UAL 915. No upgrade. 8D, aisle seat on an A320. Not a disaster… Although it is the 2nd time I’ve done that flight in 8 days.
Light chop for much of the way after Denver, some mountain wave was coming off the Rockies as well.
Flying the Modesto 3 STAR, we entered a hold at CEDES along with a whole bunch of other aircraft, since SFO couldn’t do parallel ops on the 28s. Ch9 was up, and I was dismayed to hear that we could be out here for 30mins (I’m drafting this while we’re in the hold). We got a clearance pretty shortly after that, probably only 8 mins in the hold all up; a jink to the south-west, thence MEHTA and final approach up the Bay.
On final we were requested to go as slow as possible, which our pilots reported as 140 KTS. Landed on 28R.
Flightaware track, zoomed in on the hold and approach.
Trips to DC usually start with a pre-dawn wakeup in California, screaming up the 101 to SFO ahead of the morning rush, mixing it up with perfumed/cologned business types in the security line, and discovering that you’re 12th on an upgrade list 80 names long, with 2 seats remaining in 1st class, making you wonder what the hell is 1K good for when SFO is your home market.
Not today. I took the late flight, 3.50pm departure. A morning of work in Palo Alto, ran a seminar at Stanford at noon, lunch with a colleague, then 2pm ride to airport. Got the upgrade, seat 2D on a 757. Seatguru is right about the equipment box under the seat in front, but its not a deal-breaker. Takeoff from 28R and a sharp right back onto the usual east-bound departure route over the Bay, Oakland (the SFO8 DP, with a 110 degree turn from the runway heading to 030, and I was on the right-hand side of the plane).
Lovely late afternoon views of the Sierra, with some snow cover starting to appear, Half Dome marking Yosemite Valley about two valleys to our south.
There is no in-seat power in the United 757s (hasn’t been for ages, at least in the 757s I’ve been getting out of SFO), and no channel 9 on this flight. The pilots did pipe through WFAN coverage of the last game of the World Series once we got, say, about an hour from Dulles, on ch9. Uneventful approach and landing, rolled out, no reverse thrust.
This guy wins (WSJ). And he is a sales director at UAL.
Friday night at LAX. I’m headed back to the Bay Area. Our departure gate was next to the united Sydney flight. It is weird to look over at those faces and immediately see the Australian stock. You know immediately you are looking at a predominantly Australian crowd, but it takes a little while for the cognitive part of the brain to figure out why… Predominantly white, close to zero Latino faces, perhaps a tad ganglier relative to the other people in the terminal, in LA, in the USA.
On taxi I spied 4 QF 747s and an A380 plus two V Australia 777s. That’s a lot of inventory headed to Oz from here.
I’m just catching up with this story: Delta has to fly planes to the United Kingdom to be sprayed with insecticide (for malaria and dengue fever) so as to meet Australian quarantine regulations (which apparently also stipulate that the treatments be done at an AQIS site outside the United States).
Remember the old days when they wouldn’t let you deplane upon arrival into Australia until the Quarantine people would walk down the aisles spraying cans of stuff into the air? Quite the welcome.
As Roy & HG might say, this raises more questions than it answers. How do the other non-Australian carriers deal with this? Is this for real, or a nice “barrier to entry” designed to protect Qantas, or both? When Australian airlines take delivery of new (or leased) aircraft, do they have to go through the spraying rigmarole off-shore somewhere?
Details appear this AQIS document, see Appendix 5 for a list of AQIS “approved organisations for Residual Disinsection”. Indeed, none in the USA.
So I need to do SFO-YYZ-SFO for APSA. I buy a ticket on ual.com. It is a code-share Air Canada flight, UAL and Air Canada being Star Alliance and all that, right?
I investigate upgrade possibilities. UAL can’t upgrade me on Air Canada: “it isn’t our plane, they [Air Canada] don’t reciprocate like that”. Air Canada says “we can’t upgrade you using United miles, it isn’t our ticket”.
Nice.
The UAL 1K lady says “Sorry that I can’t help you, but thanks for flying United.” I reply “if only”.
From the NY Times:
In fact, when the latest round of capacity cuts takes effect in September, the number of seats on domestic flights will drop to 66.5 million — the lowest September figure since 1984, according to OAG Aviation, which tracks flight schedules.
September 1984. 1st term Reagan. 25 years ago.
The same article mentions that United is being watched very closely, with continued big declines in international passenger numbers in 1st and business (the pointy end of the plane where they make their money). Trans-Pacific routes are some of the hardest hit.
I’m particularly interested in how United are doing on the suddenly-very-competitive Australia-West Coast routes. The airlines have been slashing fares to try to keep the planes full (and not doing too badly on that score, afaik), but it does make me wonder if anyone is making any money on the route at the moment, and how long they (UA, QF, V-Australia, Delta) can keep it up.
As all flight nerds know, United airlines lets you listen to air traffic control on their in-plane audio. On the trans-Pacific flights this is silent for all but the first and last 30 minutes of the flight (once we’re beyond the reach of terrestrial radar cover ATC is conducted via a satellite data link with the old-fashioned HF radio serving as a backup).
Anyway, I was listening in outbound from SFO on UAL863 and caught a recently departed Philippines 747 which couldn’t get its landing gear up after takeoff and was dumping fuel over the Pacific for at least 20 mins before it was light enough to attempt a landing back at SFO.
This kind of thing happens all the time, I suppose, but I’ve never heard it happening live on ATC.
I don’t know if this triggers an emergency landing at SFO, or even it would make the news.
My other thoughts were that (a) environmental risks, they are dropping a lot of unburned Jet A 10-30 miles off the coast; (b) cost — that plane would have been carrying a lot of fuel for the flight to Manilla, and the airline is on the hook for that, plus hotels for passengers back at SFO, I suppose…
Speaking of cost and airline industry stuff: tonight’s UAL flight to Sydney has a very light load. I got a nice upstairs seat with no one next to me, no problem (that has never happened before) and the load is “very very light” according to the United people. When I was flying SYD-SFO about 10 or 11 days ago it was V-Australia’s debut flight. It is an interesting time for a bit of extra competition on these routes (heading out of summer in Australia, recession biting both countries…).
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