I’m traveling to ohare airport via United airlines I have one hour to transfer to another United airlines flight would this be enough time
It depends on where your gates are you know the arrival gate and the departure gate and how well you know the airport and whether you stop to eat or shop or use the restroom and maybe even how quickly you can talk in a fast voice on one massive gulp of air
big gasp
Hey. Maybe you could get a job advertising Micro Machines.
If this is a domestic flight on the same itinerary, then an hour should be okay.
I believe the FAA has a document with min. times for conX. At work so can’t google, but I’ve seen it before and even used it to challenge an airline who pushed a ridiculous conX time.
A friend and I had an hour to change planes at O’Hare once, but the flight to Chicago had to circle when it got there to wait for an opening to land. As a result of the delay, we had to run for what seemed like a couple of miles to the gate for our connecting flight, and barely made it.
Good luck.
(That was in the 1970s, so things might be different now. Our trip began in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and our connecting flight was going to New Orleans.)
I’ve made United to United connections fairly often at O’hare. No guarantees, but an hour between flights doesn’t make me nervous. 35 minutes? Then I sweat.
Don’t forget to look into the inter-terminal shuttle that runs there between Concourses C and EF: https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/airport/maps/ord.aspx
Though sometimes it’s just as quick, if not quicker, to skip the shuttle and walk.
An hour should be good. If… as mentioned, the plane is not excessively late. Usually, if the plane looks likely to be more than 15 minutes late, talk to the flight attendant and see about speeding up connections, warning other gate you are on the way, etc. )and pack your toothbrush and a change of underwear in your carryon). Worst case you have to go through the underground tunnel from the far gates (C? B?) and then into the Y-shaped gate building (F?) but that can be done, walking briskly on the moving sidewalk in the tunnel, in about 20 minutes.
You can probably download (or browse and screenshot) a map of gates, and the flight attendant can presumably tell you before you land what gate you want to go to… Even if they change gates an hour before it should be roughly the same area.
If you have international departures, all bets are off.
It is going to be a crapshoot. O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world and huge. I have had to literally sprint with connections that tight before there. I have never missed one but I almost did once when they were just closing the door. If you are late at all, you cannot mess around. Just do whatever it takes to get to the next plane. Running is allowed inside the airport.
Whenever I’ve flown a same-carrier multi-leg route, they’ve made sure that I could make the connection, even if it means delaying the second flight so all the passengers can get there. I don’t know, maybe that’s not standard, and I’ve just been flying very customer-friendly airlines.
Yeah, same airline, same itinerary (meaning the airline put you on a multi-leg route, and it’s not you that decided to book two separate tickets one hour apart), and usually they’re good about making sure everyone gets on, since, presumably, you’re not the only passenger trying to make that connection. Unless the flight is significantly late. Then, you may be out of luck. But one hour is generally considered fine for domestic transfers within the same terminal.
The United magazine Hemispheres (in your seat pocket) has a map of O’Hare and other United hubs towards the back, with gate numbers.
I’ve done one hour switches all the time with no problems. If you are late, they are not going to hold the plane unless there are a lot of people with your problem, but in this case they do admit that it is their problem and are pretty good at getting you another flight.
Cite please.
My experience is that O’hare is large, but not any slower than any other airport. Walk briskly and save the food/restroom stop til you get near your departure gate.
I’ve made over 50 connections there (flying from/through ORD is often cheaper than other airports), and the only time I almost missed a flight is because some company was demo’ing their massage chairs… and since I had plennnnnty of tiiiime…
When you can Google, i’d be interested in seeing evidence for this, because it is my understanding that the FAA has no requirements for airlines in this area of ticketing.
Minimum Connecting Times are basically set by each airline, and the MCT varies considerably for different airlines at different airports at different times and with different flights.
