As many of you know or experienced first-hand, United Airlines had an outage yesterday impacting SHARES. More than 500 flights were delayed and several cancelled. United’s official response to me at CNBC was:

So much for “fully redundant.†To United’s credit, they did issue a travel waiver for all cities late yesterday. It’s gone now off the website, but it allowed for any passengers traveling yesterday to reschedule travel through September 7 with change fees and fare differences waived. Pretty generous extension of a ticket, I’d have to say, given it allowed for travel through and beyond Labor Day weekend. Refunds were also permitted if a flight was delayed at least two hours or cancelled.

With yesterday’s outage, United’s rather disappointing PRASM results since March compared to the rest of the industry and ongoing maintenance problems plaguing flights, I’ll be keenly listening in to an upcoming webcast.

United is presenting at the fifth annual Dahlman Rose Transportation Conference next Wednesday, September 5. Live streaming of the webcast will take place at 12:00 p.m. EDT and will be available at ir.united.com.

If it’s Jeff Smisek giving the presentation, he has historically been the one who adds a bit more detail to presentation slides, as well as being more forthcoming than other United execs during the Q&A session that follows the presentation.

Industry analysts and investors will most certainly grill whomever United sends on its financial and operational issues of late. I’ll report on any interesting nuggets of information… hopefully we won’t hear “over entitled elites†again.

Related posts:

United CFO: Certain Elites Were Over Entitled

Insights From Jeff Smisek’s Presentation This Week

United’s Presentation at 2011’s Deutsche Bank Conference