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.
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.
14 comments on “Alaska Optimizes Flying by Retiming A321s and Hubbing Portland”
Good moves by AS, and w/r/t to PDX, a long time coming.
I’m still not sure how efficient it is to have a large hub and a medium one 150 miles apart.
Well, considering SEATAC is terribly constrained, and your strength / loyalty is in the NW… what else do you do?
The PDX project is still ongoing. Check out a recent YouTube video from “The B1M” for details.
I think it’s also worth recognizing that both PDX and SEA don’t really sit in the middle of their respective catchment basins for O&D. Lots of people drive up the Willamette Valley from the South to get to PDX and plenty of SEA passengers are coming from the North and NW of Seattle to SEA, so in that sense the airports are “further apart” than it might first appear for a lot of folks. For passengers connecting through the respective airports it’s going to be very similar flight times I would suspect.
Loyalty to AS in PDX, and OR overall, runs deep. Im glad to see them leverage that while adding connection opportunities as gravy. Summer is peak tourism season and PDX lacks a significant ULCC presence. That should help with yield dilution from connections.
Lets see what the winter 25/26 skd looks like to see if this is sustainable year round.
Great point. Few companies enjoy such an ingrained brand recognition/loyalty. DL can throw all the resources they want at SEA- until they recognize that for what it is, they won’t truly understand what they’re up against.
So how many narrowbody hours does AS/HA have to the islands, and how many dedicated planes would it take with this kind of utilization?
Is the incremental red eye flying to Hawaii generally replacing AS narrow body flying or HA wide body flying? Just trying to connect the dots from
previous posts.
Welcome back PDX hub!
Granted it’s little old Medford, OR but MFR goes from 6 daily AS flights last summer (4x SEA, 1x PDX, 1x LAX) to 10 daily next summer (4x SEA, 4x PDX, 2x LAX).
Now PDX just needs a Priority Pass lounge (RIP access to Capers restaurant).
We welcome the additional service to our MFR, and the additional focus on PDX has already paid dividends for me. Based on yields I’ve seen, they won’t have trouble filling planes. Interesting, we were always told by AS that the lack of service from MFR over the past several years was due to the pilot shortage. Obviously that is less of an issue now and better fleet utilization helps. Now just waiting for AA to initiate service to DFW! That will allow easy access to both Pacific and Atlantic flying within the OW network.
Thanks CF for the multiple posts after all the details that emerged from the bullish Alaska Investor Day.
As to “timeframe to return to an all Boeing Fleet?”, I did listen to your Air Show interview with Alaska’s CEO per your request! The three of you have an excellent dynamic, and I have now found another information source!
I believe Alaska’s CEO comments that NextGen/NEO Engines are requiring much higher MRO costs than OldGen/CEO Engines might be another interesting and worthwhile vein for you to drill into using your tools (Cirium, etc). My favorite quote was along the lines of “..and this was not in the brochure..’
Happy Holidays to both you and this fantastic Community.
Fully half of the 321s remain to be further optimized so there is still room for another big boost but they are approaching it deliberately and smartly, using the first half as test cases to troubleshoot, identify unintended consequences, issues, problems, etc. Overall it seems like a very logical next step in the combined operation after reorienting the Hawaiian airbuses.
“Dual hubs” don’t typically work because 1 will cannibalize the other, but in the case of SEA/PDX we have to remember that SEA is completely full. Growth at PDX does not come at the expense of SEA. Furthermore, a disproportionate amount of traffic originates in state of Alaska flowing south. In summer, AS flies as many as 24x daily between SEA and ANC. Much of that traffic is connecting. Does AS really need to dedicate 12 Seattle “slots” to ANC connections, when those same pax can be served via PDX? If the PDX hub is successful this summer, I wouldn’t be surprised to see AS add summertime service to JNU, FAI, KTN or other major connecting spokes.
A good corollary could be United’s treatment of EWR and IAD. We know EWR is full, and it’s hard to make a case that EWR is a worse performer on net because of the capacity put into IAD.
If Alaska had the option to add another 50 daily flights to Seattle I’m sure they would prefer to, but that isn’t an option with SEA’s real estate and airspace constraints.