Early Mornings, Late Nights, Those are the Best Flights

I definitely prefer early morning and late night flights, all the better for getting your work done at the client before heading home. They also seem consistently more reliable than middle-of-the-day flights that get bogged down in air traffic delays. Since I commute mostly from San Francisco to New York, this basically means the red-eye there and the last flight back. At the airport yesterday, I noticed that United is adding one new flight between San Francisco and New York every day, an early morning departure from SFO to JFK and one late night return from JFK to SFO.

The new morning fligth leaves SFO at 6:05am and gets in to new York at 3:30pm and the return departs JFK at 8:40pm, arriving back into SFO at midnight. The morning flight should be nice to get into New York at a reasonable time, although it's pretty much means your day is shot froma work & meeting standpoint. Going East with the time difference, there's nothing that will fix that. The return flight, however, is very appealing.

The 8:40pm departure from New York is a huge improvement on the past when both AA and United's last flight from New York back to San Francisco departed at around 6pm. This was a ridiculously early departure that required you to leave Manhattan at no later than 3:30 to make the plane. It also departed at the peak hour from JFK for all flights, resulting in huge waits to take off. Last week, after we pushed back from the gate at 6:45 (late), we inched our way to the runway where the captain announced we were number 75 for take-off. An 8:40pm departure should be smooth(er) sailing by comparison.