#unitedairlines — Public Fediverse posts

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.

Dulles Airport does need a reboot, but the two dumbest parts of its $22.5 billion redesign need to get the boot first

For decades, it was screamingly obvious that Washington Dulles International Airport desperately needed three upgrades: extending Metro to there, replacing its horribly cramped C/D concourse, and retiring the giant, wheeled Mobile Lounges and Plane Mates that haul passengers around my city’s international airport.

We got the first thing done in 2022, and now Wednesday’s announcement of a $22.5 billion transformation of the airport puts the second two objectives in the measurable future.

For the most part, the new plan seems good. A new series of concourses, starting with the already-under-construction E concourse, would replace the 1985-vintage, window-deprived C/D facility that United Airlines regulars rightfully despise. And an expanded Aerotrain network would end the need to take those people movers–often crowded, always reeking slightly of diesel fuel–to or from the D concourse and from arriving international flights to IAD’s International Arrivals Building.

But two of the components of this new concept aren’t in the Master Plan that MWAA approved last year and instead seem to reflect the input of somebody who may have last flown commercial out of Dulles in the previous millennium: President Trump.

The more immediately offensive idea, seen in three of the “conceptual renderings” on MWAA’s site, would plop a blob of glass and concrete atop the iconic, Eero Saarinen-designed Main Terminal–a triumph of Brutalist architecture and one of Saarinen’s finest works anywhere.

In addition to being ugly and enormously expensive to build, that addition would add capacity where Dulles doesn’t need it most. Although check-in desks at the Main Terminal can get crowded around major holidays, that building usually serves as an efficient funnel to the security checkpoints.

And should we ever need to expand the terminal, we already know how do that without doing violence to Saarinen’s masterpiece–by building extensions of the original structure as MWAA did in 1996.

The less obvious dumb idea in the new plan isn’t mentioned in the announcements from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and IAD’s dominant carrier United Airlines but did get a plug from Trump during an Oval Office unveiling of the plan: adding a 32,000-space parking garage.

That would be almost 50 percent more than IAD’s current parking capacity: 4,508 and 3,727 spaces in the two daily garages, plus 1,852 in the terminal lot (and an unspecified number of valet spots) and 11,431 in the economy lots that require a bus ride to the terminal.

What Trump bragged would the largest parking garage in the world would also be extravagantly expensive to build. A study released in February by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies cited a $29,000 per-space construction cost for aboveground parking in the D.C. market, so that adds up to $928 million before any premium for building next to an active airport.

That exercise in auto-addled thinking needs to go in the same circular file as the plan’s disfiguration of the Main Terminal.

Cost grounds alone should see to that: Even if United writes a very large check to MWAA, the airports authority would still be floating billions of dollars in bonds, with interest costs that passengers would wind up paying. The smaller the total price tag, the smaller the rise in the cost per enplanement (CPE) that winds up in the price of every ticket. MWAA projects a $12.77 CPE for this year, but that figure could exceed $90 under this scheme and place IAD in the same stratospheric altitude as JFK.

I am somewhat confident that these bottom-line considerations will lead MWAA and UA, who will have to deal with this project long after Trump leaves office, to do the right thing. That may be foolish optimism on my part, but I’ve already seen sanity prevail in one other way here: This week’s discussions about the future of Dulles have not featured any suggestions that we make the place yet another thing renamed for Trump.

United Airlines says it will ‘look into’ worker’s threat to call ICE in viral video
By Roque Planas

United staffer told customer ‘you don’t act like at a citizen’ during incident over wait time at San Francisco airport

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/20/united-airlines-san-francisco-airport-ice-threat

#SanFrancisco #UnitedAirlines #Airtransport #ICEUSImmigrationandCustomsEnforcement #USimmigration #California #WestCoast #USnews #Worldnews #USpolitics #TheGuardian #RoquePlanas

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. ↩︎

Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies, Serve Robotics, Android 17, United Airlines’ ambitions, Polymarket’s pop-up bar

CHICAGO–This is one of my favorite cities in the U.S., but it doesn’t show up in my work travel as often as I’d like. So I’m delighted that the Online News Association decided to move its annual conference from late summer to early spring and then stage this year’s event here–in a hotel that should be familiar to everybody who’s seen The Fugitive.

