Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air Request Equal Access to Boeing Field

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air notified the King County Council today of their request for equal access to Boeing Field, formally known as King County International Airport, with the intent of operating as many as 100 departures a day from the county-owned facility.

"We share the same concerns as many in our community about expanding commercial passenger service at Boeing Field," said Bill Ayer, chairman and CEO of Alaska Air Group, the holding company of Alaska and Horizon. "However, if a direct competitor moves their operations to Boeing Field, we’re left with no choice but to request equal access.

"Maintaining competitive operating costs and schedules is necessary to continue offering the superior service and low fares our customers expect from us," Ayer said. "We also need to protect the 14,000 Alaska and Horizon employees, many of whom are based in the Seattle area, whose livelihoods would be threatened if we allowed ourselves to operate at a competitive disadvantage."

Alaska and Horizon currently operate 147 and 134 departures from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, respectively, which combined account for about half the airport’s traffic and make Alaska Air Group the Port of Seattle’s largest airline customer. Alaska and Horizon plan to retain operations at Sea-Tac, while moving certain flights to Boeing Field.

"For Horizon, a regrettable potential outcome of splitting our Seattle operations might be a decline in service frequency to some of the Pacific Northwest communities that depend on our Sea-Tac flights for connections to other domestic and international routes," said Jeff Pinneo, president and CEO of Horizon Air.

The start of Alaska and Horizon operations out of Boeing Field is largely dependent on when facilities at Boeing Field could be built to handle such a dramatic surge in flight activity and the accompanying passenger traffic it would generate. Today the airport lacks sufficient ticket counter, gate, ramp and baggage facilities, as well as parking, access roads and connecting ramps from Interstate-5, to accommodate substantially more airport traffic. How such improvements and additional security and air traffic control would be funded is another unknown, since Alaska believes the county is obligated to accommodate, on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory basis, its application and those of other airlines to operate from Boeing Field.

"The cost of infrastructure improvements is just one of many reasons we’d rather not pursue commercial service at Boeing Field if we don’t have to," Ayer said. "Just as important are the environmental issues that will have to be addressed. With the planned capacity improvements at Sea-Tac that this community has funded, which will accommodate increasing regional air traffic well into the next decade, we don’t see a compelling case for the kind of public impacts that an expansion of Boeing Field would create."

Alaska Airlines and sister carrier, Horizon Air, together serve more than 80 cities through an expansive network throughout Alaska, the Lower 48, Canada and Mexico. For more news and information, visit their newsroom on the Internet at http://newsroom.alaskaair.com/ .

SOURCE: Alaska Airlines