Reservations computer crash delays Alaska flights

An Alaska Airlines jet waits for boarding at the Juneau Airport last September. Monday’s Alaska Flight 69 from Seattle and Ketchikan was delayed about an hour by the computer outage. File photo.

Flights to and from Alaska were among those affected by a recent international computer system breakdown.

Alaska Airlines reports about 50 planes were delayed Monday night, including 10 out of Anchorage and one from Ketchikan. United, American and Delta were among other affected airlines serving the state.

Delays were caused by a breakdown in the SABRE computer reservation system used by more than 300 airlines worldwide.

Alaska Airlines’ Bobbie Egan says the outage lasted a little more than two hours.

“Our employees had to manually check in passengers like we did back in the good old days,” she said.

Egan said no flights were cancelled. She said extra award-program miles were not offered to passengers, as is sometimes the case. That’s because because delays were short and the flights continued.

“If we had any passengers who were significantly inconvenienced we certainly want to hear from them and they can call our customer care department and we’ll deal with each customer on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

The delays began around 7:45 p.m. Monday, Alaska time.

Flights in the air were not affected.

Sign up for The Signal

Top Alaska stories delivered to your inbox every week

Site notifications
Update notification options
Subscribe to notifications