canyonwalker | (Reply)

From:

Our best read on the situation is that the flight crew and the ground crew were crunching to move as many passengers as possible from the earlier SFO flight. We figure they were looking to put a family with one or two young kids into adjacent seats and saw our row. By moving us up to Polaris they could accommodate 3-4 economy passengers from the other flight. I figure also that our elite status helped them choose us from among various passengers who could be moved to make room.

Once we departed I checked on the other SFO flight. It did ultimately take off but its seat map showed that economy was empty and only Polaris was occupied. My best educated guess there is that there was a crew shortage so they had to offload a lot of people onto other flights. There's a required minimum ratio of cabin crew to passengers, I believe 1:50, for safety reasons.

This is based on inference and educated guesswork. There were facts visible but not enough, collectively, to constitute proof. I chatted with 1-2 other expert passengers who came to similar conclusions. Our crew refused to discuss specifics of the situation. They all professed ignorance. I find that extremely hard to believe. In a clutch situation like that there's going to be a crew briefing to coordinate the literally dozens of staff members working the problem across multiple aircraft and ground operations.