Alaska Airlines returning to normal after earlier cancellations

By Susan Gilmore and Michael Ko
Seattle Times staff reporters

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Alaska Airlines was slowly returning to normal operations today after canceling many of its flights because of problems de-icing the planes.

The airline hopes to operate about 70 flights out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport by the end of tonight. Typically the airline has 130 planes leaving Seattle each day.

Horizon Airlines, owned by the same company, cancelled 111 of its 144 flights today, also because of problems de-icing the planes and because the airport in Portland was virtually shut down because of the weather. Most of the Horizon planes spend nights in Portland. While two typically overnight in Seattle, there were 25 here Tuesday night, said Cheryl Temple, Horizon spokeswoman.

Both Alaska and Horizon hope to return to normal schedule tomorrow.

The problem, said Greg Witter, Alaska spokesman, is the time it takes to de-ice the airplanes at Sea-Tac. The freezing rain meant when one part of the plane was de-iced it would ice back over while the other half of the plane was de-iced and crews would have to start over.

"Snow is one thing and frost another," Witter said. "When you put freezing rain into the mix it creates a whole different, hopeless impact."

He said snow is much easier to deal with than freezing rain which occurred overnight.

With the de-icing problems at Sea-Tac, and the shutdown of the Portland airport, Alaska cancelled half of its 500 normal departures today. "Seattle and Portland wiped out half of our schedule," he said.

In deciding which flights to operate, and which to delay, Witter said operators looked at destinations where there were many flights, as Anchorage and Southern California, so passengers could be rebooked without severe delays. The priority today was the East Coast flights because the airline operates so few of them.

"Everything hit a critical mass," said Witter.. "Mother nature dished it out."

At the airport earlier today, hundreds of people crowded in lines leading to the Alaska and Horizon ticket counters. The lines stretched all the way to the back of the main terminal. Waits lasted hours. Clusters gathered around departure computer screens, facing the long lists of cancellations.

Others dialed cell phones as they scrambled to find other airline flights, telling the airline operators, "Anything, I don't care," or "I'm just trying to find a way to get home."

A common complaint among travelers at the airport was that no one was getting a clear answer about why Alaska flights were canceled while other airlines were not. .

Steve and Janet Smith of Seattle were waiting with their two young children. They arrived at the airport at 8 a.m. for a noon flight to San Diego to celebrate 5-year-old son Michael's birthday. They had promised him a trip to Sea World. But in line, it was all they could do to keep the kids from running around.

"We have a lot of juice, a lot of snacks, and we take turns taking them for walks," Janet Smith said.

They expressed frustration with Alaska Airlines because they checked the airline's web site before they left for the airport and saw nothing to indicate this was coming.

An Alaska representative walked around telling travelers that all flights until 1 p.m. were canceled, but the reader board listed no cancellations. The Smiths were told to wait in line, but the line was hardly moving. They were told to call the airline on the phone, but the line was constantly busy.

Doug Lewis, a 50-year-old Seattle Police detective, was trying to get to his son's Marine Corps boot-camp graduation Thursday near San Diego. Some of his family members had gone out of their way to get to the airport early, staying in a nearby hotel overnight and arriving at the terminal at 4:30 a.m. For their trouble, they waited in a ticket line for five hours only to be told their flight was canceled.

They managed to find tickets on a Southwest Airlines flight for later in the day, but Alaska workers had already taken their luggage away and couldn't give it back.

Lewis said he was planning to take Southwest to San Diego, hope his luggage followed him later..

"I'm a regular Alaska flier, I got the mileage points and everything," Lewis said. "But they're not doing a very good job of telling us anything."

Alaska and Horizon make up about half of all departures from Sea-Tac. Many of their planes stay overnight in Seattle. So the airlines were particularly affected by the weather.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company