From everything I've heard, the wide body vacancy should be out soon and should address this.

Wasn’t one of the plans (pre-covid) to close the ORD 777 base, move those planes to the coasts, and just make ORD a big 787 base doing everything it had been flying with a single fleet? From what I remember the same plan was to follow in IAH.

Perhaps, but I assume that involved Boeing delivering new 787s, something that hasn’t happened in a long time

Flew on N796UA yesterday so decided to look at the Mainline Fleet Google page again. This time I tried to make sure I was reading the chart properly and not just wishful thinking, but from what I see 7 planes have come back online in the last 3 days. Finally!

https://sites.google.com/site/united...fleet-tracking

Looks like N222UA flew back to SFO from VCV last night so hopefully that will be 8 very shortly.

That plane just got back getting the cattle car interior in the B model. Should be in fairly good shape.

expect 25 domestic cattle cars
19 A models and 6 B models

20 aircraft back on line on 5-30. 11 polaris confgured and 9 Cattle cars (2 of them B's)

I was curious how the return of the A and Bs has been going and then I witnessed it first hand, not good. Granted, sample size of one. Saw a B yesterday at IAH that had a gate return. It finally pushed off gate again, 4hrs late, only to return again minutes later. End result, equipment sub, arrived at ORD 9+45 late. Yikes. Certainly some rust to work off before they’re ETOPS ready. Any other examples? :cool:

A 777A flew UA5 IAH-LHR yesterday (5/31). I believe that's the first ETOPS flight with one of the returned aircraft. Arrived 27 minutes late.