Los Angeles International Airport

I took the shuttle from the Westin Hotel to the airport and arrived there 25 minutes later after passing the Holiday Inn LAX and the La Quinta LAX. I were dropped off at the terminal 7 – and had to walk back to terminal 6 where the Premium Cabin / Customer Counters of United are located. The lines at the counters at terminal 7 where quite long and I was not in the mood of queuing there. Walking back a few minutes was in the end much faster than queuing there.
In terminal 6 I used the self check in facilities and for the first time, I did no have to see an agent. Not sure, why … but I considered myself lucky, though I noticed that the LH Miles and More number was missing, but decided to deal with this later in the Red Carpet Club.

Security took a couple of minutes, but the fast line for elites were not very long and soon later I was on my way to the Red Carpet Club. I thought about checking out the Continetal Presidents Club in terminal 6 but decided against it. Though I had close to 90 minutes before boarding, I was not in the mood for walking through the terminal.

At the Red Carpet Club, my frequent flier number was stored in the system. The lounge was not that full and there were more than enough seats, so that everybody who wanted to sit alone had a free seat or lounge chair next to him. The “breakfast buffet” of the RCC consists of cereals, bread, marmalade, juice and apples. Tea and coffee were available as well.
I took a seat and updated my trip report among a few other things while sitting there and waiting for my flight to SFO.

10. January 2010
LAX – SFO
[Los Angeles – San Francisco]
UA239 (United Airlines); Boeing 757 (N513UA)
Gate 73
10:30 – 11:55 [effective 10:29 – 12:15]
Economy Class
Seat 19 C

Boarding had not started as I reached the gate. Regarding the number of people in the gate area, the flight seems to be full, especially as they were quite a number of passengers appearing on the wait list, where the standby status had not cleared yet.

Boarding started as usual with First Class Passengers, Global Service Members and 1Ks, soon later followed by Premier Executives and Star Golds. I headed for the gate and quickly was waved through. I made it back to the regular Economy Class seats and stored my carry on in the overhead compartment and the laptop under the seat in front of me. The plane quickly filled with passengers. The crew made several announcements to store the bigger items of the carry ons in the overhead compartment and the smaller ones under the seat. They highlighted, that it was a short hop to SFO which took of less than an hour in air time and so the cut of leg room should not be an issue. Nevertheless, a lot of passengers had a lot of hand luggage and especially the later comers difficulties to store this in the overhead compartment. So far, the incident on Christmas day had no effect on this short domestic trip.

The safety demonstration was shown on the small screens in the cabin before we pushed back and headed for the runway. The captain had informed us prior to take off, he expect an on time arrival, despite the bay area was foggy. He mentioned channel 9 being turned on, but I did not plug my earphones in the jack. We pushed back at 10:29 and taxied to our runway. We had to queue for a few minutes on the taxiway shortly after push back and later again before we finally took off.

Wheels were in the air at 10:53 and the flight itself was uneventful. A quick beverage round was done, but I skipped it and continued reading in the magazine I brought with me from the RCC as well as in the Hemisphere Magazine. The 3 days report was about the Sonoma Area and since this is one of the regions I wanted to visit I read it.

As we came closer to SFO the captain told us, that we unfortunately had to expect a bit of a delay, since there were quite a number of planes approaching SFO at this time. After a few waiting patterns, it was finally our turn and we began our final approach and touched down at 12:04, 22 minutes behind schedule and taxied to our gate, but the entrance from the taxiway was blocked, so we had to sit on the tarmac for a few more minutes. Finally we could roll the last metres to our gate, where we arrived at 12:15 and after a few more minutes I could disembark and headed over to the international terminal and the RCC.

The UA 757 for the flight to SFO and the 747 of LH for the flight th FRA next to an Air China 747

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