The pilot of a San Francisco to Houston United Airlines flight ordered pizza for everyone on board after the plane diverted to New Mexico for a medical emergency, leaving passengers with a long delay on the ground.
A passenger on board passed out in the lavatory, and the flight landed in Albuquerque. The airline needed to replenish medical equipment used in responding to the emergency, to be legal to take off. While doing that, cabin crew exceeded their maximum duty hours and so they had to bring in fresh crew. Kudos to United for doing that at an outstation.
United is good about pushing out meal vouchers to customers and they did so here – but airport restaurants closed. That’s when the captain ordered pizza.
- 30 pizzas were delivered to the airport and brought airside
- Eventually new crew came to work the flight, and the plane took off for Houston with passengers having eaten.
Credit: @ladyt98tanya
@ladyt98tanya #unitedairlines #pilots #great #greatness #greatpilots #christlike #thankyou #california #sanfrancisco #houston ♬ Powerful songs like action movie music – Tansa
Though the pizza order is just now being broadly reported, it appears that the flight in question was UA2480 on September 13th. I began searching for the reported scheduled 7 p.m. arrival in Houston (2480 is a 7:02 pm. arrival) and looked back through historical performance of that Boeing 737 MAX 9 flight to find a 1:34 a.m. arrival two weeks ago.
Delta does the same thing, but with the twist that the Flight Crews eat all the pizzas IN FRONT OF the starving passengers.
Premium Pizza Performance Art. Only on Delta.
Captain ought to have ordered 100 “Shake Shack” burgers and malts . Pizza is sort of junky .
When the passenger passed out in the lavatory , how did they know ?
Thank you to the United Airlines pilot who bought 30 pizzas for the passengers when their flight was diverted to Albuquerque due to an in-flight medical emergency
“Pizza is sort of junky .” That explains why I can’t find pizza anywhere.
Pizza has the advantage of coming in varieties that can appeal to most people’s dietary needs/preferences, and come from restaurants designed around a high volume delivery model, so a pizza restaurant can push through 30 pizzas no problem; asking Shake Shack to handle an unexpected 100 person order is going to take longer than you’d like.
A lot of snarky comments here. This pilot is a minor hero and he aught to be celebrated. Great job!
Kindness like this is such a rarity in today’s world.
Kudos to the Captain! Hard to find people like Captain Denny nowadays.
I agree with comments praising the Captain of the UA flight…he really did a great, “passenger sensitive” thing…it’s easy to “throw shade,” but all positive gestures (these days) ought to be lauded! I remember, LONG ago, when, in a similar situation (thought not an awfully long delay on the ground), a Captain, again on UAL, ordered a drink service to be done while we had to wait for things to be resolved. WOW!
There is only ONE Pizza…and it has to come from NYC. Unless the Pizza was flown in from there, it was a thoughtful but futile effort. NYC Pizza rules!
Give me a break. Over the course of my 30+ years with a global airline, I’ve heard of this happening many times, both at my own airline and at others. Very, very nice gesture, but hardly (yawn) newsworthy.