SEA-IAH just got 5 miles closer

According to the updated United.com SEA-IAH is now 1,869 miles apart instead of the 1,874 it has been for many years.

I suspect the flights will still post as 1,874. Anyone else see city pairs getting closer & farther apart?

-RM

MUC-ORD dropped a bit, as did a few others.

SFO-DEN is now 4 miles closer and dropped from 967 to 963. SFO-HKG is reduced from 6921 to 6909. I do not like the mileage reduction in these routes.

ALB-ORD dropped 3 miles from 723 to 720. ALB-IAD is now closer by 1 mile at 324 instead of 325. Pretty much all distances I'm familiar with are now a bit shorter.

Wouldn't that be 4 miles?

-RM

SFO-JFK is now 2,577 down from 2,586
SFO-IAH is now 1,631 down from 1,635
IAH-PBI is now 953 down from 956

Now if this holds to be true*, it's gonna $uck the proverbial big one -and it must have changed overnight as my printouts for my 3 PMUA booked itins all had the old MP miles listed but today they show shrinkage (for a net loss of 50 PQM's)


*not to mention that it will royally phugly my spreadsheet as now I'll have to revise the mileage I have listed for the city pairs as it pre-fills automatically when I enter the routing.

UA has finally figured out wormholes...but they can only cut 4 miles off each leg . My trip to MXP next week lost about 30 miles roundtrip.

this is an awesome technique to make you fly more to attain status! shrink the distance on a route and expect you to meet the elite threshold with the reduced miles.

maybe they want more people to qualify on segments?

It seems that the new UA is using CO's mileage calculations which tend to have shorter distances between airports and results in the awarding of fewer RDMs & EQMs.

No, I believe it's the other way around. It looks like the old pmUA distances are being used. CO always used and displayed 1,874 for SEA-IAH but now united.com shows 1,869. IIRC that's what .bomb showed.

-RM

Not for me as the three city pairs in my earlier post were all PMUA distances which were reduced (plus, any good PMUA flyer knows that SFO-JFK was always 2,586 and not 2,577 )

BOS-EWR from 201 to 200

This is all due to the earthquakes in the past year, all destinations are now closer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14seismic.html

Good thing for 500 mile minimums!

SFO YVR was 800 now 798, my how our planet is shrinking

What we see here is a genius implementation of slow flying to conserve fuel and improving the on-time performance without changing the schedule. The bean counters found out that if airports were closer together they could improve two important numbers with relatively little expense (xxx million miles flown may hurt a little).

Now, will get the originally quoted CO distance on an existing ticket, or the new UA distance?

You'll earn based on whatever they have in the system when the flight is credited.

And with the geographic realignment, I'm just adding this to the ever growing list of changes I'ms supposed to like

Maybe the are now excluding the taxiing mileage. So it is now runway to runway instead of gate to gate.

Could it be that they compared the CO and UA miles and then picked the smaller number going forward?

Just noticed that ORD-SFO dropped by 7 miles from 1846 to 1839, and ORD-LHR suddenly became closer as well by 16 miles, dropping from 3953 to 3937.

Not liking this development.

I actually seem (hopefully) to have found an example of the opposite:

LAX-DEN, PMUA was 849 miles (I flew it a couple weeks ago on top of a couple other times last year). Just booked LAX-DEN today, and the website is saying I will get 859 miles, 10 more than the PMUA number.

So the earth isn't universally on a diet then. Good to know I needn't worry.