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| Denver Airport Terminal Building |
DEN eastbound banks on UA (new schedule) will be
8am
11am
3:30pm and 8pm OR 5:30pm (cities closer to DEN get both timings on average, more easterly destinations get the ~5:30pm flight)
DEN westbound banks
8am
9:30am
2pm or 3:30pm
7pm
I like the better westbound times, previously cities like SMF, SAN, etc. wouldn't see their first departure from DEN till after 11am but now get far earlier departures.
Similarly Midwest cities like IND see ~6am flights to DEN now which is better for utilization and some business travelers than not having the first flight until ~9:30am.
SNA/SAN with their restrictive curfews now can get UA DEN flights to the first eastbound bank of the day (now slightly pushed back), which is an improvement from their previous schedule (first flight at 8am and connecting to very little) so this should help loads and yields through a boosted number of available connections.
On IND specifically I think this schedule is much better but hope they eventually replace the 6am flight with a RON (remaining overnight) mainline aircraft and add a 3pm DEN - 7:20 PM IND - 8pm IND - 9:20pm DEN flight to link up to an expanded late night westbound bank that would help a few aircraft rotations. I see that MSN, MSP, BNA, ATL (sort of) have flights that would link to ~10:30pm westbound bank, but at present westbound departures after 10pm are few and mainly summer seasonal to only a few cities SEA, PDX, SMF, LAX, SFO, etc.
Similarly eastbound flights from DEN that link from ~5pm West Coast departures (or 2pm in the case of ANC) are sparse, leaving little for any flight leaving the West Coast after 2pm to connect to.
This I believe is the geographical dilemma of DEN. Its well placed geographically but because of time zones, flights are "forced" into a narrow band of ~10am-7pm for west-east. DEN is great for heading west at all times of the day, but for eastbound flights, due to the relative lack of red-eyes, its a little hard to build a schedule with varied flight times through the day that leaves ample connections in both directions.
So I'm a complete amateur (should be obvious) but United should work on expanding the 10:30pm westbound bank, move some eastbound evening flights a bit later (although this might require rethinking some other rotations) and add ~1:30am redeye flights from SFO/LAX/LAS/SAN to feed the few 8am eastbound departures from DEN.
The 10:30pm westbound departure seems smaller than it was last summer as GEG for example has a 7pm departure now with many other examples. Very few > 10 pm flights are operating outside of peak summer westbound. SEA for example has a 10pm flight only during the summer as of now.
I think overall they should bring it back as it seems that there a lot of late arriving flights to DEN from both directions that don't meet many connecting outbound flights. Hopefully this is a two part schedule change with the evening work later as I think a 10:30pm secondary late westbound bank would be great for utilization.
It seems there are also holes in the late eastbound bank as some flights from the west arrive very late missing the 5pm and smaller 8pm eastbound banks such as RNO/ANC-DEN. For GEG, for example, it would be great if they could offer both a 7pm and 10pm flights for example.
In summer 2019 it looks like the "westbound" (loosely defining it to also include COS, CPR, ABQ, etc.) as around ~16 daily flights for a rough estimate, all leaving around 10-10:30.
Maybe UA has maxed out DEN demand with its current evening flight but just looking at DL's ATL schedule you see 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, ... late night departures on many of its trunk routes. Eventually I hope UA can manage something like 9:30am, 12pm, 3:30pm, 7pm, and 10pm on a route like GEG... and add RIW (I digress)
I hope this really helps them build and grow DEN, UA needs a "megahub" like AA/DL have. For July 2019 UA now has 482 departures scheduled per day out of DEN, up from 445 last summer, and 397 in 2017. AA is 800+ in DFW and DL is 1000+ in the same time period, but growth for UA has been pretty incredible once they get around to it.
ACV (Eureka, CA), FAI (Fairbanks, AK), and CHS (Charleston, SC) were added with this schedule change and multiple new routes were announced today including, IAD-AVL, IAD-ELM, IAD-LEX, IAD-MHT, IAD-HHH, EWR-PNS, ORD-HHH, LAX-EUG, LAX-MSN, LAX-PSC, LAX-SUN, and CMH-SFO, while dropping LAX-DFW, LAX-ABQ, IAD-PHL, IAD-CRW, EWR-AVL, EWR-LEX, EWR-HAM, EWR-MHT, and EWR-SBN.
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| Added routes |
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| Dropped routes |
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