Has this been posted? Pretty interesting, if not downright scary. The Air Force link within the article needs clicking, it expounds.
Probable permalink: flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL8 … /KORD/KSFO
Thanks. I believe that was a good idea!
He alerted the flight attendant, who appeared unconcerned.
I don’t get this one. Was the flight attendant too busy to look out the window? Or did he/she look out, see the fuel dumping and just shrug it off as normal? Either way, I’d say United needs to train their flight attendants a little better in dealing with their passengers’ concerns.
Good thing the guy was persistent in voicing his concern!
I don’t get this one.
I don’t get it either needle.
How they could ignore a boom operator in the Air Force who has likely seen such, or how even he could watch that thing for an hour, that’s a long time, without pushing a little harder for attention, but then as always, we don’t know the whole deal. But it’s his life also.
I also thought somebody wasn’t paying much attention to the gauges, but when the First Officer came back it was reported they were concerned with losing that much fuel so quickly, just didn’t know where it was going until he saw it out the window from the Air Force guy’s vantage point.
wooh. 
Ok so he watched for an hour and the a/c was leaking at 6000 lbs per hour…so they lost 6000 up to the point at which the pax decided to alert someone? Total time between KORD and KSFO 4hr 40min, so we’ll call it almost 5 hours so 30000 lbs lost which is 4464 gal (30000 / 6.72) anyone want to venture a guess at uplift KORD RJAA? From KIAD RJAA on a NH B744 it was roughly 370000 (full fuel).
Today’s flight just got airborne at a flight time of 11h 50m…if this thing had kept venting fuel that would be almost 72000 lbs lost just out of the vent. I’d be curious to see what caused that? Mechanical, or inadvertant flip of a dump valve?? We’ll have to wait I guess.
af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123149266 with picture of fuel venting from wing…
Cha ching. The words leaking fuel should raise alarm bells all over the place.
Shouldn’t be that big a deal for the captain or FO to walk to the row of seats to check this type of problem. If anything show compassion and comfort the passenger should they be mistakened.
Of course we now are post 9-11 so common sense just may be tossed out the window as somebody may forsee this as a “diversionary tactic”…
If you look at the flight history, the aircraft was either repaired or swapped for another 747 in SFO as 4 hours after their arrival in SFO they were back on their way to NRT.
Fuel Dump Switch… OFF
“That was easy.”
With the current state of the world do you suppose they had a spare 744 there at SFO? I’m to tired and lazy to look and see if there was anything brought in to be transloaded into 8)
A mechanic and his pen do wonders 
This thread started 6 days ago and I just noticed yesterday cnn dot com had a story on it…come on people get with it 
Quite possible considering SFO is a major maintenance center for them.
We should be able to determine if they used a different aircraft in a couple of months when the BTS on-time data comes out for May.
Chemtrail…
Almost all 747 maintenance is done at SFO. There’s almost always one there that is or can be ready to go within a few hours.