What happened to Ted flight 1462 from Reno, Nev., to Denver on July 23rd?
Here’s what went down according to one passenger on the flight. Ted 1462 was supposed to leave at 5 p.m. but was delayed until 7:30 p.m. because of “weather,” according to a reservations agent.
Passengers boarded at 7:45 p.m. and the flight didn’t take off until after 8 p.m. — about four hours after its originally scheduled departure time.
The reason? Apparently Ted — United’s low-fare unit — couldn’t find a pilot.
“Ted simply forgot to give us a crew,” said Audrey Strong, who was on the flight with her husband, Richard.
Even the flight attendants were “baffled” by the crew mix-up. They told the Strongs, “You definitely deserve some sort of compensation because this is totally the airline’s fault.”
Do they?
First of all, I should say that I forwarded the Strong’s case to United yesterday to get its side of the story on 1462. When I get a response, I will add it to this blog posting.
Second, are the flight attendants correct? Check out United’s CSR file and in particular, its contract of carriage.
Scroll on down to United’s Rule 240, and you’ll see that United should have sent passengers on the next flight to Denver, even if it was on another airline.
The best that Ted 1462 passengers can hope for now that he flight is over is to write a polite letter to United and get a few goodwill vouchers.
United responds: After this item posted, United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski sent the following response: “The crew that was assigned to fly Ted flight 1462 did
not originate in Reno, which as you know is very common…assigned crew arrive on inbound flights that they have flown into a particular city.
“The crew’s schedule was to fly Phoenix to Denver (segment one) and then Denver to Reno (segment two) and then Reno to Denver (segment three). The crew got held up in Phoenix due to the weather in Phoenix, and did not make their Denver to Reno flight and that is why there was temporarily no crew available.
“We certainly did have pilots available on-call and those were the pilots that we deadheaded to Reno to fly the Ted flight 1462 you are asking about. Since Reno is not a base for United, we had to deadhead pilots into Reno whereas in our hubs we can call-in pilots who can get to work
in an hour.”
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I call BS on this. If UA doesn’t have a crew, then their passengers should be entitled to compensation. I assume there were many passengers who missed connections in DEN and then had to spend the night. Those passengers should get hotel rooms and meal vouchers. I’d also think UA would provide some compensation.
For anyone who needed to get somewhere the next day and missed their trip, they could probably invoke the “futile trip” clause in some DGR and get their money back. I pulled that with NW a couple years back, got my flight refunded and a $150 voucher.
(They’d stranded me in DTW without pilots. They offered to fly me to my destination — TUL — via ATL, getting me in 8 hours late and in time to miss a wedding. It took a lot of calls, but I invoked the futile trip clause and got reimbursed.)