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Comment by inamberclad | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how that will work out for Southwest after this.

Sometime in 2023 Alaska Airlines completed their efforts to sell off all their Airbus and Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Alaska acquired Virgin America and its all-Airbus fleet in 2016, and the Q400s were from their Horizon Air operations. The company sold the Airbus aircraft to American and retired the Bombardiers.

The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics.

Now Alaska's fleet is all 737, a mix of MAX and NG models. The MAX is about a quarter of their fleet, so the current grounding has hurt them.

I've been thinking about this one, but I'm not sure it makes sense. Let's say that Alaska flew half Airbus. And let's say half their 737 fleet is MAX's. (E.g. a quarter of the fleet, same number they have today.) And as time goes on, it becomes increasingly 737MAX as they upgrade to get better fuel efficiency.

How would this help them? A large % of the fleet is still grounded.

This math is wrong. The MAX is a quarter of the all-737 fleet. If Alaska flew half Airbus, an a quarter of 737s were grounded, then it would a quarter of half, or an eighth. You're suggesting that the MAX would make up half their 737 fleet, "as time goes on", but then that would be true in an all 737 fleet as well. Either way you do it, the result of having some Airbus models would be a smaller portion of the fleet grounded.

You're proposing to replace the non-MAX 737s with Airbus, but I think it would make a lot more sense to replace the 737 MAXs with Airbus. That way, nothing gets grounded.

I flew on an Alaska branded Embraer craft a few days ago. Do you mean only those operated directly by Alaska? I think mine was operated by Sky West.

Yeah, Alaska operating as Sky West. It's kind of like outsourcing.

What's missing from that explanation is that Virgin got horrific lease terms on their fleet because they were a fledgling airline. Had Alaska been the one to lease them the terms would've been much better and the financial benefit to dumping them would've bee much smaller.

As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while. Horizon still exists as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska. Their fleet is all Embraer. In fact I'd be hard pressed to think of a time when Alaska was ever all Boeing.

> As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while

I do kind of wonder about the relationship with Boeing, with Boeing Field and the plant just up the road from Alaska's HQ at Sea-Tac. Cynically speaking I'd guess that Alaska and Boeing CEOs are golf buddies or something. Boeing's HQ is is now in Chicago (which may be part of the problem, as the article notes) so maybe not.

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