Alaska Airlines has recalled all its pilots from long-term leave to handle growth

Pushing forward with an aggressive growth plan, Alaska Airlines has recalled all its pilots who had taken long-term leave during the pandemic, and this week it began training its first class of newly hired pilots since the downturn hit.

“We are growing our airline back from the deep cuts we made in 2020,” Capt. John Ladner, Alaska’s vice president of flight operations, wrote in a memo sent to pilots Wednesday.

In an interview Friday, he said the airline hopes to hire about 170 new pilots by year’s end.

Ladner laid out in his memo the brisk schedule for adding Boeing 737 MAXs to the Alaska fleet over the next six years. To ramp up pilot training on those aircraft, he said, two new MAX simulators will be ready for training next year to supplement the single MAX simulator Alaska operates now.

Alaska has just taken delivery of its seventh Boeing MAX and will take five more by year-end and another 63 over the following two years. It has a total of 93 MAXs on order with options to buy 52 more that it expects to add by 2026.

With those additions, next year Alaska’s fleet will climb back above its pre-pandemic level of 237 jets.

By the end of 2023, Alaska will have a fleet of 251 jets, and if it exercises all the MAX purchase options it will have more than 300 jets by the end of 2025.

Last year more than 900 Alaska pilots chose to take extended leave to avoid furloughs. In an agreement with the pilots’ union, the Air Line Pilots Association, management allowed pilots to sign up for leave varying from three months to more than two years with pay set at about 60% of normal wages and full benefits.

That deal allowed management to recall pilots with 45 days’ notice, to provide flexibility if air travel levels recovered. Now that’s happened on U.S. domestic routes.

IATA data shows U.S. domestic air traffic in July had recovered to just over 92% of its level in the same month in 2019. Airlines are hoping that a dip in August traffic, as the delta coronavirus variant surged, will be temporary.