Alaska Airlines adds new Europe routes, debuts 787 plane makeover
The airline will begin daily service from Seattle to London, though the carrier did not specify a date, and tickets are not yet on sale. And will fly seasonally from Seattle to Reykjavik starting this spring.
The airline previously announced it would begin flights from Seattle to Rome in the spring, with tickets expected to go on sale this fall. Alaska will soon start new transpacific routes as well, with service from Seattle to Seoul-Incheon beginning Sept. 12, and flights from Seattle to Tokyo-Narita beginning Jan. 7.
'With these bold moves, we are accelerating our vision to connect our guests to the world. We are seizing this moment to redefine the international experience and level up. And we're doing it with the same relentless focus on safety, care and performance that's always defined us," Ben Minicucci, Alaska Airlines' CEO, said in a statement. "I'm so proud of how our people continue to step up and deliver as we push ahead on these initiatives, with even more to come.'
A new 787 experience
As the new long-haul routes launch, Alaska is also updating its Boeing 787 aircraft with a new paint job and plans for new interior finishes.
The airline said there are no changes planned to the exterior of Hawaiian Airlines-branded aircraft, which are now part of Alaska Airlines following a merger.
By this spring, all Alaska Airlines-branded 787s in the combined carrier's fleet will feature a new northern lights-inspired paint scheme.
'Our new 787 exterior embodies Alaska's transition to a global airline with beauty, grace and a nod to our heritage. As we significantly expand to new destinations around the globe, we're eager for more and more travelers to recognize our new livery as being Alaska Airlines and appreciate the outstanding service we've long been known for," Andrew Harrison, Alaska Airlines' Chief Commercial Officer, said in a statement.
Cruising Altitude: Can you recognize an airline by its colors? There's a reason why.
The airline was quick to add that its well-known tail personas are not going away across the fleet.
"The Alaska Native on Alaska narrowbody aircraft and Pualani on all Hawaiian Airlines' aircraft flying to, from and within the Hawaiian Islands are not going away," the company's press release said. "They will remain unchanged as essential elements of our brands' legacies and history."
The statement also teased that the combined carriers were preparing to introduce new business class cabins and interior finishes across the long-haul fleet, but did not provide specifics on what form those changes would take.
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The company deploys about 100 balloons from six launch sites globally, a fraction of the 92 launch sites operated by NOAA, but it aims to expand to launch up to 10,000 balloons globally over the next five years, Dean said. Windborne's data is less costly than radiosonde data 'on a per observation or per station basis,' Curtis Marshall, the director of the Commercial Data Program for the NWS, wrote in an email. And while its data is now free and open to the public, as the company expands, it wants to hold back some of the information it gathers for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers, Dean said. That data would no longer be useful to other forecasters. Radiosondes' Old School Technology is Difficult to Replace Radiosondes collect one vertical profile—a line from ground level to the point where the balloon explodes—of data in the atmosphere, which is important for understanding climate change signals. WindBorne's balloons, in contrast, collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, across a horizontal expanse. Their path is somewhat ad hoc, determined by where the wind blows them, whereas radiosondes collect data in a line rising from a location that stays the same for each launch. While WindBorne's lack of a consistent path doesn't matter for short-term weather forecasting, it could matter for understanding longer-term changes to the climate, which are currently based on decades of vertical profile data collected at the same spot, Glackin said. WindBorne's data would not be comparable with that historical record. 'We have a very cleaned-up climate record that allows us to talk about how the climate is changing,' she said. 'If all the radiosondes went away tomorrow, it would be hard to figure out what's changed, and what to attribute to technology versus what really happened in the atmosphere.' There are methods for transitioning to new instrumentation, Colman, the meteorologist who used to work at NOAA, said, but the NWS would need to proactively plan for that changeover to maintain a consistent data record. The NWS isn't moving to replace radiosondes—yet—but it is in the 'early stages' of planning for a new suite of upper atmospheric observing systems that would provide data 'substantially similar to the federal radiosonde network,' Marshall wrote. The new observing systems would come from commercially operated balloons, drones, and aircraft, and 'complement our federal balloon network.' However, Austin Tindle, a cofounder of Sorcerer, a WindBorne competitor, said that officials within NOAA are increasingly asking him 'what it could look like to be a true replacement to a radiosonde.' 'It's been a vibe shift recently, coming up in conversation a lot,' he said. WindBorne's Dean declined to respond when asked if he'd been having similar conversations. NOAA's partnership with WindBorne 'could be completely on the up and up [meaning an add-on rather than a replacement], but folks don't have a lot of trust in the broader strategy for the NOAA weather enterprise, based on everything that's happened,' said Di Liberto, citing the agency's June 25 announcement that it was permanently ending—within just five days—a vital microwave satellite program used for forecasting hurricanes. Dean at Windborne is none too eager to replace core NOAA functions. 'You're better off augmenting than you are replacing traditional weather balloons, but we want to fill gaps wherever they form,' he said. He's not alone. Tindle, whose solar-powered balloons are smaller and travel farther than WindBorne's, said that Sorcerer 'was never intended to be a replacement' for radiosondes, but to cover places in the world with no traditional balloon launches. One reason for private weather monitoring companies' caution about how much service they provide government lies in the directive that federal agencies have to serve the public, which is sometimes mismatched with business interests. A Sofar solar-powered, satellite-connected buoy for measuring ocean-atmospheric dynamics is readied for deployment in advance of Hurricane Ian in 2022. Sofar collaborated with NOAA to enhance hurricane forecasting in a project that was discontinued this year by budget cuts. Photograph: US Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron VXS-1 One of Sofar's thousands of solar-powered, satellite-connected buoys that are deployed in five oceans around the world to capture real-time data on waves, weather, and sea surface temperature. Photograph: Sofar 'The mandate of the government is not ours,' said Tim Janssen, a cofounder of Sofar, which has created a network of buoys that deploy from vessels and aircraft with sensors to monitor ocean conditions. 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'But I don't think they can dance into the secretary's office and say, here's the answer to all our problems.'
