If, as Janice writes in the article, the aircraft scheduled is the one coming in to EWR from Antigua

Most airline travelers will never know the real reason for a flight delay. Most frequent travelers have at least a few stories of being within earshot of airline personnel and hearing about things like paperwork snafus, pilots who overslept, forgetting to cater the plane, etc.
An 8 p.m. United flight from Newark to San Francisco was departing on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Its on-time record last month was no better than a 50 percent. Still, everything appeared fine until about an hour prior to departure, when the airline announced a 30-minute delay.
After doing the math, this didn t make sense. A plane arriving at 7:15 p.m. shouldn t require an hour-and-45-minute turnaround. The complication, according to United, was that an international flight, even from the Caribbean, would have customs delays.
Fair enough. But, in that case, if the plane needed that much time between arrival and departure, there was no way it should have been scheduled to depart Newark at 8 p.m. if it was only scheduled to arrive at 6:56 p.m.
This means one of two things — Either United park plaza hotel reliant center had created a schedule they had no reasonable intention of following, or United had used the plane intended for the Newark to San Francisco leg for another flight and gave us the later arriving plane.
If United had swapped planes, that wouldn t be uncommon. Whether airlines admit it or not, some flights have more priority park plaza hotel reliant center than others, for reasons of load factors, revenue generated, crew issues, overseas park plaza hotel reliant center connections, etc. When an airline park plaza hotel reliant center has several of the same aircraft type, it s relatively easy to swap such aircraft. The passengers who end up delayed when their plane gets borrowed are the ones who suffer.
No one claims scheduling aircraft is easy. In San Francisco, a lot of so-called weather delays are actually a combination of weather and limited take-off and landing slots. Air Traffic Control might limit an airline s total flights in or out, and the airline decides which of its flights to prioritize and which to delay.
(When it s weather, park plaza hotel reliant center as a rule of thumb, longer flights, especially transcontinental or international, usually get priority. So passengers from San Francisco to JFK or Europe might be fine, and anyone going to Los Angeles or Vegas might wish they had driven. In fact, even with that hour-long delay from Newark, we were still better off than many travelers on short flights that Sunday.)
So what do you think, Consumer Traveler readers? Does knowing the reason for a delay matter to you? Or do you only care about honesty in the length of the delay? (There is another whole post!) Or, while we re asking park plaza hotel reliant center questions — at what point should an airline give some compensation to passengers?
Unfortunately this country does not have EC261. So compensation for delays is up to the airlines themselves. Cannot even rely on the old Rule 240. So only reason to lie is to avoid paying on their own committments.
Yes, I think airlines park plaza hotel reliant center owe it to their customers to be honest, especially when delays are chronic, as seem to be the case for this flight. Publishing a flight schedule that is essentially impossible for the airline to adhere to is nothing less than fraud. It s intentional and it dupes customers park plaza hotel reliant center out of money they should be spending elsewhere.
BTW, FlightAware lets you view individual aircraft by tail number ( N numbers in the US). You can see if an airline is occasionally or habitually swapping equipment on a given connecting flight with the same flight number. In my experience, this is not uncommon on flights arriving in the US from a foreign point of origin. Airlines make money by keeping park plaza hotel reliant center their equipment in the air as many hours/day as possible, so while everyone is going through customs and immigration, the arriving aircraft is taken to a domestic gate to get airborne again ASAP.
On a flight to go from Atlanta to Germany, needed to replace a piece of equipment in the cockpit ..simple enough, should not take long. Oh oh, don t have the right size Allen Wrench. Have to locate one and get it here. Made it in time so flight was not scrubbed, but it was touch and go.
If, as Janice writes in the article, the aircraft scheduled is the one coming in to EWR from Antigua, then yes. You can see the inbound tail # and compare it to the aircraft that actually went to SFO under the same flight #.