Adelaide
Inaugural flights are always fun, and with San Francisco, California to Adelaide, Australia being the last major one of 2025 for United Airlines, this one was quite the party. Plenty of excited passengers, employees from United Airlines, the respective governments and tourism boards, and of course, media and influencers, both at the gate as well as on-board.
Koalas, kangaroos, and wombats were in abundance, including one passenger, Warren, in full kangaroo suit and printed banner. Three kinds of pies plus lamingtons for consumption before boarding and while you listened to the obligatory speeches and watched the ribbon cutting, headlined by senior vice president of global network and alliances, Patrick Quayle, for United. Caught up with plenty of familiar faces as well, including Vice President of Flight Operations, Captain Marc Champion, who was to be the pilot in command of tonight's fight. All too soon it was time to hustle onboard N29975 for the 16 hour, 8,070 mile journey of United flight 207 from SFO-ADL.
With the high-tier Global Services frequent fliers in our little group of frequent fliers snagging all the available upgrades to business class, a bunch of us ended up in premium economy and economy. The mood all around was pretty festive, although with such a long flight there were understandable hours of downtime as people needed to sleep. The lobster in Polaris (business class) looked delicious but sadly did not make it to economy or premium economy, we got a rather ordinary chicken in Premium Plus (premium economy); however, as flight attendant Dave proudly noted, they did upgrade the wines for the flight to some very nice ones from Penfolds in all classes of service (!).
Somewhere in there we snagged a bunch more group photos and had plenty of fun conversations, not just with both influencers aboard covering the trip for United, but also with Luc Bondar, COO & president at MileagePlus / Vice President for loyalty at United Airlines, who was terrific at keeping us engaged but also not spilling any inside information.