Southwest Will Fly To Paine Field, Putting The Airport At Capacity

"The airport will have only two gates," use bus gates and board by airstair

let's see ...... already 24 announced departures (and might go higher if AA and DL jumps in and see who blinks first) against 2 jet bridges (that can handle 10 flights a day at the best of times unless you start stretching the flights to uncanny 5am or 11pm departures) and at a terminal that only has 16 departures allocated for it ....

Maybe about 48 hours into service launch and people will start trending a hash tag like

# Paine Field = # Pain Fueled

I used to live just north of the SnoKing county line, and have been following this closely. There is *absolutely* demand that can be served profitably from Paine Field...Alaska always knew this. I plan to use Paine once it's operational, if given equal choices between it an SeaTac.

(I'd hoped for direct service to Spokane, but now it looks like that will be harder to achieve.)

I suspect once flights have been operating for a while they will be able to add one or two more gates and additional flights. The neighbors just need some time to adjust, and realize it's not as bad as they feared.

Not surprising WN chose to add flights. They have a pattern of shifting flights to less crowded airports. UA adding flights also makes sense. In the AS/DL war, UA has been the loser at SEA. While AS has maintained its size in SEA and DL grew, UA lost market share, and even closed its SEA flight attendant base in 2014. It will be interesting to watch the demand out of PAE. Especially as Snohomish county continues to grow and many move north for more affordable housing.

@Lucky - any idea how these flights could affect any airline changes at SeaTac?

Could this free up space for Alaska or Southwest to add more Hawaii flights from SeaTac?

As for demand , i am sure if fares are right people will drive to Paine Field from Seattle area. People are doing it now to Bellingham as Alaska offers some inexpensive flights to Hawaii from there

Where did you hear that all of AS' and UA's flights will be on E175s? From what I remember, UA announced DEN and SFO but didn't say with what equipment.

There should be some interesting plane spotting over PAE.

This is a great excuse to get some A350s up there and have them drag race the 787.

Jeez, Henry. Get a friggin writer. That's awful.

It'll be fine. It's a baby airport that's slot restricted. AA and DL and whoever else can eff themselves until the airport thinks they're ready.

And anything that takes pressure off of SeaTac is great.

How many flight operations per day does Boeing have from Paine field? Is this new commercial service really going to increase the overall number a lot? I would imagine the E175s are pretty quiet compared to all of the heavy Boeings using that field.

Alaska made a good move to increase its plans from 8 to 13 flights. Now it has 13 of 24 flights. Alaska should have announced 16 flights so that there would only be 2 flights left for competitors. WN would not have come in for just 2 flights.

The NIMBY people shot themselves in the foot. If they didn't protest much, PAE would only get one Allegiant Airlines flight to LAS and maybe 3 Horizon flights to PDX. Now the NIMBY people pressured them to build a 2 gate terminal which makes airlines try to grab a limited resource, having seen Dallas Love and LaGuardia's situation.

Great news! Flying from Houston to see my sister in Oak Harbor/Whidbey Island just got a lot easier. Thank you WN for adding this.

I'm sure there are a lot of military families that have siblings at the Naval Air Base there that will be thrilled with the airports opening. It shortens the commute from Sea-Tac by at least an hour during rush hour.