Patreon readers got a bonus post that I’d meant to have written weeks earlier: a recap of MWC Barcelona in which I also gave away a global eSIM to the first reader to ask for it.

3/24/2026: The most innovative robotics and engineering companies of 2026, Fast Company

This list, the product of months of research and editorial back-and-forth, finally emerged online this week. And then we had to run a quick correction after one of the companies honored said that we’d mentioned an achievement that they did not want disclosed.

3/25/2026: Delivery Robots Have a Mapping Problem, PCMag

I sat down in a hotel lobby in Austin during SXSW with MJ Burk Chun, co-founder and vice president of product and design at Serve Robotics, to talk about the issues that company is working to address as it tries to scale up having four-wheeled robots cart food deliveries to customers.

3/27/2026: Google Ships Latest Android 17 Beta. Here’s What’s New, PCMag

In between having so many longer stories to write, I was happy to get one that I could bang out in an hour or so.

3/28/2026: United’s New Upgrades Aim to Keep You Online and Fully Charged at 35,000 Feet, PCMag

My week started with me flying to another one of United’s hubs–with the airline covering my airfare and lodging–for its United Elevated event at LAX. In addition to looping me into UA’s ambitions for its onboard product, this event doubled as a reunion with some of the avgeek journalists I met at Cranky Dorkfest in September and with my former Washington Post colleague Lori Aratani, who interviewed United CEO Scott Kirby onstage Tuesday morning.

3/29/2026: Pints meet prop bets: Polymarket’s “Situation Room” pop-up bar in DC, Ars Technica

I thought I saw an opportunity to write for this occasional client for the first time since the summer of 2023; fortunately, my editor then and now agreed.

Boeing’s certification logjam begins to break with FAA approval of 787 upgrade

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://theaircurrent.com/aircraft-development/boeing-certification-faa-787-upgrade-mtow/

Capital City Airport At Lansing MI postcard
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#CapitalCityAirport #LansingMichigan #AirportTerminals #UnitedAirlines #JetAircraft #AirportAprons #AerialViews #b727 #b737 #AirportArchitecture #VintagePostcards #OldPostcards #Postcards

1959 First 720 Press Photo.
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#Boeing720 #Boeing #b720 #UnitedAirLines #PrattWhitneyJT3C7 #Avgeek #AircraftManufacturing #Aviation #AviationHistory #1950sAviation #PressPhotographs

1959 First 720 Press Photo.
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#Boeing720 #Boeing #b720 #UnitedAirLines #PrattWhitneyJT3C7 #Avgeek #AircraftManufacturing #Aviation #AviationHistory #1950sAviation #PressPhotographs

1959 First 720 Press Photo.
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#Boeing720 #Boeing #b720 #UnitedAirLines #PrattWhitneyJT3C7 #Avgeek #AircraftManufacturing #Aviation #AviationHistory #1950sAviation #PressPhotographs

1959 First 720 Press Photo.
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#Boeing720 #Boeing #b720 #UnitedAirLines #PrattWhitneyJT3C7 #Avgeek #AircraftManufacturing #Aviation #AviationHistory #1950sAviation #PressPhotographs

1959 First 720 Press Photo.
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#Boeing720 #Boeing #b720 #UnitedAirLines #PrattWhitneyJT3C7 #Avgeek #AircraftManufacturing #Aviation #AviationHistory #1950sAviation #PressPhotographs

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.

1962 Unites Air Lines LAX Advertisement
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#Aviation #Avgeek #lax #UnitedAirLines #JetAge #AviationHistory #MidCenturyDesign #AirlineAdvertising #LAX #LosAngelesInternationalAirport #DC8 #VintageTravel #1960sAviation #AirportArchitecture #GoldenAgeOfFlight #AviationHeritage #AirlineHistory #VintageAirlines #JetMainliner #AviationPhotography #TravelHistory

United Airline planes landing at SFO while passing in front of the Harvest Supermoon.

