Alaska Airlines

Two unscheduled landings; two different reasons

Air traffic control, , , ,

An Alaska Airlines plane flying from Los Angeles to Seattle with 116 passengers and five crew members on board had to make an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon Thursday night because the pilot lost consciousness.

According to an airline spokesperson, the co-pilot declared an emergency and landed Flight 473 safely.  Medical personnel  met the airplane on the runway and the pilot was taken to the hospital. The plane continued on later to Seattle with a new pilot. (A few more details here.)

The reason for the diversion of a JetBlue flight on Thursday night was a bit different: according to the Denver Post, JetBlue flight 185 from New York’s JFK airport on route to San Diego was diverted to Denver International Airport because of an unruly female passenger. The woman was escorted off the plane and met by police, but as of late Thursday night it was unknown if the woman was arrested.

 

 

 

Week long delay for some Alaska Airlines passengers?

Fun Stuff,

My route home to Seattle from Santiago, Chile was via Miami and Chicago, so I suspected I was maybe just very tired and a bit out of it when I looked at the “Departures” and “Arrivals” screens for Alaska Airlines at O’Hare International Airport.

ALASKA SCREEN SHOT

The departures were definitely for January 7th – my day of travel – but the arrivals screen said January 1st – which made me wonder where those planes – and all those passengers – have been the past week. And what sort of crazy New Year’s Eve party they may have been at if they were just now getting home a week later.

I snapped a photo (actually I stopped a tall person passing by and asked them to reach up and snap the photo), posted it on Twitter and, not long after, got a reply from the airline:

ALASKA TWEET

Thanks, Alaska Airlines, for attending to that glitch. I’d hesitated getting on my flight for fear that I’d end up in another dimension.

Alaska Airlines’ paint the plane contest

Design, liveries,

Alaska Airlines is having a Paint the Plane contest.

The airline has decided to paint a 737 with a Hawaiian theme and asked Hawaii schoolchildren to submit their ideas. These three designs have been chosen as finalists and Hawaiian residents are being asked to vote for a winner. The winning design will get painted on a plane and the winning artist will get a$ $5,000 scholarship and a trip for four to any Alaska Airlines destination.

Here are the finalists:

Sophia Cleek’s design

Izabella Hamilton’s design

Each of these designs looks pretty snazzy. If you’re a resident of Hawaii you can vote for your favorite here. The rest of us will just have to wait and see which design wins and wait to see the newly painted plane flying by.
Voting ends December 18, 2012. The winner will be announced January 10, 2013.

Bad day for Alaska Airlines

Air Travel, , ,

We all know how irritating it is when our the internet signal goes down in our home or office.

Magnify that feeling times a bazillion and you probably won’t be anywhere near what Alaska Airlines, Horizon Air and their customers across the country had to deal with when the the connection to the ticketing system was lost at around 7:30 a.m. PT on Monday morning due what turned out to be two severed fiber optic lines in the Sprint network.

“Sprint provides the airlines with connectivity to SABRE, the system the carriers use for reservations, to check in passengers and to purchase tickets,” the airline explained.

It took a while to figure that out, but right away what that meant for travelers at more than 60 airports – especially Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where about half the flights are on those airlines – was long lines, hours of waiting, flight delays, cancellation and more waiting as airline staff tried to figure out what they could get done by hand.

Here are some of the photos Sandy Ward, from the Future of Flight sent from her vantage point this morning at Sea-Tac airport:

Manual ticketing was the order of the day. Anyone remember the days when the airlines had little stickers that represented your seat assignments?

There was one upside of the Alaska Airlines internet outage: because no one could check in for their flights, there was a short line at the security checkpoint.

Alaska Airlines said its internet service was restored by early afternoon, but the damage had already been done: as of noon, Alaska and Horizon had already canceled 70 flights and disrupted the travel day of more than 6,000 passengers. And, the airline said, although more than 130 flights had departed by noon, some of those flights were up to four hours late.

It’s understandable that travelers are upset. Especially those who missed important connections, meetings and social events and those who stood around for hours without accurate information about what was going on.

Alaska Airlines says it’s going to try to make it up to them. On the Sprint Network Outage page on its website, the airline is offering to waive change fees for those with tickets for travel on October 8th and 9th. And in an apology to travelers, the airline is encouraging those whose plans were significantly disrupted to get in touch with the Customer Care Team where, we might assume, some reparations will be made.

Let’s hope thing get back to normal on Tuesday.

