Tag Archives: a319

Alaska Doesn’t Want These Guys

Alaska Airlines likes to advertise that it is “Proudly All Boeing”.  It isn’t of course.  The Q400s and E175s are definitely not Boeing jets.  When they bought Virgin America, they acquired a large fleet of Airbus jets too.  These are not going to be part of the fleet for long, though.  Alaska has made it clear that they are going away.  The A319s are apparently too small so are the first in line for replacement.  Go to Paine Field and you will come across a bunch of Alaska painted A319s bagged up and awaiting their future.  A319s are generally smaller than airlines want these days – it is not that long ago that the A319 was more popular than the A320 but that is no longer the case.  I wonder where these will go next.

Salt Lake City is a Scenic Airport!

I had a long layover at Salt Lake City when connecting on a Delta flight.  The sun was out and the mountains in the background were covered in snow so it made for a rather pretty backdrop for the airport operations.  It was a bit Delta-centric given that they hub at the airport and we were in one of their terminals but it did make for some nice light and scenery for aviation shots.

When United Thought That Ted Was a Winner

Occasionally I post about disappearing airlines.  Normally they are airlines that went away because they ran out of cash.  This one is a different story.  The arrival of low cost airlines caused a lot of the majors to think that they could fight the newcomers by setting up their own lost cost operation.  United came up with Ted.  I guess this was like half a United!  They moved a bunch of their Airbus A319s and A320s from United to Ted and set them up on services which, I guess, did not have the premium passengers and so was focused on the economy traveler.

Ted lasted for a while.  I don’t know whether it was ever a profitable business or not.  When you viewed it in the context of the overall United business, it might have been good for a while.  However, whatever the underpinnings of the business were, eventually United came to the conclusion that Ted was not a good idea.  I don’t know whether the cost base was too high to sustain it or whether it was just undercutting revenue from United but they gave up on the idea.  The jets got repainted and became part of the United fleet again.