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American Morning
United Airlines Debilitated by Hailstorm Damage
Aired June 22, 2001 - 11:24 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The big hailstorm that pounded Denver Wednesday night could have an impact on air travel all across the U.S. for many days to come. Hail, some of it the size of golf balls, damaged dozens of planes at Denver International Airport. United Airlines reports damage to 30 of its jets, forcing the company to cancel at least 125 flights system-wide. About 1,500 passengers were stranded at the airport overnight.
Chris Brathwaite is with United Airlines. He's a spokesperson at the company headquarters in Chicago. He's on the line with us now.
Chris, bring us up to date on how much damage was caused and how long the repairs will take.
CHRIS BRATHWAITE, UNITED AIRLINES: Good morning.
Yes, we had 32 of our planes suffered varying amounts of damage due to the hailstorm in Denver. But we're in the process now of assessing that damage. And yesterday we were saying that -- we've put the planes kind of into three buckets, if you will: those planes that we think we can get back into service within three days, those that may take up to a week, and those that may take up to a month.
The good news for us today is we're finding, slowly, that those planes we thought may take up to a month to repair, actually we think we may be able to get them -- some of them back into service sooner. So that's good news for our customers.
O'BRIEN: Sort of a bit of airline triage here, if you will.
BRATHWAITE: Exactly.
O'BRIEN: Put this into perspective. Given the size of the United fleet and the number of flights that United flies, how big an impact is this?
BRATHWAITE: Well, with 32 -- any time you take 32 planes out of service for any period of time, you know, the planes typically do four legs in a day, so a plane that's sitting in Denver now that was supposed to go to Chicago, and then maybe Chicago to Miami, Miami to Washington, those other legs aren't going to happen.
But on the big scheme of -- on the big, grand scheme of things we have 614, 615 aircraft in our fleet. So it's a piece, but it's not an overwhelmingly large piece.
O'BRIEN: It's not as if there are backup planes sitting in hangars, ready to go, right?
BRATHWAITE: Well, we do have 22 spare aircraft, and we have taken some planes that are in, for lack of a better word, in the shop, so to speak, getting some onboard upgrades. We've pulled those planes -- some of those planes back into service as well. So we're doing everything we can to limit the disruptions to our customers.
O'BRIEN: All right, so the message to customers is: If you have a booking on United, what should they do about it? And it doesn't matter that Denver -- Denver doesn't necessarily need to be involved in your itinerary, correct?
BRATHWAITE: No, it does not. I think, for the most part, people traveling on United, the overwhelmingly majority of them will not notice anything different. But just to be safe, folks ought to check their flight status using our Web site United.com, or call our automated flight information line at 1-800-824-6200 to check the status of their flight.
O'BRIEN: That's 800-824-6200 to check the status of the flight.
And just let me ask you, Chris, obviously this is a fluke kind of thing. Can you recall this kind of thing happening before, and if you had had some advance notice, would there have been anything you could have done about it?
BRATHWAITE: Well, to answer your first question, this has happened before. I mean, airports are open-air areas. I don't know that it's happened on this level before. But even advanced notice, you know, hangar space is limited. And 32 planes, especially the size of these planes, there's really nowhere you could have put them to protect them from Mother Nature. So we're kind of at Mother Nature's whim when it comes to these kind of things.
O'BRIEN: Just a little bit in harm's way there, I suppose.
BRATHWAITE: That's right.
O'BRIEN: Chris Brathwaite, who is with United Airlines at the corporate headquarters in Chicago giving us the latest on the situation in Denver and the ripple effect that has ensued. Thanks for being with us on CNN THIS MORNING.
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