Here’s a Los Angeles Times article from just a couple of months ago on flight connections:
I recommend mentioning to the flight attendants on the first leg of the flight that you have a short amount of time to make a connection. They may be able to call ahead to the other gate to hold the flight for you. (Or rather than the flight attendants, you can talk to the gate agents after you disembark.)
Do you really need to do this in the modern era? I would be astounded if the gate crew for the connecting flight didn’t know, from their computer terminals, exactly how many people they are expecting from inbound flights.
In my own flying experiences, i’ve had a number of flights where we were boarded and waiting to push back from the gate, only to hear an announcement like, “Sorry about the delay, folks, but we’re waiting on six passengers from a flight that just got in from Atlanta. Their plane has landed, and they’re on their way. They should be boarding in five or ten minutes, and then we’ll get going.”
I guess it’s possible that i’m overestimating the amount of information available to the staff, but surely every airline knows this stuff without needing flight attendants to call ahead.
I’ll bet, too, that they probably also have to make calculations about when and when not to wait. Is it worth keeping a fully-laden aircraft idling on the tarmac for an extra fifteen minutes to wait for one passenger, or are you better off leaving that that one person behind in order to keep your schedule? What about six passengers? Or ten?
Yes, you’re probably correct that the gate crew knows that some of the passengers are on an incoming flight with a limited amount of time to get from one gate to another. But it can’t hurt to mention it to the flight attendant. On one flight where I was nervous about making a connection, the flight attendant let me move to a seat at the front of the plane for the last few minutes, so I could be one of the first to disembark.
(In another case, I and another passenger ran from one gate to another at the Detroit airport only to arrive just as they were closing the door. So we had to wait four hours for the next flight. And the airport in Detroit was really dreary so it wasn’t any fun to spend the time there.)
Thanks for all the awesome advice
I’ve also seen airline employees waiting just outside the jetway with a big list, telling everyone as they got off where their next gate was, and which way they needed to go to get to it.
FAA has substantially zero oversight of the customer side of the airlines.
The DOT may have such standards, but I doubt it.
It varies. For sure everything is safer & smoother & more reliable if it’s all one booking on one airline. People can really screw themselves by building their own tight connections that the various systems don’t recognize as being connected.
Assuming the normal ticketing situation and an approved connection, then yes, the master computer knows about all the connections of all the people. And feeds the same info to the flight attendants on board. And provides info to the outbound gate agents and ops managers about which flights are expecting inbound pax with tight (or negative) connections.
What varies from time to time and company to company is how much they act on that info. Holding a plane for 15 minutes so 6 people get on from a connecting flight sounds good until you realize you just made all 150 people on that outbound flight 15 minutes late to their next destination. And you may have made a different inbound flight wait 5 or 10 minutes for the gate you were supposed to have vacated on time. Making those 150 people 5-10 minutes late also. How many of those people had tight connections before we injected this additional delay into them?
Everyone is running their systems very, very close to the edge of chaos every day. Leaving lots of slack to account for anomalies is cost prohibitive. As a consequence small delays rapidly snowball. Doing the “right thing” for 6 people in the morning can easily screw a few hundred by the end of the day.
At least at my carrier this year if we had 6 people arriving late enough on an earlier flight that we needed to hold 15 minutes to accommodate them on our outbound flight we’d probably only do it if this was the last flight of the day to their destination. Or if we were taking them to an international gateway where a missed flight there means a 24 hour delay.
If those things don’t apply we knowingly and deliberately leave on time without you and when you get to the empty gate you’ll find our computer has already rebooked you on the next flight to your destination. In fact if you have your phone on, we’ll have emailed you with the new plan while you’re still in the air.
The greatest good for the greatest number and all that.
Or at least that’s the justification that management gives us. The fact is that DOT rankings for on-time performance are very important to marketing and many customer surveys tell us they consider it very, very important. That’s good. The fact that DOT doesn’t include any metrics about customers left behind in the service of on-time goals is less good. And both these lead me to suspect we’re gaming the visible statistics at the expense of (some) actual customer satisfaction.