#unitedairlines — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: Qualcomm’s problematic 6G pitch, Android feature drop, United Airlines app, Google display-ads case

I have rarely appreciated having a Monday off as much as I do right now–only a few days after a nine-day stretch in which I traveled from home to San Diego and back and then to Orlando and back and then to Dublin and back. Because of all that travel, I didn’t get around to posting photos of last weekend’s trip to see the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope until Friday and spent part of Saturday afternoon writing a post that I couldn’t finish Friday.

Patreon readers got an extra this week: a post published Monday about how T-Mobile’s recent fondness for retroactive rate increases should have me researching my alternatives, except that I have yet to do much in the way of that.

8/31/2026: Qualcomm’s 6G Pitch Has Efficiency Covered. Privacy Is Another Story, PCMag

I already had qualms about Qualcomm’s understanding of people’s privacy concerns in its early marketing for 6G. The “6G Leadership Day” event the company staged in San Diego–with Qualcomm covering my airfare, lodging and ground transfers there–did not dispel my sense that this firm is having a read-the-room problem.

9/1/2026: Latest Android Feature Drop Helps You Keep Tabs on Items Without a Tracker, PCMag

I had barely enough free time Sunday to write this post from an advance copy of Google’s announcement.

9/1/2026: Flight Cancelled? United App Adds New Standby Options to Get You Moving Faster, PCMag

When I think of United and flight delays, Newark comes to mind–so I picked a photo of UA jets at EWR to illustrate this. And then I spent more time than planned Wednesday at my original home airport, courtesy of flight delays.

9/3/2026: Google Dodges Forced Breakup in US Display-Ads Case, PCMag

This news dropped while I was somewhere over the Atlantic, but since nobody at PCMag had covered it by Thursday morning I was able to write this later that day during the slower moments of the Identity Week conference in D.C.

A lesson taught again by flight delays: Airlines need to be in the communication business

I managed the dubious achievement of spending an extra hour or so on different Dulles Airport taxiways two days in a row–and one of those was much easier to deal with than the other.

The first one was the worse one. After a delayed departure from San Diego (at the end of a Qualcomm event for which the company covered travel costs for journalists and analysts invited), we landed Thursday night and then took about 50 minutes to cover the last mile or so.

The pilot gave one update after we’d stopped by IAD’s private-jet facilities, one of the farthest points possible on a taxiway from our assigned gate in the C concourse, explaining that recent thunderstorms had caused multiple delays and left our gate occupied. And then we had extended periods of silence as passengers who had connecting flights in the event’s last bank of transatlantic departures started getting antsy and then angry.

We did finally reach our gate at 10:40 p.m., and from the departure boards showing those late flights getting delayed to 11:15 p.m. or beyond, it looked like everybody should have made their connections. I was just happy to be able to take the last Metro train home.

Less than 16 hours later, I was back at Dulles for a flight to Orlando. This one pushed back on time, then stopped on the way to runway 30–and we didn’t have to wonder why, as this pilot explained that they’d discovered an issue with the emergency-evacuation lighting not working that required us to return to the gate for maintenance technicians to assess.

He kept coming back on to update us on the progress of things, both at the gate and then when we spent close to an hour parked near our previous stopping point while air traffic control had to revise our route and the airline’s dispatchers redid the numbers on our flight.

This second flight had two other things absent from the first: audio from the flight deck available via the seatback screens (what I still think of as Channel 9, from its spot on United’s old audio system) and Starlink inflight connectivity.

Being able to hear our crew communicate with ATC kept me ahead of developments, while free WiFi that actually worked let me follow our flight’s progress in the Flightradar24 app on my phone. I also could have used that satellite connectivity to tune into LiveATC.net on my phone, but then I’d have had to pick particular feeds after our departure.

After we landed, I thanked the pilot for taking time to let us know what had been holding up things and for having Channel 9 on… and then he said he didn’t know that system had been on, joking that this meant I’d known more than he did.

But intentional or not, being kept in the loop and having ways to put myself in the loop made me feel a little more appreciated as a customer. I’ll try to remember how that felt when I’m going on about my own work, here and on social media.