World’s largest salmon lands in Anchorage

Airplanes, , ,

This is just plane fun.

On Thursday, Alaska Airlines unveiled the world’s largest salmon: a 91,000 pound, 129-foot long fish-themed Boeing 737-800 at a ceremony in Anchorage.

Alaska Airlines unveiled the world’s largest salmon: the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon II

The new “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon II” is almost identical to an earlier version of the paint scheme the airline used on a 737-400 in 2005. (That plane was re-painted with the carrier’s signature Eskimo livery last year.) This new design is about nine feet longer than the original one and features fish scales on the winglets and a salmon pink-colored Alaska script across the fuselage.

The design was produced in partnership with ASMI, which promotes wild, natural and sustainable Alaska seafood.

Here’s some of the trivia Alaska Airlines has shared about the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon II and a fun video of the plane getting painted.

• The 129-foot-long Boeing 737-800 has a wingspan of 117 feet and a cruising speed of 530 mph.
• Mylar paint was used to create an iridescent sparkle over the nearly 3,500 fish scales & to make the painting 3-D.
• More than 90 percent of the fuselage was airbrushed with 21 unique colors to create the lifelike king salmon.
• A crew of eight worked around the clock for 27 days at Associated Painters Inc. in Oklahoma City to paint the plane.
• Mark Boyle, a Seattle-based wildlife artist, created this design, the design for the first Salmon-Thirty-Salmon plane and a dozen other special paint themes for Alaska Airlines, including the Spirit of Disneyland I and II.

(Photos & video courtesy of Alaska Airlines)

Making it easier to fly with wine

Food, , ,

Wine has become a big deal in Washington State, especially in the Yakima Valley, Tri-Cities and Walla Wall Valley regions. And, come September, anyone planning a wine-tasting trip will be happy to know that Alaska Airlines, Enterprise Rent-a-Car and the area tourism bureaus are expanding the Washington Wine Country Taste and Tote program that makes it easier to get to Washington wine country and take the wine home.

Since 2011, Alaska Airlines has allowed passengers flying home from the Walla Walla Valley to check their first case of wine free. In September, that policy will expand to include the Yakima and Pasco/Tri-Cities airports.

In addition, Enterprise Rent-A-Car will waive car drop-off fees for anyone flying on Alaska Airlines into Yakima, Pasco or Walla Walla regional airports who wishes to fly out of one of the other two airports.

The new program also allows travelers to sample wines at participating wineries and pay no tasting fees by showing a current Alaska Airlines boarding pass from one of the three airports.

Not interested in Washington wines? Alaska Airlines will also accept one box of up to 12 bottles of wine per passenger at no extra charge from customers on flights departing Sonoma County at Santa Rose Airport.

Here’s more information about the Washington Wine Country Taste and Tote program.

This seems like a win-win wine program for travelers and for wine-makers, so drink up!

Horizon Air president apologizes to mistreated passenger

Airline policies, Assistance, , ,

Over the weekend, a Bend, Ore., man took to Facebook to describe the incivility he alleged was inflicted on a fellow passenger on an Horizon Air flight out of Oregon’s Redmond Municipal Airport.

Cameron Clark witnessed what he described on Facebook as “the worst of humanity” when airline staff on duty appeared to ignore and refuse special assistance to a couple he thought was “disabled/mentally and physically challenged.”

Clark estimated the couple to be in their 70s and said that the man later told him he had late-stage Parkinson’s disease, that his companion had MS and that he was trying to get to Bellingham, Wash., to see his daughter.

“He had a hard time walking,” Clark wrote on Facebook, “No one offered him a wheelchair or asked how they could be helpful. He stumbled off toward the safety inspection line. Predictably, he didn’t understand/comprehend their restriction of his luggage, and got stuck in security.”

Throughout the weekend, Clark’s Facebook post created a flurry of negative and outraged comments, which Alaska Airlines responded to with a series of Facebook posts of its own.

I spoke with Alaska Airlines spokesperson Paul McElroy on Monday morning and he told me that while the passenger did not get on his Friday flight, he did fly Saturday and is visiting with his daughter at an alternate location. McElroy said the airline refunded the passenger’s initial ticket price and provided complimentary round-trip transportation for his trip.

“There are things we should have done better,” said McElroy, who added that the president of Horizon Airlines was preparing a post to that effect. (Regional airline Horizon Air and Alaska Airlines are both owned by the Alaska Air Group, which is based in Seattle.)

