Click here for iFriendly audio.
Courtesy of alaskaair.com
Friday morning’s shooting at Los Angeles International Airport in southern California and subsequent closures has affected flights across the country.
Paul McElroy is a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines.
He says only one flight to Alaska was cancelled due to the incident.
“There is one flight, flight 157, that was supposed to have left Los Angeles at 11:30 this morning and flies non-stop to Anchorage—we did ultimately cancel that flight.”
There have been delays on flights to other states, but, he says inbound service to Alaska was otherwise unaffected.
And, McElroy says, there are no expected delays for passengers travelling from Alaska to the lower 48 via California.
“All of our affected flights, and I should say there have been three cancellations and about seven delays—they’re all outbound flights from Los Angeles. Our flights to the airport have been getting in just fine. The problem has been that because the main road into the airport is closed, both our crews and our passengers are having a difficult time getting to the airport. So that’s what’s caused these delays and cancellations.”
In other Alaska Airlines news, the check-in time for domestic flights has gone up by 10 minutes. Passengers are now required to check in a minimum of 40 minutes before departure. McElroy says it’s to make travel less stressful for passengers.
“The reason why we’re changing those times is that we’ve had differing times depending on the airport, and depending on whether a customer checks a bag or not. So to make it easier for them, we decided to just standardize a final time to 40 minutes before departure so it would be easier for our customers to remember.”
The change went into effect October 30th.
