Horizon Air cutting hundreds of flights

Horizon Air — the regional airline that is part of Alaska Air Group, carrying passengers on shorter flights throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond — is cutting its flight schedule this summer because of a severe shortage of pilots for its Q400 turboprop planes.

The shortage became a crisis in May when Horizon was forced to cancel more than 318 flights because it didn’t have enough pilots to fly all its planes.

In response, the airline is now pre-emptively canceling flights later in the summer and is weighing if it needs to pare its schedules for the rest of the year.

In an effort to reduce cancellations, it’s also sending out managers who are qualified pilots to fly the planes and offering double pay to pilots who fly extra flights.

On Thursday, Horizon Chief Executive Dave Campbell sent a memo to employees announcing that the airline is cutting multiple flights in August and is studying its fall and winter timetables “to ensure we have schedules that we can reliably operate.”

Campbell wrote that the pilot shortage, coupled with the airline’s unprecedented growth as it has added aircraft, “created a perfect storm.”

“June will go down as our ‘bump in the road’ — our moment when things got too far off track, and now, we must decide how to recover,” Campbell told employees. “We have established a war room to daily manage potential cancellations.”

About 17,000 passengers who have already booked flights between Aug. 4 and Sept. 3 that are now canceled will be automatically rebooked on Horizon or Alaska flights leaving either earlier or later that same day.

Alaska Air spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said those passengers should already have received an email informing them of the flight change.

She said Horizon has targeted cancellations for routes where the airline flies multiple times per day.

“Horizon has been strategic in making sure wherever possible that we can rebook those guests with minimal impact,” she said.

The canceled flights represent 6.2 percent of all Horizon flights in August, Egan said. As examples, she said one flight will be canceled on each of these routes:

o Seattle and Boise, now with eight daily flights

o Seattle and Spokane, now with 15 daily flights

o Seattle and Portland, now with 26 daily flights

o Redmond and Portland, now with five daily flights

o Portland and Sacramento, Calif., now with three or four daily flights.

Horizon employs almost 3,700 people and serves 45 cities in Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Washington, as well as Alberta and British Columbia.

Egan said it’s been hit by a pilot shortage that “the entire regional airline industry faces.”

When Indianapolis-based regional carrier Republic Airways declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year, it attributed its financial troubles largely to canceled flights caused by the shortage of qualified pilots.

To address the problem at Horizon, Campbell said in his memo that in addition to the schedule cuts, the airline is “offering 200 percent premium pay” to pilots who fly extra flights beyond their normal schedule.

Horizon’s flight-operations team is also increasing from 19 to 34 the number of supervising pilots — known as “check airmen.” This should speed up the introduction of new pilots, who must have such a supervisor alongside them in the flight deck as they embark on flying a new aircraft type.