They fixed the captain problem, but that doesn't fix the where to park planes overnight problem. That (might) prompt a new base.

I don’t understand how this keeps coming up as a rationale for new bases. On a typical trip I will park airplanes overnight at any number of airports that have no pilot base. Parking a plane overnight doesn’t require a pilot base- it requires tarmac & a hotel.

Not incorrect.

But at some scale, it make sense to avoid paying for X thousand hotel nights/year. And to have reserve coverage for all those AM departures. IDK what scale that is - I suspect for narrowbodies it's north of a dozen airplanes staying overnight. Which would mean something like a 5:30 and a 7:30 to every hub. Not many candidates ... the list of large airports/cities that are not already UA bases is Dallas, Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix, Boston, Detroit, Seattle, Minneapolis. Cities that aren't somebodies hub are the St. Louis, Nashville, New Orleans, Portland range. I agree none of those places make sense if you can grow your current bases. Question is how much growth can current bases support and how much it costs to open an outstation.

Wouldn't count on Seattle. United HAD a base there for decades, but Alaska and Delta sort of shouldered them out.

https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...20of%20Seattle.

LAS has been a disaster for them. MCO is basically just another CLE. They need EWR to become more efficient badly but that’s unlikely.

I don't seen anywhere else becoming a passenger connection hub for united.
But let's say Nashville, for arguments sake, had the following flights at 0600 and 0800

EWR
IAD
IAH
ORD
LAX
SFO
MCO

That's 14 planes parked overnight. That's the sort of operation that _might_ make sense to have a pilot base especially if you need somewhere to park planes at night.
And yes you could also buy 10,220 hotel rooms/year to suppor that operation.

Why has LAS been a disaster for UAL? And isn't MCO expanding...making it a little better than CLE.

One of the main objectives of new crew domiciles was a recruitment tool for new pilots. The hiring team knows that the contracts at the big three are similar enough that people will go to the airline that has a domicile where they live. I think that had as much weight as operational reliability, and overnighting cost.

Given that this experiment seems to be on the back-burner at this point, I think that Las Vegas showed that it did not quite pan out the way they had hoped and with the new contract’s forced upgrades, filling CA seats was possibly an even higher objective

FWIW, it is SUPER cheap to park a 121 plane overnight at MCO. Something like $80.

Que, the resident UAL hater. Please explain to us UAL guys what makes LAS a disaster? Inquiring minds want to know.

you really should’ve limited the amount of koolaid your consumed while at SKW