Alaska Optimizes Flying by Retiming A321s and Hubbing Portland

Alaska was busy working on integrating its Hawaiian fleet this past weekend. I should be mad that they dumped all these changes right before the holidays, but who can stay mad at Chester? After all, this wasn’t just noise. This was really focused around two substantial changes: the Hawaiian A321 fleet and the Alaska Portland hub.

Ramping Up A321 Utilization

Hawaiian has a fleet of 18 A321neos that it uses to fly almost entirely between the islands and the mainland. (There is a weekly flight to Raratonga, but that is on weekends only, and I’ve ignored that here.)

Here is the traditional way that Hawaiian has used the airplane, going back to last summer. You will see Day 1 showing origins from Hawaiʻi while Day 2 has all directions and Day 3 has just flights back to the islands.

Don’t worry about the details if you can’t read the individual cities. It doesn’t really matter. Just keep in mind that pink is a Honolulu flight, light purple is a Kahului flight, and dark purple is either a Kona or Līhuʻe flight.

Old Hawaiian A321neo Sample Summer Utilization – July 15-17, 2024

^{Data via Cirium}

The pattern is pretty clear here. Airplanes would leave the islands in the middle of the day, get to the West Coast, and then sit all night. The next day would have a morning return to the islands before it did it all over again. The one exception to this was the redeye to Salt Lake City.

Now, keep in mind that last summer, Hawaiian scheduled only 17 lines of flying. I think they just wanted a spare in there.

But now, let’s fast forward to this year. Over the last two weeks, Alaska has made sweeping changes to the A321 schedule, changing some markets and retiming flights. It now looks like this:

New Hawaiian A321neo Sample Summer Utilization – July 14-16, 2025

^{Data via Cirium}

You’ll see there are early morning departures from Honolulu to Portland and San Diego. We have late evening arrivals from the West Coast, none later than the LAX flight arriving at 11:29pm. And there are now more redeyes in the network.

In this schedule, there are 18 lines of flying, so they are fully utilizing the fleet. I actually wonder if there will be a 737 that can be pressed into service if needed instead of holding back a more valuable and scarce A321 as a spare.

Whatʻs the end result? Itʻs pretty dramatic:

Hawaiian A321neo Scheduled Daily Block Hours

^{Data via Cirium}

Before last summer, the airline was still trying to get beyond the engine issues that grounded airplanes. Last summer peaked at 190 block hours per day. It spiked in the fall as high as 200, but that was only on certain days. Now next summer? Youʻre looking at more than 230 hours per day consistently.

Whatʻs even more interesting? You still have 11 airplanes that sit overnight on the mainland for a long time. Take that airplane that lands in San Jose at 6:40pm and then leaves the next morning at 7am. It is not crazy to think you could add in a turn to Seattle there. Get some free extra aircraft time and drive utilization down even further.

Portland Gets Banked

Over on the Alaska side of the house, the airline has decided to turn Portland into a real banked hub instead of the modified rolling-style hub. The latter is better for utilization of airport resources, but the former is generally far better from a commercial perspective. Alaska has relied on Seattle as its big hub, but now it wants Portland to step up and take more connections.

Hereʻs a look at a chart we did for this weekʻs Cranky Network Weekly.

As you can see, there are now five clear banks of flying and very little in between. To make this work, Alaska needs more gates and quite likely more employees. I assume that this is all now possible since the airport’s big renovation project is done. Alaska just had to decide it was worth the investment.

With five clear banks, Alaska has now changed frequencies around. It added an extra daily next summer from Portland to Austin, Bend, Sacramento, Salt Lake, and Vancouver. It’s adding 2x daily to Anchorage and Medford.

Some markets actually see decreases. Most notable is Seattle which loses two flights. Presumably with a better banked schedule, there will be fewer people needing to flow between those two cities. Burbank also loses 1x daily.

If you’re looking for a good example of when cutting is good news, take a look at Boise. It loses 1x daily from Portland, but two of the remaining daily flights are upgauged from Embraer 175 to 737, so seats are up. And in Spokane, frequency stays flat, but again two of the flights are upgauged. This is about getting more people to flow through the hub at the right time.

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Both of these moves underscore the massive change going on under the hood as these two airlines integrate and Alaska rethinks the best way to use its resources. It’s an exciting time to be watching this airline.