bofc

Once again Alaska seems to be hanging up the "Please Fly Southwest" sign in Terminal One at OAK. The slide continues - Previously Q400s replaced 737s on flights to PDX, and SNA - OAK service was discontinued completely. And starting this Fall one of the three SEA - OAK round trips (at a key time for business travelers) will use a CRJ 700 instead of the current 737. No wifi. No First Class. Tight squeeze seats. Ugh.

The SEA - OAK flight is always full so it's apparently a "strategic" deployment of equipment elsewhere. It's a shame to see this happen. Does Alaska ever reverse course on decisions like this? Or is the demise of Oakland only a matter of time?

drc1912

Do you know which of the flights on any given day will use the CRJ's? I fly SEA->OAK and back ~3x a month and this could impact my flights...

ANC

seems to be the trend airline wide with smaller a/c being used for flights less than 750 miles and even some around 1000. Ive even seen AA flying Embraer 175s hub to hub ORD to DFW. If AS was filling the 737s all the time it wouldnt be pulled from the route. They wouldnt bring in smaller a/c with less seats if the current flights were selling out all 3 flights on a daily basis.

SOCguy

Sure they would, if they could fill the same airplane somewhere else and make more money doing so. Maybe somewhere WN doesn't fly and impact yields.

eponymous_coward

Yields for SEA-Bay Area aren't all that great. 8 day advance purchase (May 2) is $79 for SEA-SFO/OAK/SJC.

Not exactly a shock in a market with AS/UA/WN/VX/DL in it, and DL aggressively pricing things.

SayNoToCoach

Previously I had only done Horizon flights between PDX and SEA. This February I did it on SMF to PDX. That got a little long. I'm 6'0" and 210lbs. Plus I have pelvic nerve issues as many of you know. My flight was full too.

Eastbay1K

One of 3 or one or 4? Seems to be one of 4. They've done this before. Hopefully it will return to mainline, as it previously did.

dc333

This is pretty telling and doesn't bode well long term. It would make sense to reduce seats on this market.

rybob1

It would seem that the easy solution to free up airplanes for new routes would be to substitute thinner/shorter routes with CRJ/Q400/E175's. If I have to choose between more destinations served or more mainline service, I'll take destinations. As an added benefits, haven't we seen some routes receive higher frequency, in order to keep capacity about the same in the market?

ANC

as far as the 175s go, I think if that goes well for AS, theyve only scratched the surface ^

And if you read the fine print of some of their articles involving the 175, they hint at using 20 to 25 of those things.

I happen to really like the EMB175s. Just getting a bit skiddish that there hasnt yet been any deliveries of the AS versions yet and my flight is almost just 65 days away

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

What does AS' contracts allow? Ie is there a limit to the # of them AS can have operated by OO for the E175's.

tusphotog

I can't wait to see what the AS and QX pilot unions say if they bring in 25 E175s. The QX guys are pissed as it is because the same CR7s they flew were moved to Skywest to fly the same routes.

Don't worry about the E175s not being delivered yet. Skywest operates several of them already. Expect them to show up a few days early so the ramp crews in SEA or PDX can get trained on them. Other than that, it's a fairly seamless addition.

AS Flyer

Unfortunately, the AS guys can't say anything. Well, of course they can say something, but they have nothing in their contract to prevent the company from adding as many E175's as they want to. No scope language to protect them from this. That said, We all know that AS is getting a lot of planes over the next 10 years or so, and they have to go somewhere. It wouldn't make sense for AS to put an E175 on a route that they can fill a 737 on with equally high margins. The E175's are being added to routes that, at least for now, couldn't support a 737. I say, let the E175's build a market for us and then we can move the bigger planes in once there is a larger market there. AND, in the meantime, AS will be adding plenty of new routes of their own as well.

Chugach

I am intrigued to see what AS starts to add when the MAX planes are delivered. They're going to have range that AS has never had before...pretty sure they can hit northern South America from LAX and possibly Japan/Korea from ANC, and should also give them the ability to get to Hawaii from more inland destinations.

3Cforme

The amendable dates for the AS pilots' contract is March '18, and December '18 for the QX pilots. If AS starts adding contracted aircraft aggressively one can be sure the AS & QX pilots will have something to say. See p14 of the Ann Rep.