It is standing room only. A new terminal would solve those problems.

 

I've heard of some crazy stuff due to the "power of the V" but that is some mighty influence by a Finnish gent, musta been related to royalty!

 

Mongolia is incredible and is one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in the world. Dirt cheap, amazing outdoor opportunities, the only issue is connectivity and adding a flight from Tokyo goes a long ways towards fixing that. It was probably my favorite or second favorite vacation, although the eat at the hotel, McDonald’s and Irish pub crowd probably won’t be interested.

 

The disease of poverty has pretty much been eradicated in the Nordics. I've met many a female FA's that commute from OSL with thier Norwegian boyfriends or fiancés. One chick even admitted it was just to keep flight benefits to visit her family in Southern California and the Philipinas......

Norway .........Talk about hitting the Jackpot! 🎰

I have met a guy who lived in Brooklyn but commuted to FLL......this despite his company having a base in JFK. Gotta tell ya...we all have our reasons, but I did kinda want to see the AME on his medical.

 

You’ve not traveled in Iberia if you think this is a burn. Beautiful architecture, great food, & moderate climate. The smaller towns have all this minus the crowds of Barcelona & Lisbon- sign me up.

Mongolia’s been on my list for a while, but the layover (if it doesn’t end up being an augmented all night turn) will almost surely be too short to enjoy much of what there is to see in the country at large. I’ll have to do that one on my time off, but UAL service out of NRT will make it that much easier.

 

So this is probably a dumb question but how does that work doing routes like Narita to Mongolia, or Sydney to Melbourne. It just seems like if an airline from another country was doing flights from NY to LA, we would be protesting and going up in arms with ALPA to stop it. I don’t know much about it.

 

Tokyo and Mongolia are 2 different countries. It would be 100% legal for Qantas to fly SYD-LAZ-YYZ. I have no idea about the Australia example and I’m not sure if that flight is operated by UAL or the Star alliance partners.

 

I know UAL used to do that route. I’m not sure if they still do.

 

Each country has their own rules about operations like this.

UA (from PanAm) and DL ( from NW) have rights out of Japan, so we can fly to other countries besides our own and actually inter-Japan I believe.

Most countries allow a stopover on a 5th freedom flight ,ie AKL-LAX-LHR for New Zealand airlines. But, I believe the US only allows the carrier to sell seats into or out of the US to/from the home country, so they would not be allowed to sell LAX-LHR or the LHR-LAX portion as an individual ticket.

 

Between 1985 and 1991 United acquired the Pacific division of PanAm as well as Pan Am's London-European operation and the rights to fly LHR to the US for a total of $1.4B over 6 years (over $3B in today's dollars). That was a hefty price back then. Some of those routes have expired, but United has substantial rights to fly all over the Pacific. I remember seeing a list of all the route authority United has in the Pacific and it is staggering. This might be why Kirby ordered 150 787s. The Narita operation alone at one point was so large there were talks of opening a pilot base there in the 1990s. United had a massive flight attendant base in Narita as well.

The Pacific route authority also included the HNL base and the 747s that were based there. Although United closed the HNL 747 base there is still a Flight Attendant base there and this is why United has more gates in Hawaii than any other airline except Hawaiian. To this day there are United Flight Attendants that are still flying that are Legacy PanAm out of HNL. All of the legacy PanAm pilots retired years ago.