Seeking help re SCs and points for AA flights

[icarus]

Ave, omnes - I haven't been around for a while, I know. I've recently changed jobs, moving to the private sector at last, with a couple of the several advantages being that I get to keep my FF points, and that I occasionally get to accompany my boss into the Chairman's Lounge.

In any event - I wanted to draw on the considerable collective wisdom here to see if anyone could tell me what points and status credits I might accrue for some domestic US flights I'll be making in September/October. I'm flying with AA, as follows:
SFO to DFW in P (first class)
DFW to MSN in Q (I think this class won't earn points)
MSN to ORD in S
ORD to SLC in S.

I'm QF Gold / OW Sapphire.

I'm a bit worried about the two-hour connecting time between my flight into SFO and my flight SFO - DFW but as I'm travelling in J I'm hoping I'll get to the front of the immigration queue reasonably quickly. Is that too optimistic? The flights to MSN are cactus, so if I miss the SFO - DFW flight (which then connects to a DFW MSN flight), I have no prospect of getting to MSN til the following day.

Any help would be very gratefully received!

Icarus

[Dave Noble]

2 hours should be enough; if you are late and do miss the SFO-DFW flight, there are still options to MSN via ORD which would still get you in that evening

Crediting to QF, you would earn 120SCs for SFO-DFW , zero SCs for DFW-MSN, 10SCs for MSN-ORD and 20 SCs from ORD-SLC

Dave

[icarus]

You are truly a prince among men, Dave! A million thanks.

[FlyFirst]

You are truly a prince among men, Dave! A million thanks.

Icarus - another useful tool is if you can google:

gretacirclemapper

You can then enter in your USA segments and the mileage comes up. You can use this to work out you QF status credits. This was an invaluable tool for my recent flights around the US where some segments needed to be tweeked slightly to get into the next milage band to get more QF status credits (for example, a slight change of routing would net 1217 miles (and 120 crdits for First class), instead of 11xx miles which only accrued 90 credits).

FlyFirst

[icarus]

FlyFirst - many thanks for the thought, but that domain seems to have expired. Dammit!

I hope that never happens to seatguru!



Icarus

[Kiwi Flyer]

http://gc.kls2.com is still working

[NM]

Just be aware that QF does not use Great Circle Mapper to determine the length of a flight. They have their own way of measuring it, and a flight that show 1217 miles on GCM may be 1190 miles by Qantas mileage. When you end up with flights that are very close to the border between zones, its best to try to determine how many miles QF believes the flight to be. The best way to determine this depends on the flight operator.

In my experience, QF flight distances can be determined from the FF web site for calculating points earned for particular flights. Flights operated by AA can best be determined from the AA web site on-line schedules and looking at the flight details. QF seems to award miles based on what AA tells them the flight distance was.

The variations can be small, but can also be significant if expecting a certain zone credit for a flight and finding QF calculates if in a different way.

[Kiwi Flyer]

Good point NM - GCM is only an approximation. When mileage is close to a limit it may pay to check (eg distance based awards, Global Explorer and Circle Pacific, for SC earn).

FWIW I havent seen any cases as extreme as the example NM gave 1217 vs 1190.