Alaska Airlines launches Boeing 737 Max on first passenger flight

• Alaska Airlines started passenger flights with the Boeing 737 Max on Monday.
• The first day of flights included two round trips, the first from Seattle to San Diego, California.
• United Airlines has just placed an order for an additional 25 Boeing 737 Max aircraft.
• Visit the Business section of the Insider for more stories.

Boeing’s most famous aircraft is having a great start in March, with two milestones at the beginning of the month.

Alaska Airlines started passenger service with the Boeing 737 Max on Monday, after a very late start. Flight AS482 left for San Diego from the airline’s hub in Seattle in the early hours of the day and arrived without a hitch before departing back to Seattle.

The first flight was the culmination of more than 19,000 miles and 50 hours of test flights performed in the weeks since the aircraft was delivered to Alaska. The airline’s only Boeing 737 Max 9 flew as far from Seattle as Charleston, South Carolina; Kailua-Kona, Hawaii; and Juneau, Alaska throughout February, shows FlightAware data.

Alaska is the fourth U.S. airline to fly Max and initially planned to start service during the summer of 2019, until the grounding in March 2019 delayed these planes. Max’s first delivery to Alaska took place only in January, just two months after the Federal Aviation Administration’s ground cancellation request, which was quickly echoed by countless regulators around the world.

Executives were confident in the aircraft and its ability to reduce costs, even before the first model arrived at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport hub in Alaska. Boeing’s loyal customer ended 2020 with firm orders for 68 aircraft, compared to an initial order for 32 aircraft, and options for 52 more before the first test flight was even carried out.

More airlines also relaunched the Max service after disembarkation, as countries and regions like Canada, the EU and Brazil approved the return of the aircraft to the skies. Boeing said at the end of January that more than 2,700 flights had already been made by Max since the landing.

Alaska has only four daily departures planned with the aircraft until March 18, when its second Max goes into passenger service. Los Angeles and San Diego are currently the only cities that receive visits from Max on flights from Seattle, according to data from Cirium, and eventually from Portland, Oregon.

The aircraft will be mainly on the West Coast until more aircraft are added, but the test flights reveal that the airline probably has plans for flights from the East Coast and Hawaii Max. Alaska may take Max south of the Mexican border, the airline’s largest international destination region, and Costa Rica, as the two countries have given the green light for the aircraft to fly in their airspace.

United places more maximum orders

United Airlines is also moving ahead with Max after a successful relaunch. Andrew Nocella, the airline’s commercial director, told the team in a memo that 25 new Boeing 737 Max aircraft have just been ordered and deliveries of 45 previously ordered aircraft have been delayed.

“These new aircraft represent the best the industry has to offer in terms of convenience, experience and comfort for the customer,” said Nocella in the memo, which United shared with Insider. “In fact, flights on our MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019 had the highest average customer satisfaction score of any large narrow-body aircraft.”

The relaunch of United’s Max aircraft began on February 11 with the first flight traveling uneventfully from Denver to Houston, Texas, with Insider on board. United has steadily increased the number of Max flights and is on track to move from 24 daily departures on February 11 to 96 by the end of March, according to Cirium.

Jonathan Roitman, United’s chief operating officer, told Insider after the first flight that the name Max did not remove many passengers from the aircraft. Many on the first flight didn’t even know they were flying in a Max, despite United’s warnings when booking a flight on the Max and the name of the aircraft on the airport signage and on-board security cards.

Both United and Alaska are the only two American airlines that fly Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft, the largest variant in commercial service.

Southwest Airlines is the only airline in the United States to fly this Max that has not restarted operations, with its relaunch of the Max scheduled for March.