ChasenSFO
hen teaser
Happens more than you'd think. In my time at SFO dealing with these things, I saw many Pacific-bound flights turn around making a 10+ hour journey to nowhere. It usually seems to come down to "Well, we can divert to HNL/ANC and strand the airplane and people there, or just go back to SFO where we have the resources to fix the plane and move the people". So United flights often just turn around while JAL and others may end up in HNL or something.
The worst I saw was a United 747 going to Beijing. They were on some weird routing already due to storms that was going to add time to the flight and then the alt select knob on the MCP went haywire causing the pilots to have to manually hold altitude. They tried to divert to ANC as this was when UA had already moved all 747s to SFO for reliability reasons and always had spares so the plan was to have a rescue plane in ANC within a few hours of the diversion. I wasn't told this, but I'd imagine the deadheading crew would not be legal to continue and pax would spend the night in ANC anyway, but at least they'd be off the plane hours sooner and have a quicker Pacific hop the next day. Well, wx in ANC forced them to end up coming all the way back to SFO. Just under 14 hours to nowhere. They arrived at SFO past the times customs on Concourse G would close, so they had to hold in the South Ramp for over an hour for the redeye Asia/Latin America bank to give an open 747 gate, and that night Singapore and Air India were ALSO using the A Concourse due to late arrivals so the rag-tag end of the night low-staffing for customs had to process 2 777-300ERs then a 747-400 unexpectedly. I'm sure that took forever. After all was said and done, there was a lot of "Wait, why were they forced to use customs if they never landed in Asia" e-mail action. When I was asked if I had weighed in on that, I said, "I was told not to argue with the Watch Commander of CBP ever again, so I didn't even ask when he told me they'd need an international gate and couldn't use T3". The next day, the 747 used for the extra section broke LOL. The issue was a leak of some kind resulting in the 747 not being allowed to tow off the gate. We didn't have an extra gate for another 747 to tow onto until the early evening and the entire crew ended up being replaced. They got there almost 48 hours behind schedule if I recall with the pax being in a plane or an airport for most of that time. Such is life.
Flying is awesome, but trust me, 1.5 decades of operation roles mostly at large hubs has shown me a side of aviation that you don't hear much about. And let me tell you, they don't like people like me who love to tell everyone how the pizza is made haha.
The worst I saw was a United 747 going to Beijing. They were on some weird routing already due to storms that was going to add time to the flight and then the alt select knob on the MCP went haywire causing the pilots to have to manually hold altitude. They tried to divert to ANC as this was when UA had already moved all 747s to SFO for reliability reasons and always had spares so the plan was to have a rescue plane in ANC within a few hours of the diversion. I wasn't told this, but I'd imagine the deadheading crew would not be legal to continue and pax would spend the night in ANC anyway, but at least they'd be off the plane hours sooner and have a quicker Pacific hop the next day. Well, wx in ANC forced them to end up coming all the way back to SFO. Just under 14 hours to nowhere. They arrived at SFO past the times customs on Concourse G would close, so they had to hold in the South Ramp for over an hour for the redeye Asia/Latin America bank to give an open 747 gate, and that night Singapore and Air India were ALSO using the A Concourse due to late arrivals so the rag-tag end of the night low-staffing for customs had to process 2 777-300ERs then a 747-400 unexpectedly. I'm sure that took forever. After all was said and done, there was a lot of "Wait, why were they forced to use customs if they never landed in Asia" e-mail action. When I was asked if I had weighed in on that, I said, "I was told not to argue with the Watch Commander of CBP ever again, so I didn't even ask when he told me they'd need an international gate and couldn't use T3". The next day, the 747 used for the extra section broke LOL. The issue was a leak of some kind resulting in the 747 not being allowed to tow off the gate. We didn't have an extra gate for another 747 to tow onto until the early evening and the entire crew ended up being replaced. They got there almost 48 hours behind schedule if I recall with the pax being in a plane or an airport for most of that time. Such is life.
Flying is awesome, but trust me, 1.5 decades of operation roles mostly at large hubs has shown me a side of aviation that you don't hear much about. And let me tell you, they don't like people like me who love to tell everyone how the pizza is made haha.
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