UA Re-Banking a Recipe for Missed Flights?

UA recently announced plans to "re-bank" flights at Chicago, Houston and Denver hubs, reducing connection times into narrower windows. Given UA's not-so-great on-time arrival record, doesn't this seem like a plan that will only increase missed connections at these hubs? United's (5/2014) on-time arrival rate is only 76% which means that A LOT of pax might potentially not have enough time to make a tighter, re-banked connection in huge airports like ORD or IAH.

And because re-banking compresses flights spread out through the day, does this mean a yet longer wait if you do miss your flight?

"We have more confidence in our operational reliability going forward to permit those connections to occur without undue misconnects," United CEO Jeffery Smisek told analysts and investors. My own experience has been that there is an undue amount of late-arriving equipment and that operational reliability is not on the uptick.

What do you think of the re-banking plan?

The re-banking plan is described in an article in ChicagoBusiness.com

 

That on-time rate doesn't reflect the regional flights so that's potentially an issue, too.

In theory well-defined banks of flights are a good thing for customers. In theory.

 

Precisely.
I don't think UA's on-time reliability will support this change. Despite their good intentions I fear this will not turn out well for the customer.

 

It won't unless they increased frequencies however we know this isn't the case as they're trimming capacity.

 

For decades most U.S. airlines had banked flights - with longer turns at the hubs - and it worked just fine.

It won't work for 20-25 min RJ turns, however. Unless they can somehow schedule the RJs to be countercyclical between mainline banks. I.e. eastbound RJ's arrive, and then depart for the tail end of the previous westbound bank, then eastbound mainline arrives, eastbound mainline departs, then westbound RJ's arrive for the next mainline bank and do their quick turns for the eastbound RJ bank.

There's really no underlying reason that UA shouldn't be able to operate banked hubs. We'll see how they perform.