Alaska Airlines Majorly Simplifying Fleet

Alaska Airlines plans to simplify its fleet by next year, and this involves retiring quite a few planes.

Alaska Airlines retiring A320-family & Q400 aircraft

The Seattle-based carrier will have a single fleet of Boeing and Embraer E175s for regional flights by the end of the year. This means that the airline will retire all of the jets.

The current fleet of Alaska Airlines and wholly owned subsidiary Horizon Air consists of over 300 planes.

• 35 Airbus A320s
• 10 Airbus A321neos
• 11 Boeing 737-700s
• 61 Boeing 737-800s
• 91 Boeing 737-900s
• 16 Boeing 737 MAX 9s
• 63 Embraer E175s
• 32 Bombardier Q400s

The airline has nearly 150 planes on order, including the following:

• 15 Boeing 737 MAX 8s
• 54 Boeing 737 MAX 9s
• 60 Boeing 737 MAX 10s
• 19 Embraer E175s

The decision to simplify the fleet is consistent with Alaska's low-cost high productivity mindset and is expected to drive significant economic benefits.

Alaska Airlines' fleet should consist of 400 aircraft by mid-decade despite the fact that all of these planes are being retired.

Alaska had already said it would retire its A320s by the end of the year. This is the first time we have heard of the carrier's plans to retire A321neos and Q400s.

My take on Alaska Airlines’ fleet changes

There are a few thoughts about Alaska Airlines.

• Alaska Airlines was already planning on retiring most of its Airbus fleet, so the A321neo retirement doesn’t come as a huge surprise; this jet was ordered by Virgin America pre-merger, and it would probably be pretty inefficient for Alaska Airlines to keep around such a small subfleet
• The elimination of Q400s is much more interesting to me, since the Q400 turboprop and E175 jets have the same capacity of 76 seats (though the latter has more comfortable cabins and first class seats)
• I wonder if on some level this decision comes down to the general pilot shortage we’re seeing, as it’s especially tough to get pilots to want to work on turboprops nowadays, when they could be working on jets
• Even with Alaska Airlines still having some E175s on order, this represents a significant capacity decrease for Alaska’s regional fleet, so I’m curious to see what markets end up getting cut, or if some markets transition to 737s
• The Q400 is a pretty polarizing plane — I know some people won’t miss these planes, while others love them

Bottom line

Alaska Airlines plans to retire A320s, A321neos, and Q400s by the end of the year. The A320 retirement has been announced before, but the A321neo and Q400 are new.

It's not surprising to see Alaska completely retire its Airbus fleet, especially with the number of Boeing MAXs on order. The retirement of the Q400 will affect capacity in Alaska's regional fleet. I'm sure many will miss this plane.

What do you think about Alaska Airlines?