The final print issue of United’s inflight magazine Hemispheres contains an easter egg on the cover.
Reader Travis points out,
The cover depicts shadows of iconic landmarks in various cities: the Eifel Tower in Paris, the Willis (nee Sears) Tower in Chicago, Tower Bridge in London, the Empire State Building in New York, the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, and … the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. What’s odd is that United does not fly to Kuala Lumpur, or anywhere else in Malaysia. Is this an embarrassing mistake by the cover artist, or is United signaling that it will soon start flights to Kuala Lumpur?
I’ve been up the Petronas Towers. I loved the view of it from my suite at the Grand Hyatt Kuala Lumpur, which is a hotel that I’ve loved. In many ways Kuala Lumpur is a better food city than even Singapore (Penang, Malaysia has its justified partisans as well).
I love a nice prawn mee soup. The best I’ve ever had was in Petaling Jaya outside K.L.
Kuala Lumpur is a good guess for a future United route. They fly to Singapore and Manila, and they’ll be taking more long haul aircraft. It hasn’t been a super premium destination though.
I also don’t necessarily take Hemispheres cover art literally. In the spring they featured Network Planning SVP Patrick Quayle wearing a Jordanian flag pin and then the airline dropped service to Amman. But it’s an interesting clue nonetheless.
If United flies to KUL, that shows that it’s the preferred US carrier for passengers. Passengers could fly one stop via SFO unless they lived in San Francisco. In contrast, with Delta or American, it’s two stops, the US hub and the partner’s Asian hub unless you live in Dallas, Charlotte, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, or Detroit.
So the distance of SIN with the yields of MNL? Not happening.
UA needs to capture the naturalized-Singaporean-Americans-but-don’t-want-Singaporean-government-to-know market.
It’s “Eiffel” tower (with two f’s).
I wouldn’t have thought there’d be enough premium traffic to KL. I lived in SIN for 7 years and never could get the hang of Malaysia. I think the airport is woeful.
Geographically related, is UA starting service to Vietnam or did I dream that?
5th freedom tag from SIN seems more likely
Then again, UA do not fly from New York either – yet Empire State is on the cover 🙂
Tom,
UA flies to LGA.
Gary there are some corrections needed in this article. United does not actually fly into NYC, it is spelled Eiffel* with 2 F’s. And the magazine is most likely signaling the 5th Freedom route from SIN.
United does like to try new routes even if they don’t make money. Throw a dart and see what sticks.
A KL route would really surprise me for UA, especially as MH doesn’t even run a flight to the US.
It *IS* a sad reminder about the state of AA’s international network and how they don’t fly to HKG or KUL or CMN or AMM when there is a partner with many regional flights on the other end. I can’t understand how they can’t make any of those routes work.
UA is a horrible airline to fly economy class with which most of us do. Unlike Asian airlines with better food, pleasant FA and more Prompt on departure.
“In many ways Kuala Lumpur is a better food city than even Singapore (Penang, Malaysia has its justified partisans as well.”
Actually, in every way, Kuala Lumpur is a better food city than Singapore, and Penang is better still for many dishes. This has become even more true over time as more and more hawkers in Singapore are selling food, or at least the condiments and ingredients that go into making it, prepared commercially in commissaries. In Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and all over Malaysia, buying components of dishes commercially is still more or less unheard of and essentially all street food is still prepared laboriously in the original artisanal manner. For example, almost all Fried Carrot Cake/Chai Tow Kway sold by hawkers in Singapore is made with tow kway that wasn’t made in a factory, while basically every hawker in Malaysia is frying up tow kway that they made themselves that morning before dawn, and same with the chili padi.
I think very few Singaporeans would disagree with this, and every well cultured Singaporean — which is to say almost all Singaporeans — has their favorite place to eat any given dish, and that favorite place is usually in Malaysia.
Any additional flight always creates more redemption opportunities, but otherwise this won’t be of great marginal use to east coasters who can already fly to KL with one stop heading both east and west. Air Canada has added a nonstop to Bangkok from YVR, and I would think that would be a route with more demand than KL for UA.
maybe they got the wrong tower…should be Taipei 101.
I’m guessing it could be a nonstop from newark, almost as long as Singapore air’s nonstop from nyc, provided united has the aircraft to handle that range
UA could add SFO-KUL perhaps not daily but the 787 is not going from fly NYC to SE Asia without huge payload restrictions if it at all.
UA has no choice but to keep growing as DL grows and regrows in the Asia/Pacific region.
But DL is building an APAC network from multiple hubs while AA is all but cornered at DFW and a few Tokyo routes elsewhere.
UA has a powerful hub at SFO but no service to anyplace else but Tokyo outside of California.
let’s see if KUL joins the list of UA destinations from SFO…
The commenters noting that United doesn’t fly to NYC are wrong. Yes, I get the point that United doesn’t fly to JFK. However, LGA is in NYC proper. United operates ORD-LGA near hourly (15+ daily departures). They operate IAH-LGA 7-8x/day. They operate DEN-LGA 5x/day (an exception to the perimeter rule). United Express operates IAH-LGA 4x/day. And there’s a United Club at LGA.
Let me fix the headline for you:
SHOCKING: United may fly to a majority-Muslim country, Americans disgusted by this betrayal!
There you go.
Mak is right on about this one but neither of u spend enough time in Indonesia.
View from the Mandarin is better. my 2 cents on both points.
ps. you can see the Mandarin in Gary’s picture between his room & the Towers
Tim
How does your mother feel about your unrequited crush on Delta? This topic isn’t even about Delta, but you have to bring it up.
What nonsense.
United to cover artist: “We want a layout with iconic skyscrapers around the world”
Cover artist to United: “Ok, here you go”
Trying to read anything more into this is just absurd.
Jon F
If you understand anything about the airline industry, you know that UA is highly committed to maintaining its size position in the Pacific.
They have no choice but to grow because DL is going to grow including to Asia.
DL’s CEO just spoke up in MSP and talked about all of the initiatives that will happen at DL including with the A350-1000s that are less than 2 years away from arriving.
The 35K will be the most capable and most efficient aircraft in the US carrier fleet.
You can absolutely bet that UA will be looking for every opportunity to grow because DL will be breathing down UA’s neck.
UA flies from EWR which is actually closer to NYC to many cities across the continents (not all). They fly EWR-NRT/South America/Europe etc.
I have been on a flight from KUL to EWR recently and there were a significant number of passengers on the KUL-NRT sector which is operated by NH (All Nippon Airways) and the connection at NRT is mostly on UA and NH for onward connections to the US. For the NRT-EWR sector, there were a good 20 pax from the KUL flights, many others to SFO/LAX/IAD. Small numbers but the NH/UA option is very popular among travel agents in KUL for flights to the US.
Not forgetting that MH (Malaysia Airlines) operated into EWR via DXB initially (before being denied fifth freedom by the UAE, which was when EK began their first flights into US soils) and eventually ARN (Stockholm Arlanda) and ceased operating the route in 2012/2014.
UA can do the route with a low premium 787-8 from SFO or 737 from NRT. UA is again exercising our 5th freedom flying out of NRT. Most of these routes we already have the rights to operate out of NRT. It would make sense to tap into that market to boost NRT-USA flying or Malaysian tourist to GUM and Micronesia. Enough feeder traffic would also justify the return of NRT-HNL direct service on our own metal.
Actually nonstop SFO-KUL makes sense as Silicon Valley tech companies are moving off-shore operations from China to Malaysia due to the US-China trade war and geopolitical tensions.