Jet2K

My wife is short of 1K by 392 miles, and instead of spending $200 for the double EQM, we were thinking of doing a MR on New Year's eve.

We have been toying with the idea of flying a 500 mile hop before midnight to get her over the hump for 1K, and the rest of the MR departing right after midnight in order to count toward next year's EQM.

Perhaps something along the lines of:

SFO-LAX late in the evening of 12/31
LAX-xyz just after midnight early in the morning of 1/1
return perhaps on 1/1 or thereabouts

Or we could originate in Sacramento
SMF-SFO late in the evening of 12/31
SFO-xyz just after midnight early in the morning of 1/1
return perhaps on 1/1 or thereabouts

However, I have not been able to find any departures from LAX or SFO that leaves after midnight to make this work.

Short of going to the airport in the evening and look at the departure board, is there a way to search for flights leaving from a particular airport after a certain time? My eyes are popping from the sockets from reading the PDF schedule to no avail.

Morrissey

I don't know that there are ANY scheduled flights out of LAX after 11:59pm.

qasr

I don't know of a way to search for flights to anywhere at a particular time, it can probably be done with GDS access though.

There was a SFO-BOS which left at 12:06 (UA178?), but I think that has gone off the winter schedule. LAX-ORD also used to leave just after midnight, 12:09 or so, but that looks like it is back to 11:59pm now.

qasr

Of course, if you want to go big, the SQ SFO-HKG flight leaves at 12:05. SFO-ICN leaves even later too.

cur

Red eyes to ORD, EWR, or JFK?

wimpypipsqueak

Are you also 100% sure that flights that leave at 12:01 do in fact count towards the following day. They usually show up on the departure board with the previous day's flights, with the "tomorrows flights" starting at around 6am. I have no idea, but an interesting question.

qasr

They do. From my Mileage Summary:

23-Apr-05 UA 1493 Y Class LAS to LAX
24-Apr-05 UA 0126 A Class LAX to ORD

That was a late flight out of LAS connecting to an ORD redeye.

wimpypipsqueak

OK....good info ^

us2

Whatever you do, hang on to this woman. Finding someone who'd do a New Year's Eve MR is difficult. To that end, why not treat her to a nice night in LA and fly back in the morning?

rustyr

The only early am dep I have seen on UA is out of ANC-12:50 AM to SEA. You could fly out of SMF or SFO; there would be one or 2 equip changes depending on your origin as you will stop in Seattle going up and back; I think it arrives in ANC around 11:45PM, chances are it's the same plane going back. When I did a dummy res it left SMF around 2PM 12-31 to SFO,then SEAQ before getting to ANC and then reverse on Jan 1st. The price was obscene=$809. You would be better off taking late nite into LAX then transcon to east coast or Midcon to Chicago and back and book it so there would be a forced overnite in LA to catch 1st flight out in morning. I'm not sure I understand from the OP's content= if you paid the $200 would she lock in the 1k status w/out any more flights?. If that would be the case, I would do that. Or fly down to LAX Sat nite and have a great nite on the town and come back on the 1st, as was suggested.

Morrissey

No. They all leave before midnight.

icedancer

It's not exactly what the OP is looking for, but on the LAX website (http://www.lawa.org/lax/welcomeLAX.cfm), if you go to "airlines and flights", you can put in any arrival city and any date, and it will tell you all airlines' schedules for that arrival city from LA area airports in chronological order. I tried JFK for fun, and there were indeed no flights leaving after midnight from LAX.

I wonder if it's an LA curfew thing and not a UA thing. On my last UA flight into LAX, the plane was scheduled to get in at 12:20, and the pilot mentioned the curfew on the PA. Said the airport turns itself around after midnight for noise abatement, and if we had to land west to east, it would take us another XX additional minutes to get set up for landing.

FlyinHawaiian

Flying in on an IAD-LAX flight in August, we arrived after midnight and did the Redeye Two arrival in which you pass over Santa Monica heading west over the ocean and then a sharp 180 bank to the south to line up on the north complex runways (6/24). The south side was still doing departures over the ocean, so it was very strange to be landing in the opposite direction of the departures.

1K SFO

This is Mrs. Jet2K. This post finally got me to be a real poster instead of a lurker. I think I'll be keeping Jet2K a while longer .

Oh yes, a night in LA would be nice!

wimpypipsqueak

I dont remember seeing any departures after midnight for UA from either LAX or SFO on the departure boards. The latest red-eyes are 11:59 IIRC.

You cal look here for currently scheduled departures, and if you look later enough in the afternoon / evening you wont see any UA deprtures from SFO after midnight.

http://www.flysfo.com/airlines/arrivdepart/results.asp