Entries by Mark Jahnke

Alaska Airlines retired its its venerable MD-83s today, the oldest aircraft currently in its fleet. Most of these served with the company since the late 1980s as the company retired its signature 727 aircraft. For a time they were the largest aircraft in the airline’s fledgling fleet, and only several years ago the company was still trying to find ways to save them from retirement.

Despite their notoriously common mechanical problems, the “Mad Dog” was very popular with passengers, particularly thanks to its quiet cabin (even near the engines), as well as its five-abreast seating, which meant that less than thirty passengers were seated in middle seats. This also was popular with Alaska management—Alaska replaced the carts and other parts on the aging planes in order to save weight and improve fuel economy.

But ultimately it was their economics that led to their downfall: as the noisiest aircraft in the fleet, they also guzzled fuel much more than their higher capacity replacements. For Alaska, the 737-800 made much more sense for three key reasons: fuel economy, capacity, and range. Not only does the 737-800 burn less fuel per hour, but it carries more passengers and possesses much greater range than the MD-83, allowing it to fly every one of Alaska’s routes. The MD-83 was typically limited to the West Coast of the U.S, venturing only to Anchorage and Fairbanks on rare occasions.

Despite its shortcomings the MD-83 was an important aircraft in Alaska’s history; it operated the first scheduled service between the U.S. and Eastern Russia and helped develop much of the company’s service into Mexico. For Alaska, this moment isn’t about the past, however. It’s about the future, and the future that an all-737 fleet will behold will be a good future indeed. Alaska Virtual will continue to offer service on our Discontinued Flights which were served by the MD-83, including the entire network of services in the Russian Far East.

Update: the Seattle-Post Intelligencer has an article on father-daughter pilots who flew one of the last flights.

This topic is being discussed on the Message Boards.

As a lead-up to the future launch of Aeroflot Virtual, SimAirline.net will be offering pilots the opportunity to fly the Tupolev Tu-144, the first supersonic airliner and the fastest commercial airliner ever produced, at Concorde Virtual. First flying on 31 December 1968, a full two months before Concorde took to the skies for the first time, the Tu-144 was both ahead of and behind its Western counterpart. While faster and larger, it lacked the same range as Concorde and could not supercruise, or cruise without afterburners (although this was fixed in a subsequent model). Coupled with difficult handling which led to two crashes, the program was eventually cancelled.

The Tu-144 entered service on 26 December 1975 as a mail plane and began passenger service just under two years later. Regularly scheduled passenger service ended on 1 June 1978 following a crash one week earlier. Despite officially being withdrawn from service, it was put back into service for one or two flights a year as recently as 1987. In the mid-1990s one of the planes was refurbished as a flying laboratory for NASA and flew several flights until being grounded once again by budget considerations.

Sadly, most of the aircraft now have either been scrapped or lay derelict at various airports in western Russia. Only one is on display outside the country, at the Auto and Technik Museum in Sinsheim, Germany, where it is displayed next to an Air France Concorde.

SimAirline.net will be offering daily Aeroflot flights between Moscow Domodedovo and Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), the only regularly scheduled route.