Alaska unveils a new longest route connecting New York City with Anchorage

Alaska Airlines is betting that you won’t mind spending nearly eight hours holed up in a domestic jet on its new longest route.

The Seattle-based carrier announced on Friday brand-new service between New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC) in Anchorage, Alaska.

New daily seasonal service will commence on June 13, 2024, on board one of Alaska’s new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets. This route will operate through Aug. 19.

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Additionally, Alaska will launch once-weekly flights on Saturdays between San Diego and Anchorage. This route will be operated by the standard version of the Boeing 737.

At 3,386 miles, Alaska’s New York-to-Anchorage flight will become the longest in the carrier’s network. The airline is blocking it for seven hours and 45 minutes in the westbound direction and seven hours and five minutes in the eastbound direction.

You’ll find the full schedule at the bottom of this post, but the timetable is roughly what you’d expect for an eight-hour domestic flight. It departs in the morning from New York and arrives in the midafternoon in Alaska. It returns to New York as a red-eye, leaving at 8 p.m. — a bit early to start falling asleep — and landing the next morning at 7:05 a.m.

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Before announcing this new flight, Alaska’s three longest flights were as follows, based on Cirium schedules:

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• Chicago to Anchorage: 2,846 miles
• Honolulu to Anchorage: 2,777 miles
• Miami to Seattle: 2,724 miles

As you can see, Alaska’s new route will be over 500 miles longer than the next-longest route. It’ll be interesting to see if the airline modifies its inflight service to more closely resemble a long-haul flight. (After all, New York to London — a proper long-haul route — is just 65 miles longer.)

Note that Alaska is set to receive the Boeing 737 MAX 8 in the coming months. The carrier has 15 of these jets on order, and the cabin configuration hasn’t been unveiled yet.

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While this announcement might be splashy for Alaska, the carrier will go up against some serious competition on the other side of New York City. That’s because United Airlines already offers daily summer seasonal service between Newark and Anchorage.

Interestingly, United also deploys a Boeing 737 MAX 8 on the route (it used to operate a lie-flat-equipped Boeing 757 on this flight), but the carrier’s westbound schedule is not quite the same as Alaska’s. United’s Newark-to-Anchorage service departs at around 3:15 p.m. in the afternoon and lands in Alaska at 6:58 p.m. It returns as a red-eye flight, also departing at 8 p.m.

Two years ago, Delta Air Lines also flew between New York and Anchorage, but that service from the coronavirus pandemic era hasn’t returned since. As such, it’ll be interesting to see how Alaska fares with this new route.

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“Alaskans love nonstop flights to and from the state. We like having great travel options and adding places such as New York and San Diego definitely fit the bill,” Marilyn Romano, Alaska’s regional vice president, said in a statement.

With these two new routes, Alaska will offer a total of 14 nonstop destinations to and from Anchorage in the summer, including locales in the Lower 48 and Hawaii. Specific destinations include Chicago; Denver; Honolulu; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; New York; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and Everett, Washington.