Old COBOL program...
 

Lately I've been taking advantage of the fact that UA can email me itineraries. It's so much better than:

CSR> Okay, do you have a pen and pencil?
ME> Yup!
CSR> Okay.. Departing (starting a 8 leg itinerary)
.
.
.
CSR> Got that?

Anyway, I was noticing that the HTML email that arrives has CONNOISEUR whereever business class should be written. IIRC this was introduced in the early 90s as part of the TWA LHR operation, but went away just after UA and the other 4 charter *A airlines formed their alliance.

Somewhere there's a stray DB2 table that needs updating...

Old Iron Never Dies, It Just Fades Away...

Ahhh so that is what C stands for.

I guess Y is for YAHOO (or is it YOKEL?)

OK - now you guys got me currious. I've always wanted to know where "Y" came from, or "C" for that matter. "F" makes some sense as does "P" (First, Premium).

I know a lot of the other letters are just random assigments, not trying to make sense of BMHQKSTLV etc. Just currious if ANYONE has a REAL REASON as to why "Y" and "C."

Billy

Old COBOL program...
 

What is, "What does United's web site run on?", Alex?

As an old COBOL junky I 'd say any COBOL code is more reliable than that. :)

No, the question would be "What is steam"?

Clipper Class
 

AFAIK the 'C' originates from PanAm's Clipper class. (PanAm was the first airline to introduce an additional class between Y and F to accomodate the business traveller.)

andy

Similarly, Y comes from ECONOMY.

As an old COBOL programmer (of 35 years standing), I would look further afield for the "Connoisseur" issue. A human somewhere hasn't done it's job properly.

And as for "Y", how about economY?

Why Y?
 

What about ... "Y"ou lot, shut up back there!

or, "Y can't I use the lavs up front?"

United.com runs very recent and secure versions of Sun Solaris. None of that MS junk...

Yes... but while the site is secure, it still sucks eggs. Do a search on how many times "my itineraries" has been down. Granted, this is more the programming staff than the platform....

I believe that "Connoiseur" is the source of UA's C designation. In fact, if you look at some of the on-plane monitoring screens on some of the older planes, it will actually refer to the C section by that name, rather than business class.

Timothy