Special Report: The reasons Spirit Airlines failed are also why United wants American

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://theaircurrent.com/airlines/special-report-us-airlines-reverse-spirit-united-american/

Flights to nowhere can be fun

I hadn’t planned on my brief visit to Vancouver for Web Summit’s second annual conference there to include any flying between my landing at Vancouver International Airport Monday and my departure from YVR Thursday morning. But sometimes, your event schedule has a gap just large enough for somebody to pilot a floatplane through.

That idea of taking an aerial tour of Vancouver got lodged in my head at Web Summit Vancouver last May–when I found myself distracted by aircraft departing from and arriving at Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, next to the convention center and its bitmapped-orca Douglas Coupland sculpture.

And as I was nearing the end of my first five appointments on an overscheduled Tuesday, I realized that a) I had almost two hours before my next appointment and b) the weather looked ideal for flying, at least compared to Wednesday morning’s forecast of clouds and possibly rain. So I booked a 20-minute tour flight on Harbour Air’s site at what seemed a workable time before I had to walk a few blocks away for an offsite panel.

The flight on this 67-year-old de Havilland DHC-3T Turbine Otter was what I hoped and expected it to be, going from my experience taking a floatplane ride above Seattle out of Lake Union 13 years ago. Taking to the air and returning from it without solid ground below the wing feels like cheating at flying; being in a plane small enough where you can see the pilot adjust the controls and almost immediately see and feel the aircraft respond provides an extraordinary demonstration of aerodynamics at work; the views from a large and non-pressurized window maybe 1,000 feet above ground are magical.

(The timing of this particular flight was less than magical, in the sense that it seemed that Harbour consolidated its 3 and 3:15 p.m. tour flights into one that departed at 3:20 and then left me hustling to get to my panel. I’ll expand on my avoidable scheduling fail in this Sunday’s weekly recap.)

Avgeeks sometimes call out-and-back bookings like this “flights to nowhere,”1 and I’ve now taken enough of them to realize I may have a bit of a flying problem.

My introduction, as far as I can remember, took place at a 1997 air show at College Park’s airport–the oldest continuously-operated airfield in the world–at which I recall paying $20 in cash for a flight in what years-later searching suggests was a Stearman Model 75 Kaydet biplane.

I then went almost 16 years before the next such flight, my Lake Union joyride–and then followed that days later with a balloon excursion above Sonoma County, Calif., that remains my slowest-ever aviation experience.

2014 bought a work-related flight to nowhere, a hop out of Austin during SXSW on the inflight WiFi operator Gogo’s business jet. That company invited me to try out the ground-to-air connectivity on this Canadair CL-600 by texting people, so I taunted a friend on the ground with “I’m texting you from a private jet. How are you?” and got the reply I deserved.

I had another Gogo flight to AUS and back in 2016 on the 737-500 that Gogo had acquired in the meantime, on which I saw a travel journalist successfully ask the pilots for a chance to experience takeoff in the cockpit jumpseat. That led me to make the same request before another Gogo flight on that 737 in 2017, treating me to an EWR-departure experience unlike any other.

In 2019, a friend took my wife and I on a tour above Sonoma County in his Diamond Star DA40 single-engine, four-seat aircraft. That remains my smallest-plane experience, and the only one in which I got to touch the controls. Briefly.

In 2021, I had my loudest-plane experience when I spent $450 to fly on a 1945-vintage B-25 bomber out of Hagerstown, Md., my only flight to date to allow a view from a tail gunner’s seat.

And in 2023, JSX treated me and other invited journalists to a DAL-DAL hop to try out Starlink WiFi on an Embraer 145.

The last two years tacked on ORD-ORD and LAX-LAX flights courtesy of United Airlines to test their deployment of Starlink on an Embraer 175 and then a Boeing 737. And with this week’s joyride above British Columbia’s metropolis, I have to accept that I’ve developed a moderately expensive habit here.

Which is okay with me.

1. The bad kind of “flight to nowhere” involves a long-haul international flight that experiences some sort of malfunction that requires returning to the departure airport, even if that requires backtracking across much of an ocean. ↩︎

United CEO is skeptical of eVTOL airport taxis, but FAA has a more nuanced take

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://theaircurrent.com/air-traffic-control/united-skeptical-evtol-airport-taxis-faa-simulations-scott-kirby/

Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations

This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)

2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar

My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.

