Stupid United continues to be annoying -- or maybe it's SF

[dr4b]

Flight delayed yet AGAIN this morning -- a 9:45 flight was first said to be 10:05, then moved to 11:15 because of a cloud cover in San Francisco that wouldn't allow us to take off because they weren't sure we could land. We ended up being in flight for a long long time and they even announced at one point, "We're circling over the bay area now in a holding pattern -- we may land in San Jose because we need to refuel..." and then all of a sudden we were allowed to land in SFO after all. At like 2pm. My original flight had me here at 11:30. I didn't get to work until a little after 3pm. It's not the flying commute that bugs me, it's the amount of extra wasted time due to airlines. Sigh.

Comments

[zml.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not clear to me that that's United or SFO sucking. My Alaska SJC flights are rock solid, but you would hate your life flying in there to go to Tagged. I suppose ou could check the Alaska SFO flights this morning and see if they were just as screwed..

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

Wow. And I thought holding in the air was extinct because of traffic management. Which is why they hold planes on the ground in the first place. Anyway, it's probably not United's fault; when the weather conditions deteriorate, they start not being able to land planes in parallel, which cuts the landing throughput. So there probably were planes into SFO all over that had to wait to leave.

SJC and OAK tend not to have weather issues and tend to advertise as much.

[dr4b]

Sadly, United doesn't fly into Oakland :( Ugh. It'd probly be reasonable for me to get to a job in downtown SF, unlike SJC which would take forever on Caltrain/etc :(

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

D'oh! Yeah, SJC to SF just doesn't work at all. BART extension is proceeding, but just to south Fremont; who knows when it'll reach down into SJ, and then it won't get that close to the airport either.

[oren.livejournal.com]

I vote SFO sucking. I've had an Alaska SJC run get stopped by cloud/fog cover before too. Of course doesn't happen as much as SFO.

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

Do you mostly take morning flights to SFO? I'm curious as to whether that's when the fog (and delays) are worst with SFO. When I lived in Santa Clara, I saw lots of morning fog there. I flew SFO with United and US Air, but mainly in the colder months, and I wonder if there was also less fog then.

[dr4b]

Nope, I've been delayed at morning and night and in the afternoon :)