A group of United Airlines frequent flyers took part in a drama-fuelled marathon in which they flew to every one of the carrier’s hub airports in a single day – known by United’s most ardent fans as the ‘United 7 Hub Run.’
Whether it be that they needed to quickly rack up some additional miles to achieve status in an epic ‘mileage run,’ or they were just doing it for the fun of saying they flew between all of United’s hubs in less than 24 hours, around 60 frequent flyers took part in the challenge of June 6.
The United 7 Hub Run route:
- Newark – Washington Dulles (UA-504)
- Washington Dulles – Chicago O’Hare (UA-1775)
- Chicago O’Hare – Houston (UA-723)
- Houston – Denver (UA-1246)
- Denver – Los Angeles (UA-2240)
- Los Angeles – San Francisco (UA-20256)
The marathon began in Newark at 6 am on Saturday, with an early morning flight to Washington Dulles. The frequent flyers then hoped to have an hour transit in Dulles to connect onto a flight to Chicago O’Hare, but this is where their plan quickly started to unfold.
The flight from Dulles to Chicago O’Hare was delayed by more than two hours and didn’t arrive at the gate until 11:17 am – nearly an hour after their connecting flight to their next hub, Houston, was meant to have departed.
Thankfully, the connecting flight to Houston was also delayed, and it didn’t depart until 12:55 pm, arriving at George Bush Intercontinental Airport just before 4 pm.
From Houston, the hub run participants were meant to catch a 3 pm flight to Denver, but this also ended up departing nearly two and a half hours later, arriving in the Mile High City at around 7 pm.
At this point, it was looking increasingly likely that the hub run flyers’ luck was about to run out. In order to complete their challenge, they had to fly from Denver to Los Angeles and then on to San Francisco.
As luck would have it, though, the connecting flight to Los Angeles was also delayed by two hours, and it’s now understood that United deliberately delayed at least this flight in order for all the connecting passengers to make it on board.
The final flight from Los Angeles ended up departing around 50 minutes late, arriving in San Francisco at 11:18 pm – with just 42 minutes spare for the hub runners to complete their challenge.
The obvious question is whether United knew about the challenge and deliberately held some of these flights for a considerable amount of time in order to get their plans back on track?
That might not actually be the case, however. For several years, United has utilised an AI ‘Connection Saver’ tool that holds flights for late-arriving connecting passengers.
Usually, Connection Saver will delay a flight by 10 or 15 minutes, but, in this case, where there were 60+ passengers connecting onto the next flight, leaving without them would cause a major headache in finding space on other airplanes to their intended destination.
That being said, United does absolutely know about the challenge, organizing gate parties and giving out swag to the participants and other passengers who just happen to be on one of the hub run flights.
The marathon is the brainchild of the ‘Caril Brothers’ on Instagram, a United Million Milier, who spends a lot of time on United planes. Even he will, no doubt, be keen to have a rest after the antics on Saturday.
