Does anyone have any info on what all of the recent middle of the night Alaska 737/738 flights between KPDX and KSBP are about? There was a lot of hoopla about an Alaska charter flight awhile ago since it was the first 737 to ever visit the airport, but now there has been 6 roundtrips and a Frontier A319 in the last 48 hours, all late at night. Can’t figure out what they are for.
3 nights in a row pretty much rules out a sports team, not that anybody here is playing anybody from Portland anyway.
The only other local event is an international film festival, but that brings up the question of why only PDX/SBP. Maybe I’ll check flight aware and if they are back tonight maybe I’ll see if they are bringing people in or out. Maybe. maybe not.
<Disregard the film festival, that was a couple of weeks ago.>
These wouldn’t be training flights would they? Seems like an awfully long distance if so. They’re each on the ground for about 40 minutes, which is enough time to either refuel and/or offload/onload passengers.
May be something to do with Camp Roberts troop movements? I know SMX gets C-17’s on occasion with National Guard troops coming from back east. Wierd either way.
Too bad these aren’t day flights, they’d be cool to see. I didn’t think SBP even had the ramp space to hold 2 737’s. I’m used to being spoiled from seeing flights like this at SMX.
Camp Roberts is a slight possibility, but I don’t think much goes on there any more. I doubt training flights either, they probably do 99.9% of their training in the simulator. I haven’t gone through all the flights, I’m not sure there has been more than one on the ground at a time. I’ll try to get out to the airport before I head back to Saudi and nose around, trouble is I don’t know anybody here anymore so I may not get a straight answer.
Could be. There is nothing that stands out in the local paper though.
I noticed that all of the Alaska flights inbound were 7000 series and outbound were 9000. When they deadheaded back out after dropping the SF symphony off it was a 9000 series flight. I haven’t looked up the inbound flight to verify it was a 7000 flight.
It might be interesting to see if there are any hotel rooms available in town…
