A Sight No More: Alaska Airlines' Airbus A319s

The COVID-19 crisis is wreaking havoc on the aviation industry in more ways than one. Aside from the sharp decline in air travel demand and struggling airlines ceasing operations, airlines that are getting by during these times have been forced to make drastic cuts and reductions in many aspects of their daily operations as well as planning for the future. One thing we've seen during this crisis is airlines accelerating the retirement or removal of certain aircraft types from their fleets. Some of them iconic, some of them often underappreciated. In today's case, it's the latter.

Alaska Airlines has announced that they've retired their entire sub-fleet of Airbus A319s (ten aircraft total) from their fleet, along with two Airbus A320s. Along with their A320s, and A321neos, the A319s were inherited by Alaska Airlines following their merger with Virgin America. Among its mainline fleet, the A319 was the smallest aircraft in Alaska Airlines' fleet and along with the two A320s that were removed, were among the handful of aircraft that had not received the reconfigured cabin interior that the airline is currently known for. Additional A320s that are still equipped with the old Virgin America livery are also likely to retire, having already been parked and most likely not returning to service amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

Being the smallest mainline aircraft in the fleet, the A319 was definitely the least profitable aircraft in the Alaska Airlines fleet, so it would make financial sense to remove them from the fleet to mitigate the amount of money the airline is burning just to stay operation, more so now amidst this current decline in air travel. It also doesn't make much financial sense to maintain such a small sub-fleet consisting of the ten A319 airframes versus the larger number of A320s (along with the newer, fuel-efficient A321neos, which they apparently love!) that Alaska currently operates.

This is easily a case of a short-lived aircraft type with a certain livery, as the all the A319s Alaska Airlines inherited from Virgin America were only repainted just a year ago. It was also just a year ago that the final Virgin America Airbuses were repainted into the current Alaska Airlines livery. But on the other hand, this crisis and the repercussions that the aviation industry would feel from it came way out of left-field and such accelerations of fleet-type retirements were still previously a ways away from happening. The COVID-19 crisis changed everything...

Here's a photo montage of all the Airbus A319s sporting the most-merger Alaska Airlines livery I managed to photograph in the past year (excluding photos of airframes sporting the former Virgin America livery featured in a previous montage):

Airbus A319-112 (N521VA)

Airbus A319-112 (N524VA)

Airbus A319-112 (N530VA).

Airbus A319-112 (N528VA)

Airbus A319-115 (N522VA)

I was fortunate to have photographed five A319s in the Alaska Airlines livery! But it's another sighting I never fully appreciated until it was gone. While the A319 could have served certain mainline routes for Alaska Airlines and offered slightly greater range compared to the A320, the small fleet numbers and the current condition of the industry dictates otherwise. With that, we bid farewell to the former-Virgin America-turned Alaska Airlines "Baby Buses!"