Some 777/744 Aircraft to Return to Hawaii Routes Soon
 

Today's (hard copy) Business Section of the Chicago Tribune had a couple of articles about UA. One of the articles noted that Goodwin remarked that the airline "will redirect to domestic markets, including Hawaii, some of the large Boeing 777 and 747 aircraft earmarked for summer use on its (UA's) Atlantic and Pacific international routes."

The article focused on the recent shareholder mtg. in Palm Beach and United's plans to use larger aircraft on many routes, to help fight delays by flying so many smaller aircraft to the same locations multiple times each day.

Wonder if HNL will get direct service from ORD again this winter?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...180172,FF.html

In the case of the 744s, would this mean UA would have 3 classes of service to Hawaii?

This article mentions some great news -- that UA will soon mothball its more than 70 727 jets. I've flown the SMF-DEN-MSY route many times stuck in a 727 all the way.

I wonder if this explains why a large number of flights on the web site no longer list the specific equipment to be used. Or is this just another glitch?

I'm going to have to go with "glitch", but I could be wrong. I've noticed this problem for some of my flights in the next two weeks and I have to assume that it's possible to tell, with very good accuracy, aircraft types two weeks out. Another related bug I've noticed is that some 757 flights are showing up as 3-class (e.g. the 5:30 IAD-SFO flight).

Resumption of the ORD-HNL nonstop can't come soon enough for those of us frequently flying to the midwest and east coast from HNL. United used to call Hawaii "Our little corner of the world," flying ORD(2x per day), DEN, Seattle, Hong Kong, Auckland, Manila, Osaka all nonstop. Now, it only flies to/from LAX/SFO to Hawaii and 1 flight a day to NRT.....that's it.

The "3 class" is not a glitch - its to allow pricing in conjunction with an int'l C fare so that the domestic segment prices in C and not in F. It's still a 2 cabin plane. The C inventory gets you a seat in F, but you can't book it without the connecting segment.

I mentioned in the Impossible seating configurations on UC 3.0 thread yesterday that it appears you can purchase the following itinerary on united.com:

UA815 ORD-LAX, "Business" class (757)
UA122 LAX-ORD, First class (A320)
round-trip fare $3718.00

If the outbound flight is booked in First class (same seats), the round-trip fare is $3728.00

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Tony

I wonder if they'll reconfigure some of the 747-400's to 2-Class service like they did with the old 747-100's when they were doing the HNL runs from LAX and SFO. They can't have that many paying F and C customers on those routes...and it would open up (theoretically!) more award inventory.

It would be cool if they reconfigured some of the 744 to two cabin, like the 747-100. Especially if they keep an international business class seat (with the footrest). I used to love flying in row 1 on the 747-100, great space, one cabin upgrade from economy, and domestic first class service as opposed to the watered down domestic business class service.

When I flew SFO-HNL last Sept it was on 744 with international B seats. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif The return flight was on 741 and what a difference!

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