United Airlines is quietly turning San Francisco into one of its most adventurous hubs. The Star Alliance carrier has just announced two brand-new nonstop routes from San Francisco International to Virginia — Norfolk and Richmond — both launching at the end of March 2027 on 166-seat Boeing 737 MAX 8s.
These are serious distances for a narrowbody: the westbound legs run just over six hours, landing back in California around 9pm. Each route gets only two flights a week — Norfolk on Wednesdays and Saturdays from March 31, Richmond on Thursdays and Sundays from March 28 — so flexibility matters if you book. The morning departures east and evening returns are timed to connect with United's big Asia-Pacific bank at SFO, which is good news if you're coming from Manila, Seoul or Tokyo and heading to coastal Virginia.
Norfolk is the historical one: no airline has ever flown it nonstop from San Francisco, and the city ranked as SFO's tenth-largest unserved domestic market with about 43,000 round-trip local passengers a year. Richmond is a different story. Breeze Airways has run the route twice weekly on Airbus A220s since May 2022, and United's arrival makes this the first time two carriers will compete nonstop. Helpfully, they've avoided overlapping days — Breeze's traffic is almost entirely point-to-point, while United is chasing connecting passengers through its Pacific hub.
The Virginia pair brings United's confirmed 2027 SFO launches to seven, nearly all timed to the March 28 summer schedule switch. The line-up includes Charleston, South Carolina (up to four weekly MAX 8s), a daily Hartford, Connecticut service returning after a 2018 exit, and daily regional-jet flights to Oklahoma City. Long-haul is on the menu too: a brand-new route to Okinawa and a Tel Aviv return on 787-9s, three times a week each. Okinawa has never been linked to SFO before.
It follows a busy 2026 that added Carlsbad, California; Portland, Maine — now the longest nonstop domestic flight from SFO; West Palm Beach; and Sapporo, Japan, the first time Hokkaido's largest city has had a nonstop from the US mainland's Lower 48.
Rumour mill: United is widely expected to return to New York JFK in 2027, flying from both SFO and Los Angeles on its A321neo 'Coastliner', and reportedly hunting for up to 20 slot pairs. It already runs up to 23 daily flights a day to Newark across both California hubs, so a JFK return would be about grabbing more of the enormous California–New York market rather than filling a gap.
Why it matters for travellers: if you're based in Norfolk, Richmond or Charleston and heading to Asia, Hawaii or the Pacific, one-stop trips through SFO just got a lot simpler — no drive to a bigger hub required. And for Californians, coastal Virginia and the Lowcountry are now within a single six-hour flight. The catch is frequency: two weekly flights fill up fast, so book early, especially for summer.