2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag

I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.

2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag

I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.

2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag

Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.

2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag

I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.

2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag

Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.

Ranking United’s mid-continent hub airports for connections

Having a major United Airlines hub be a one-seat Metro ride from my home does not ensure that I get a nonstop flight as often as I might like. The obvious reason is that flights to smaller cities usually require connecting somewhere; the non-obvious reason is that United will often price a connecting flight for significantly less than a direct one.

Whatever the cause, the outcome leaves me as a traveler with a choice: At which United hub should I plan to change planes after flying out of Dulles? Or National?

This week’s travel treated me to more time at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport than I had planned on, which got me thinking about how I would rank ORD and UA’s other two options for connecting somewhere in the middle third of the U.S., Denver International Airport and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport

ORD: The worst part of O’Hare is the inexplicably long taxi every flight seems to take between runway and gate or vice versa–even though this airport’s taxi times are bad but not the worst, my flights never seem to take anything close to a direct path. But once I finally reach ORD, hopefully after postcard views of the Loop’s skyscrapers on the way in, seeing Helmut Jahn’s glass-and-steel architecture in Terminal 1 puts a smile on my face. And Michael Hayden’s “Sky’s the Limit” animated sculpture in the tunnel connecting T1’s B and C concourses brightens any travel day a little more. T2’s dreary F concourse, however, adds no glee to my travel experience and can be a long walk away from B or C.

Most of the United Club lounges are good, while the larger, newer one by gate C11 is outright great. ORD is devoid of credit-card lounges in United’s terminal spaces, but it offsets that shortfall by having the best airport restaurant in the U.S., Tortas Frontera.

O’Hare offers one other advantage: an easy, cheap transit ride to downtown that should vastly open up housing possibilities if I get stuck overnight–which somehow hasn’t happened to me since 2009.

DEN: America’s largest airport has been strikingly efficient in my experience despite its vast size–by which I mean, taxi paths don’t make me think of Chicago. Moving walkways speed getting from one end of each terminal to another, and the underground train system does the same for transfers between terminals… except when it breaks down, which has been happening an alarming amount of time lately.

That possibility makes me nervous, as does the potential of having to relive some bad security-line experiences here.

To DEN’s credit, United has immensely improved its selection of lounges at Denver International Airport after years of neglect. And Capital One’s upscale lounge in the A terminal constitutes a good reason to keep that travel-rewards credit card.

DEN’s train to downtown isn’t as cheap as ORD’s, but I do appreciate having that option in addition to all the hotels dotted along Peña Boulevard as that highway makes its lengthy way to Denver.

IAH: The worst part of the airport named after the 41st president (as in, not his far less successful son) isn’t specific to the airport or even Houston in general–it’s the weather. The lines of thunderstorms that regularly roll across Texas frequently hold up my flights to or from here and have twice left me stuck overnight. Bad weather can be a risk anywhere, but it seems to put the biggest dent into my travel hopes here.

IAH’s sprawling layout also routinely leaves me walking longer than at any other United hub, and its taxi times seem second only to ORD’s in my experience. And while United has renovated some of its lounges at Houston, none of them stand out–and the one by gate E11 now qualifies as borderline crummy. The two Priority Pass-accessible lounges from Air France and KLM at the farthest corner of the D concourse don’t add much value in practice.

IAH abounds with nearby hotels, but its inadequate public transportation options generally mean that an unplanned overnight stay either requires an Uber/Lyft/taxi or a wait for a hotel’s shuttle van.

(What about United’s other hubs outside of D.C.? I have to exclude EWR until Newark Airport wraps up the reconstruction of one of its two main runways that has made connecting through there so dicey this year. I think SFO is a great airport overall, but its vulnerability to weather delays and the reconstruction of much of Terminal 3 undercuts its appeal as a connecting airport. LAX does offer the superlative Star Alliance Lounge, but that’s a long walk from United’s gates at T7 and T8–and this airport is not great for short taxi times either.)

Looking at everything I just wrote, I realize that I’d look forward to returning to O’Hare more than I would Denver or Houston. Even though I spent more than three hours at ORD between Tuesday and Wednesday… or maybe because I did.

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