4 of JJ's passengers, however, fly on planes that are more full than average. About 1/2 of JJ's passengers fly on planes that are at least 70% full.

If Yogi Berra were contributing to this thread, he might say "nobody sees the empty United planes because nobody's on them!"

Hmmm... and yet, and yet... If UA is still flying like JJ airlines, then they have planes with load factors of 1%, 2%, and 3%? I pray they don't.

I would think that UA's real-world schedule would start with oh, say, 15%, 23%, 31%, ... 97, 98, 99.

But in any case, I understand that because of positioning, there are certain flights that may fly "empty" in order to set up the planes for the next day's schedule. I just never get to be on them, I guess. <sniff> http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif


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Brian/\/\

Not so much anymore. I did a recent ORD-SFO roundtrip and had it officially packed both ways, though with a couple of empty seats that appeared. (Though they did hand out denied boarding to people.) My return was originally booked on a 767, but when I got there voila it was a 757... (which makes more sense since a 777 leaves 5 minutes later...)

ORD-CVG is usually fairly empty on the 737 flights. UA used to run all 737s on this route.

I've also found that the second ORD-DEN 10am departure is usually fairly empty. I think there are usually two widebodies on those flights, leaving within 15 minutes of each other.

Other than that, most of my UA flights have been fairly full.

The domestic flights seem to have a good load but what about international flights. I´ve been to the U.S. last week: FRA-DTW with LH. It was Saturnday and the flight was flight was completely full in Y, 2 empty seats in C and some people in F. I flew back with UA from ORD to FRA: F was full, load in C about 65% and Y was nearly empty (nearly every passenger had 3 or 4 seats for himself).

Just flew 2 domestic flights on Sunday 3/16 and every seat was occupied. LAX-ORD and ORD-MSP.

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Greetings from the land of 10,000 lakes.

So far this year, I've had flights to PVG, FRA, TPE, connecting via domestic hubs. Of these flights, the domestic connections have been quite full, averaging 80%+, and international flights have been between 90% to <50% on 772s, and around 80% on 774s.