Alaska Airlines is pulling out of the Seattle-Washington Dulles market on June 4.

This is a bummer because the Dulles outbound was the only way to connect in Seattle to the last Juneau non-stop of the day. DC-Juneau will now require a double-connection. I know this probably doesn’t affect more than a handful of people in the world, but it’s still disappointing.

I am confused though about Alaska’s rationale, which includes both longer ground times to pad their schedules and improve reliability systemwide (which would imply lower aircraft utilizastion) and redeploying this aircraft on more profitable routes. It’s not clear to me that they can reasonably accomplish both.

I do suspect, though, that there are real cost savings to be had by shuttering a marginal station. They have only one Dulles flight now but have to retain the infrastructure (albeit outsourced) without very many seats to spread their fixed costs across.

At least there are three daily flights out of Reagan National and they have a monopoly on both routes serviced from that airport.