United coming unglued again?

One of the summers around 2000 United Airlines just totally lost it. Huge delays all of the time, cancelled flights, no reasonable options when your flights were cancelled, etc.

Seems like it might be starting to happen again. There’s only a couple of non-stops between Boston and San Francisco anymore, and they’re all pretty full, so that when something happens there’s nowhere for the passengers to go. I showed up at SFO for my 12:50pm to Boston yesterday and found that it was cancelled. They had conveniently booked me on an 11:30pm red-eye through Chicago that would get me into Boston at 10:30am today. I’m not sure why they didn’t call me (maybe I’m now signed up for something I should be, who knows). Fortunately my 1K status got me to someone who was very helpful, and I was able to get the last seat to Dulles, then up to Boston at 1am last night.

I just heard from my friend Rich that tonight’s redeye is cancelled as well, and they wanted to put him on a flight that would get home Saturday night sometime.

Hopefully this summer won’t be a repeat of 2000…