Alaska

On Wednesday, Alaska Airlines revealed its first, long-awaited Airbus A320 in the Alaska livery. The lucky aircraft, registration: N625VA, is the first from the Virgin America fleet to be repainted. The newly painted A320 comes just over a month after Virgin America formally merged with the Seattle-based carrier. From its merger with Virgin, Alaska acquired 10 […]

In a press release on Tuesday, Alaska announced that it will connect Paine Field to eight destinations along the West Coast with 13 daily nonstop departures starting in Fall 2018, subject to government approval. The all-jet service from Paine Field will fly to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, […]

Delta Air Lines overtook Alaska Airlines in 2017 to become the best airline in the United States for performance. Delta surpassed every major carrier in the country, even with multiple meltdowns that resulted in thousands of canceled flights and tens of thousands of passengers stranded. For the past four years, Seattle-based Alaska Airlines has been […]

Late last month, it was reported that Alaska Airlines and Virgin America would begin to fly under a single operating certificate (SOC) as early as January 2018. The two carriers will begin to operate under a single operating certificate on Thursday, Jan. 11, 2018. After 14 years of operation, Virgin America will cease the use […]

The Virgin America brand is gradually fading away. Since the announcement that Alaska would acquire Virgin America in a deal valued at $2.6 billion, the airline has been working to merge both brands, including future plans for Virgin’s fleet of 67 Airbus narrow-body aircraft. In March of 2017, Alaska said that they plan to retire the […]

Society as a whole is starting to see more and more “smart things.” After the introduction of the smartphone, we have started to see smart cars, smart fridges, smart blinds, and now smart luggage. New smart suitcases and carry-on bags being sold possess all sorts of features aimed to make travel easier. The features on […]

Regional aircraft, the small, less than 100 seat airplanes that we see at small airports across the country, are finding themselves on longer routes. The aircraft were originally offered as a way for airlines to serve short routes with less demand using less fuel-intensive aircraft. However, a new trend has seen regional aircraft, namely jets, […]

Like many AvGeeks, I’ve always been attracted to oddities in the aviation industry. Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737-400 Combi, short for combination, was, possibly, one of the last true aviation oddities in the U.S. Sadly, the final Boeing 737-400 Combi flew its last flight for Alaska Airlines on Wednesday. On the outside, the Boeing 737-400 Combi […]

After purchasing Virgin America for $2.6 billion in 2016, Alaska Airlines will switch all Virgin America flights to Alaska operations on April 25, 2018. Alaska was cleared by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice in December of 2016 to continue with the acquisition of Virgin America, with the deal being finalized […]

While the previous post served as an introduction to the various types of fuel hedging methods, this post will focus on several real world examples of fuel hedging done right and wrong throughout the airline industry. As mentioned previously fuel hedging is the strategy that airlines use to control their fuel costs in a market […]