Travelers on Alaska Airlines’ popular early morning and mid-afternoon flights from Missoula to Seattle will be flying Pacific Northwest skies in larger mainline Airbuses beginning in May.
With its jump from a 76-seat Bombardier Q400 turboprop regional jet to a 119-seat Airbus, the Seattle/Tacoma-based Alaska is showing its faith in a growing Missoula base.
“Whenever a route does well for us (such as Seattle-Missoula), we look at adding more capacity. Moving to mainline aircraft, in this case the Airbus, is part of the next step,” Alaska Airlines spokesperson Ray Lane said in an email to the Missoulian on Thursday.
The larger aircraft will start landing in Missoula on May 21. The upgraded flights will take off at 6 a.m. and 2:50 p.m. The Q400s will continue to be used on three other daily flights, two to Seattle and one to Portland.
“If we looked at just Alaska alone this coming year, 2020, we’ll probably see close to 40,000 more seats in our market compared to 2019,” said Cris Jensen, director of Missoula International. “That’s a pretty substantial number of seats to fill, so they must be feeling pretty good about our market.”
Jensen said the Airbus will add another level of comfort to passengers with first- and premium-class seating and extra leg room.
“We were kind of hoping at some point to transition from turboprops to jet aircraft, but I don’t know if we ever imagined an even bigger Airbus,” he said. “That was little bit of surprise, and it's certainly appreciated.”
Lane said on the same day in May, Alaska will be changing to the Airbus for one roundtrip flight each between Billings and Seattle and Bozeman and Seattle.
Missoula’s daily non-stop service to and from Los Angeles, announced in August, will use Alaska’s Embraer E175, a versatile 76-seat aircraft that can be used for shorter regional flights served as well as longer routes for which the Airbus is well-suited.
Alaska Airlines, the fifth-largest air carrier in the U.S., inherited 67 Airbuses when it acquired Virgin America in 2016. That allowed it to expand into more distant markets beyond its traditional west-coast base.
Alaska is phasing out the Q400s, from 50 at the end of 2017 to a projected 23 by the end of 2020, according to airlinerporter.com.
Jensen said he expects Alaska’s University of Montana Griz and Montana State University Cats Q400 aircraft will remain in the fleet for now. They’re among 11 college-themed Q400s painted in the colors of universities in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and San Diego State in California.
“There’s a Grizzly airplane on the ramp as we speak,” Jensen said Thursday afternoon. “They’re starting to phase out the university paint schemes in the transition to mainline jets, but that won’t change the fact that from time to time we’ll see it here.”
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