Alaska Airlines’ latest route is surely its most random.
Yes, the airline operates the Milk Run, but that’s not all that random. Besides, I’ll take the Island Hopper any day over the Milk Run.
No, I’m talking about the inaugural flight 445 which took off Monday from Cleveland Hopkins at 4:30pm and landed in Pittsburgh at 4:53pm. That’s 23 minutes in the air and a total of 39 minutes from gate departure to gate arrival.
The route, which currently operates daily by a 737-900, clocks in at a whopping 106 miles:
It’s a route that hasn’t been flown since United dehubbed Cleveland in the aftermath of the Continental merger in 2014.
It’s not the shortest flight I’ve taken from Cleveland though, I flew 99 miles from Erie to Cleveland back in the day.
Flights on Alaska’s newest route start at $108 or 10K miles.
Why is Alaska flying between Cleveland and Pittsburgh?
It’s not to distract everyone from flight 1282 or operate a Browns-Steelers rivalry route.
They decided that rather than drop Seattle-Cleveland and Seattle-Pittsburgh nonstop service in the dead of winter due to low demand, they would operate the route as a circle trip from Seattle-Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Seattle. And that means they may as well sell tickets from Cleveland-Pittsburgh, even if few people take them up on it.
Good luck getting back though, as the route doesn’t operate back from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. You can always take Greyhound I suppose, though I still have PTSD from taking the bus home from Pittsburgh to Cleveland when I was in yeshiva there.
The one-way route just solidifies the case for the Cleveland to Pittsburgh route being the most random on Alaska’s route map.
The oddball route will end on 2/14, with the resumption of nonstop Seattle-Cleveland and Seattle-Pittsburgh service on 2/15.
What is the most random airline route that you have flown on?
Leave a Reply
55 Comments On "Alaska Airlines Launched Its Most Random Flight Route This Week"
All opinions expressed below are user generated and the opinions aren’t provided, reviewed or endorsed by any advertiser or DansDeals.
Phl-ewr 17 min in the air
That’s a good one, but would only be more random if Hawaiian Airlines flew it. 😀
Lol. Is that one called The Turnpike?
I took that flight many times with US Air (propeller craft), rode above the turnpike….
I did PHL-LGA. But not as a booked ticket. Rather, plane landed in PHL due to weather issues in LGA. They refused to let us off at PHL, and we had to wait an hour-and-a-half until they took off again and landed in LGA. (As a Lakewood resident, I would’ve been really happy to get off at PHL…)
Interesting. I remember reading about this some months ago, I can’t remember where.
Jordan to tlv. 15 min in the air. Not random,but shortest.
It’s not so random. It gives you a few hours to shop in the AirMall before flying BA from PIT to LHR.
Only worth flying BA ex-LHR for Hermolis. But then you’d have to fly PIT-SEA-CLE.
Alaska has a shorter in my bucket list, PSG >WRG 31 miles actual flight time of around 15 minutes
It was beautiful. I think we only got up to 5000ft and it was really cool to see all the islands and the mountains as if I was flying in a 172.
AA BWI to JFK was 37 minutes in the air for me. I don’t think they do that route anymore, but I think Delta does.
Airlines often fly short routes to their hub airports, so that’s not too random.
This might make nyc area to Cleveland cheaper, with a stop in Pittsburgh. Why are Ny-Cleve always expensive??!
That’s what miles are for!
I wish there would be a flight from Monmouth Airport to jfk for all lakewood ppl!! ☺️
Mke-Ord
The BKL-LUK days were fun!
I’m excited to fly CLE nonstop to Jamaica in March.
Never got to try ’em.
I did fly BKL-HPN during the Jetsmarter free Private Jet promo. Those were the days!
MDW-ORD.
(emergency landing on the now-defunct National Airlines.)
What changes on 2/15 that they would decide to revert back to the original route?
Presumably, demand picks up after that point.
Yeah, I realized when I reread your article. That was the “disregard” in the next post. Sorry about that.
Disregard, sorry. But the easiest way to get from PIT – CLE is to jump out over CLE when the door blows open…
Does the price include having the plane door blow off in mid flight?
Frontier flew a random weekly JAX-MCO during Covid
I have a friend who took the world’s shortest scheduled commercial flight – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
tlv-ewr-jfk
Was foggy so landed in ewr for an hour (didnt allow to deplane) then flew to jfk
Same.
Also have an a380 fly from BOS to JFK. Probably the shortest flight for the A380.