Coincidentally, on Monday the airline was meeting with Eric Lipp, the executive director of Open Doors Organization, an independent disability advocacy group. “We’re going to leverage their visit and ask them to help us review what we did with this customer to see if we could have done better,” McElroy said.

Lipp said there are laws to help passengers with disabilities and extra services that airlines can and are willing to provide. “But the law says the passenger has to self-identify,” said Lipp. “Otherwise, it’s a puzzle. The breakdown here is that the passenger didn’t self-identify and the airline didn’t have the right codes in the system to get him services he was entitled to.”

Lipp had other advice for passengers with disabilities and much of it was rolled into the apology Horizon Air president Glenn Johnson posted on Facebook on Monday afternoon. Here’s part of that statement, which includes some helpful tips.

“…First and foremost, we’ve determined that we could and should have handled this better and I apologize to our passenger on behalf of all of us at Horizon Air and Alaska Airlines. This experience has reminded us of the importance of assisting passengers with disabilities and making sure every one of them receives the special care they may need.

The information we’ve gathered during our review will certainly improve our efforts going forward.”

…Alaska and Horizon have partnered with Open Doors Organization, an independent disability advocacy group, to review employees’ handling of the situation and suggest improvements in the airlines’ disability, awareness and sensitivity training. Eric Lipp, Open Doors Organization’s executive director, advises passengers with a disability who are traveling to:

  • Self-disclose to the airline any assistance you may need before you arrive at the airport. This could include an escort or wheelchair assistance through security, to the gate, and while boarding and exiting the plane.
  • Ask the airline if you prefer to have a personal assistant escort you to the gate. Most airlines will issue passes to personal assistants to help passengers with disabilities get to or from the gate area.
  • Plan ahead and arrive at the airport at least 90 minutes before your flight departs, which allows time to check luggage, obtain wheelchair services, get through security and board the flight.

(Part of this post first appeared in my NBC News story Witness blasts Alaska Airlines for treatment of fellow passenger.

Alaska Airlines, JetBlue Airways top passenger satisfaction survey

surveys, ,

Alaska Airlines and JetBlue have come out on top of this year’s J.D. Power and Associates 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction Study, which was released today.

The highly regarded study found that after two years of consecutive industry improvements, overall passenger satisfaction has declined slightly (to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale—down from 683 in 2011) and that “attributes pertaining to a carrier’s process and people, rather than price, are more highly correlated with passengers’ intentions to fly with an airline again in the future.”

Travelers reported increased satisfaction with so-called low-cost carriers for the third consecutive year (up 3 index points from 2011 to a 754 average), but satisfaction with traditional carriers was down (the decline was 4 points, to 647).

“Passengers want it all,” Stuart Greif, J.D. Power’s vice president and general manager of the global travel and hospitality practice, said in a statement. “The airline industry is caught between trying to satisfy customers who demand low prices, high-quality service and comfort, and contending with the economic challenges of profitably operating an airline.”

In the traditional network carrier rankings, Alaska Airlines ranks highest overall for the fifth consecutive year, performing well in four of the seven factors: boarding/deplaning/baggage; flight crew; check-in; and reservation. Air Canada was just just 1 index point behind Alaska Airlines in this segment, with high rankings in the cost and fees, in-flight services and aircraft factors.

Delta Air Lines moved up two rank positions to third and was the only traditional carrier to improve from 2011, by 9 index points.

In the low-cost carrier rankings, JetBlue Airways ranked highest for a seventh consecutive year, performing well in the in-flight services and aircraft categories. JetBlue was followed closely by Southwest, which performed well in four factors: cost and fees; boarding/deplaning/baggage; check-in; and reservation. Neither airline charges a fee (yet) for a passenger’s first checked bag.

The study measures overall customer satisfaction based on performance in seven factors (in order of importance): cost and fees; in-flight services; boarding/deplaning/baggage; flight crew; aircraft; check-in; and reservation.

You can read more details here.

Travel tidbits: world’s largest flying salmon

Airplanes, ,

Alaska Airlines is joining forces with the non-profit Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute to create the world’s largest king salmon.

Stretching nearly 129 feet, the fishy design will be put on a Boeing 737-800 and hit the skies this fall. The design for the new “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon II” is based on an earlier version that was painted onto one of the airline’s 737-400 planes in 2005 and covered over with the airline’s familiar Eskimo livery last year.

Here’s a photo taken by Jeffrey Milstein of the belly of the airplane sporting that first fish.

Alaska Airlines Salmon Thirty Salmon Boeing 737-400