United switches up schedules

Plagued by ongoing problems of late flights, United Airline plans to turn to a new domestic scheduling strategy this fall in an effort to increase its on-time performance.

According to Bloomberg News, United outlined the strategy in a memo to employees. Essentially, it will mean scheduling more out-and-back trips for its mainline aircraft, instead of routing them from one city to another and another over the course of the day.

Thus the same aircraft could make multiple roundtrips to the same destination over the course of a day instead of moving around United’s domestic network.

This approach is designed to limit the number of delays and cancellations during bad winter weather, which can hit United hard at places like its Chicago O’Hare hub. It would mean that a storm at one city would only impact the aircraft at that airport, instead of cascading through the system as they do now, causing multiple downline scheduling problems.

The new approach is expected to begin in November.

United has consistently ranked near the bottom among U.S. carriers in its on-time performance. New CEO Oscar Munoz has pledged that he would take immediate steps to improve the customer experience on the airline, and on-time operations is a good place to start.

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