Any given flight on Tower Air back in the day could easily end up a random route.
Seattle to Victoria BC ~30 min on a propeller plane.
Pretty sure I flew Continental from HOU to IAH, connecting to one of the washington DC airports. Because they were competing price with Southwest out of HOU, it was much cheaper than just going out of IAH.
Wild!
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/continental-onepass-pre-merger/461679-flight-hou-iah.html#post4446256
Back in the CO days they had a short hop from Sarasota to Tampa (SRQ-TPA) very short flight just follow I-75 all the way up! At the end it was a small propeller plane.
It was sometimes cheaper that way for srq to ewr but mostly gave me longer stay with mom and Dad!
A few years ago flew JST-PIT on Boutique air. Flight was 75 miles and operated as part of the Essential Air Service. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=jst-pit
Was an 8 seat prop plane. Pilot did the safety demonstration and said “if you need anything mid-flight just call my name or tap one of us on the shoulder”
In the 90’s my dad used to fly from ISP to MCI all the time because it was a lot cheaper than EWR/LGA/JFK to MCI. Very often there would be a stopover in LGA. So, Monsey – ISP – LGA – MCI. Yes, the drive to ISP was very often longer than the flight.
Piedmont Airlines (one of the predecessors of American today), had a “hopscotch” fare. If you touched down at least two times between certain cities, the fare was cheap. Back in the early 80s, I flew from Columbia, SC to Philadelphia for around $29. The plane stopped in Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Richmond en route. It took all day. Up and down and up and down.
As a kid in the early aughts, I flew 95 miles from DTW-CLE on Continental. I think we were in the air for 17 minutes or so. (I see that Delta still flies the route today.) As I was getting on the plane, the stewardess bends down and says to me, “Going to California, right?” – and my 2nd grader self freaked out for a few seconds before she told me she was joking. It’s funny in hindsight, but who the heck does that to a little kid?
Oh, and not super-short, but the second leg of this trip was CLE-ACY on a Continental Express turboprop. That was kind of cool.
PTSD? Isn’t that a little flippant and shallow? Especially given the events of October 7th.
No and it’s a fallacy of relative privation to use that argument.
or you can just say its called ‘hyperbole’ lol
Well, yes.
But also I don’t need to share the stories that happened on those bus rides.
That’s why here at DansDeals we don’t do buses.
https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/spirit/friends-dont-let-friends-fly-spirit/
@EBG
How about getting a root canal without anesthetic because of october 7th…
PTSD = Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As the name implies, it is when a traumatic event (which is personally subjective – what you consider unthinkable I may call a regular Tuesday) causes an involuntary stress-inducing {generally: mental} reaction in the future.
Dan could well wake up screaming in the middle of the night after having a nightmare of being stuck on the bus ride from hell. You don’t know!
Except he admitted above that it’s hyperbole.
I did have traumatic experiences on thoses buses as a young teenager.
No, they don’t keep me up at night.
Also, maybe that’s what really inspired Dan to seek the upgrade life – he might be mortally afraid of being forced to take one of those busses from the gate to the plane instead of a jetway or Porsche! 🙂
Until COVID, for reasons I never understood, Delta had a daily CLE BDL flight.
Suffice to say, my upgrades cleared with ease every time even with the lowest tier status.
I flew
AA PHL- SWF
WN FLL-MCO
Not random but yet short.
NCE-MCM 7 minutes
I once flew El Al from JFK to EWR on a 747!
booked ewr-lax-oxnard as hidden city same day ticket for $250 instead of $700 on UA but that flight is long gone
Frontier has flown CLE-PIT with tickets for sale in the past few years rarely/sporatically. Seems in those cases it was just positioning aircraft, but they still had the tickets for sale, nothing remotely close to scheduled daily service like this. If the BA flight pit-lhr wasn’t so late, would be a great connection, in one direction. A bit of me also thinks cargo is a factor on keeping both cle/pit year round, people (and restaurants) need their alaskan crab legs/ salmon/ etc. year round. Would be slightly weirder if it was CMH and not PIT. Intra-ohio flights on alaskan air! But apparently CMH is 5x weekly during the same time period.
My favorite used to be Tol to Dtw on Delta. It was about a 15 minute flight. Toledo airport was always so much easier to navigate than Detroit so the extra flight was worth it.
Back in the 70’s TWA tried a Hub in PIT and it didn’t last a year. I remember working a 707, RT PIT-CLE. 5 Y pax one way and 3 Y PAX on the return. Go Figure.