Alaska Airlines will connect Alaska and Japan! I don’t care that this flight is operated by a Boeing 737, this is easily the coolest new route we’ve seen announced by a US carrier since United added flights to Greenland and Mongolia.
Alaska launching Anchorage to Tokyo Narita flights as of May 2027
Between May 13 and September 7, 2027, Alaska intends to operate daily nonstop flights between Anchorage (ANC) and Tokyo Narita (NRT), with the following schedule:
AS21 Anchorage to Tokyo Narita departing 2:10PM arriving 3:25PM (+1 day)
AS22 Tokyo Narita to Anchorage departing 9:45PM arriving 12:00PM
The 3,434-mile flight is blocked at 8hr15min westbound and 7hr15min eastbound. It’ll be operated by a Boeing 737 MAX 8, featuring 161 seats, including 16 first class seats and 145 economy seats. This will be Alaska’s second-longest Boeing 737 MAX route ever, as the airline also operated the plane this past summer from Seattle (SEA) to Keflavik (KEF), and that covers 3,622 miles.
This is an absurdly cool new route, and a throwback!
Anchorage has an absolutely massive amount of transpacific capacity… if you’re a crate. For us humans, there has been no service for a long time, while there are dozens of flights per day from Anchorage to Asia, given what a big cargo hub the airport is.
While Alaska has never flown nonstop between Anchorage and Japan, the airline did fly from Anchorage to a handful of destinations in Eastern Russia between 1991 and 1998. When it comes to passenger service between Anchorage and Asia, more recently we’ve seen regularly scheduled flights to Taipei (TPE) on China Airlines, but that route ceased in 2011.
I’m not sure if we want to call this service “regular,” but up until 2019, Yakutia Airlines operated a once weekly flight between Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (PKC) to Anchorage. I’m so bummed I never had the chance to fly that, since the airline had such a cool-looking Boeing 737 business class, with one row of recliner seats.
At one point New Pacific Airlines (initially known as Northern Pacific) was going to use Anchorage as a hub for operating transpacific flights, but unsurprisingly, that airline ultimately went out of business.
It goes without saying that spending this long on a Boeing 737 MAX is hardly glamorous. But let’s also be practical here — if you were trying to get between Alaska and Japan, you’d otherwise have to backtrack through somewhere like Seattle (SEA) or Vancouver (YVR), and it would more than double your travel time, and nearly double your travel distance.
A 737 MAX has low costs, and I imagine there will be a decent amount of demand in both directions, both among Alaskans looking to visit Asia, plus Japanese visitors (and others) wanting to visit Alaska. This is an absurdly cool new route, and I’d love to fly this!
Bottom line
Alaska Airlines’ newest transpacific route is with a narrow body, as we’ll see the airline fly daily between Anchorage and Tokyo Narita in the summer of 2027. The route will be operated by a Boeing 737 MAX, which is hardly comfortable, but it’s the perfect plane for this kind of a flight.
The plane has the range, and ultimately this is a route people will book because it’s by far the most convenient way to get between Alaska and Asia, and not because of the amazing onboard product, or anything.
What do you make of Alaska launching Anchorage to Narita flights?
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