United 737-900(ER) Economy Plus DEnver to san Francisco
Flight routing
- 1
- 2UA1023 DEN-SFO
- 3UA1931 SFO-EWR
- 4UA723 EWR-ORD
- 5UA1930 ORD-MIA
- 6AA868 MIA-MCO
- 7UA1756 MCO-IAD
- 8DL3857 IAD-MSP
Welcome back to the second part in this series. I am traveling between Minneapolis and Florida but taking the long way all the way through California back in February. I had a tight connection in San Francisco, hoping that everything would turn out ok and, well…
Pre-Flight
Welcome to Denver Airport Concourse B, home of United here in Colorado. I just came off my A320 from Minneapolis and I have a two hour connection here.
320 from Minneapolis
About 20 minutes before Departure, we got a delay notification that we would be 30 minutes late leaving Denver due to issues loading cargo onto our plane. This was not good for my 35 minute connection in San Francisco.
First View of our 7 Year old 737-924 (ER) taking us to California registered as N66831. This plane was only operated by United and never got to Continetal before the merge.
I don't like how some of the gate in Denver are so far away from the window, it makes for some…not so great photos like this one.
Soon it was time for boarding to begin…finally
Flight
Great view of this 737-900 in the Continental Livery.
Didn't get a chance to get a picture as the row was already full. Snagged row 7, the bulkhead in economy plus, for our two hour flight. Row 7 is arguably the best seats in the house since it is a bulkhead so you don't have do disturb people while getting up due to the GREAT legtoom in this row and there is still room under the seat in front of you for your bag. I wish every airline would be like this.
View of the wing from 7F
It was then time for pushback and taxi out to runway 25, 27 minutes late. Making my connection was not going to happen now.
It was then time for takeoff (32 minutes late)….
…and climb out of the Denver Area
Views of the snow covered Mountians were stunning tonight
Flight attendants soon came around offering snacks and drinks. I opted for Tomato Juice as well as pretzels and Biscoff. Enough for this relatively short flight.
Picture of the cabin from the back. I love the sky interior paired with the blue mood lighting. It's a much needed refresh from the older cabins found on the older 737s. This makes the cabin much more roomy, especially in economy.
As we began our decent into San Francisco, I got the dreaded notification. My 773 to Newark had started Boarding. It was only luck now…
We ended up landing into San Francisco only 9 minutes late. Things were looking good until we stopped here…
Apparently our gate was a tug gate and we had to wait here until we could get a tug to pull us in. This caused us to arrive into out gate. This caused us to pull into out gate at 10:15, just 5 minutes before my flight to Newark was closing boarding.
Make sure to watch my next review to see if I make it or if I will be spending the night in the San Francisco airport…
Thanks for sharing this FR! Interesting that you got one of the few B739s without the DirecTV vintage IFEs. I guess with UA’s good BYOD streaming services it maybe doesn’t matter. The bulkhead cutouts for the legroom/storage are nice, but the proximity to the mini-lavatory between cabins must devalue the row some. Surprised to hear a good crew again, I guess we will see how consistent this is across all your flights with different crews based from different hubs.
I bet you made it, last flight of the day should have the plane held for connecting passengers in my experience with UA.
I Usually have really good crews from San Fran, Denver, and Newark. They are the most chatty in my opinion :)
It’s definitely nice to have storage space in the bulkhead. UA used to be unique among the US3 in this respect, but now that DL and then AA basically did away with full bulkheads to cram more seats in, they all have underseat storage on narrow bodies, but UA definitely has the most legroom in that row.
Thanks for sharing!