United Family Day
13 October 2013
One of the things the travel community has are mini-conventions called DOs, and one of the cool things they do are station tours of various airport operations.
Smaller events (in time and scope) are called mini-DOs.
Thus, the household went to the SFO Mini Do, which consisted of the following:
- Charity lunch at The Slanted Door, where we raised money for FF Giving which is a pass-through charity primarily for the United We Care Employee Relief Fund, which helps United Airlines employees and retirees in crisis. I’ve got to say, The Slanted Door was among the best Vietnamese food I’ve had outside Viet Nam. (It’s really really hard to beat Cục Gạch Quán in Ho Chi Minh City.)
- Learning about United’s wifi and in-flight entertainment strategy, which had some interesting info about the problems of wifi bandwidth in the air.
- Sitting in operations listening into flight operations as we sat with one of the people handling flights and gates.
- A visit to the still-under-construction part of Terminal 3 (boarding area E, consisting of gates 60-68), complete with hard hats and safety vests. I declined to go up on the roof, but Rick did.
Then we trundled over to the 8th annual United Family Day, which had a bunch of things to do: vendors to visit (Rick got a picture taken as a Captain of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner), United planes to trundle onto and off of (we went on the 747), classic car displays (Rick liked the Morgan), new car displays (I had some quality Tesla time), food vendors (mmmm, pulled pork), and classic airplanes of various sorts.
Oh, and they ejected one of the airplane slides while we were watching. Quite loud!
There was also a plane pull. You could sign up on a team that pulled a United Airbus 320. We didn’t, but I’m sure there will be photos of other people from the Do who did.
One of the neat things about the planes on display is that each of them had something highlighted that you don’t normally get to see, like the innards of a 747 engine.
