Alaska Airlines continues to struggle with its core business: getting passengers to their destination safely and on time. The airline claims it's making progress fixing maintenance and delay problems, but anecdotal evidence and recent statistics suggest otherwise.
Yesterday, passengers used an emergency slide to evacuate a flight in Long Beach after smoke filled the jet's cabin. A separate flight arrived in Chicago three hours and 15 minutes late after a delay in Seattle due to maintenance problems. And a Vancouver-to-San Francisco flight on Friday made an emergency landing in Seattle after the cabin failed to pressurize. Several passengers were treated for ear pain.
Maintenance issues are particularly sensitive for Alaska Airlines since a faulty tail screw caused a deadly crash near Los Angeles a few years ago. One of its planes took off from Seattle earlier this year with a dent in its fuselage and another filled with smoke after arriving in San Francisco.
Also important for regular fliers, the airline's on-time performance has worsened, according to federal statistics. Less than 73 percent of flights were on time in June and about 50 percent earlier this month, when the airline had baggage-sorting problems at Sea-Tac airport. Those numbers don't tell the whole story since they count any flight arriving at the gate 15 minutes behind schedule as late. Twenty-six percent of Alaska's flights in June were delayed, by an average of 38 minutes, according to the Department of Transportation.
Alaska Airlines didn't return a call for comment on Monday.
Seattle-based Alaska has the most extensive route network throughout Cascadia so the region would benefit if it operated efficiently. But if the recent performance continues Cascadia travelers will increasingly avoid it, despite the convenience of its timetable. "I really want to like the airline," a man told the Anchorage Daily News last month. "But they really, really need to reorganize and get their act together or they're going to do permanent damage to their image."