#UnitedAirlines @united #PlaneSpotting #Aviation #AviationPhotography #Supermoon #Moon #HarvestMoon #HuntersMoon @flysfo #shotoncanon @canonusa #Photography #sfo #sfoairport

October 06, 2025 at 09:42PM

via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DPfriGdkTv_/

A long goodbye to the Queen of the Skies

There’s no airplane that I’ll miss more when it vanishes from passenger service than the Boeing 747. The original jumbo jet hasn’t just helped to knit the world together since its first revenue flight in 1970, that iconic four-engine widebody has also been a recurring character in my own traveling life for decades.

For the first few of those decades, the Queen of the Skies was more of a regular character for how it owned most overseas itineraries and often soaked up capacity on transcontinental domestic routes. My first flight across the Atlantic that I can remember involved a Pan Am 747; I first flew across the Pacific on a Northwest Airlines 747. And at any airport where the 747 flew, there was no mistaking that aircraft, with its upper-deck hump and quadruple main landing gear, for any other.

(Especially if the 747 in question was one of the two operated by NASA and customized to fly space shuttles across the U.S.)

But by the time I boarded that NW flight from Detroit to Tokyo in 1998, the 747 was already starting to see its commercial sunset as twin-engine widebodies like Boeing’s 777 began securing safety certification to operate increasingly lengthy routes at lower costs than the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 trijet widebodies that had once been the 747’s primary long-haul competition.

The first decade of this century featured far fewer 747 flights for me, although the one my wife and I took from Dulles to Beijing in 2007 stands out for a different reason: a seating overlap led United to move us up to business class. My final flight on a 747 operated by the airline I’ve flown more than any other came a decade later, when I was able to clear an upgrade and grab the last seat open on the upper deck of a 747-400 flying from San Francisco to Shanghai.

United retired the 747 in November of that year–and since I was at Web Summit in Lisbon that week, I couldn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money on UA’s farewell 747 flight from SFO to Honolulu.

But that was not my own farewell to the 747. Air China, Lufthansa and Korean Air still fly the 747-8, the final version produced, and a press trip to Helsinki in 2022 gave me a chance to apply an upgrade to a Lufthansa flight from Newark to Frankfurt and enjoy one more ride on the 747’s upper deck. The view up there has no equivalent to what you can see from a 777, 787, Airbus A330 or any other single-deck long-range airliner.

And then this Wednesday morning found me boarding yet another LH-operated 747-8, this time with a boarding pass for a seat in the nose. After years of reading trip reviews rhapsodizing about Lufthansa’s first class and reminding readers about how to redeem miles from partner airlines’ programs for that experience, news of an impending devaluation for Lufthansa redemptions made me realize that I had left one 747 flight undone on my checklist.

So I cashed in a large stash of Avianca LifeMiles, collected by leveraging a bank sign-up bonus earned in 2021, to book myself a one-way first-class 747-8 flight from Frankfurt to Dulles, burned some United miles to get myself from Dulles to Frankfurt, and used a Hyatt free-night certificate for the overnight stay in between.

(I wrote a longer breakdown for Patreon readers of the long game involved in this travel hack, including my surprisingly small out-of-pocket costs for this bucket-list trip.)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown across the Atlantic, but I can report that Wednesday’s flight in seat 2K–below the cockpit and ahead of the front landing gear, so far forward that I could not see the wing–stands apart from those other crossings, and not only for the luxury involved.

If I never fly the Queen again–or the two other four-engine long-haul jets in commercial service in the West, the Airbus A340 and A380–that’s okay. But if another opportunity somehow presents itself to fly a 747, preferably upstairs or upfront… it might be hard to turn down.

#747 #7478 #A340 #A380 #avgeek #aviation #Boeing #Boeing747 #bucketList #fourEngineAirliner #jumboJet #Lufthansa #Northwest #PanAm #QueenOfTheSkies #UnitedAirlines #widebody