Review of Alaska Airlines flight San Diego → Salt Lake City in Economy

introduction

Welcome again to another report! This is a continuation of my journey to Salt Lake City having started in San Francisco this morning. This was my first time transiting and for that matter ever being in San Diego international airport which made this trip that special to me. I didn't have much time here so I made the most of it by walking around the terminal and doing some plane spotting from different gates. In my opinion so far, SAN airport has to be one of the best airports to do plane spotting from, especially when airside. Unlike SFO or DTW that have these horrible dotted windows by their gate areas that are not plane spotter friendly ?. Without further due let's start with the flight report! 

My flight is AS 3488 which will be operated by SkyWest on another E175 jet as my previous flight.

Having walked a little bit through there terminal, I'd figure it would be a great time to do some quick plane spotting ;)
Here's an Alaska Boeing 737-900 departing for New York City (JFK)
I was able to hear the commotion at the gate area and learned that this flight was heavily overbooked. About 8 passengers were bumped from the flight but each person was rebooked on a later flight just three hours later. On top of that they each received $800 voucher for a future flight. I wish that were me, I gladly would of taken the offer ?.  

An American Airlines A321 departing for Charlotte (CLT)

Hawaiian Airlines A321Neo departing for Kahului (OGG)

An E175 (much like the one I'll be riding on shortly) departing for Santa Rosa (STS)

Boeing 737 MAX 9 (West Coast Wonders livery) arriving from Seattle. This has to be one of the coolest liveries I've seen on a 737 thus far!

Another B737-800 departing for Honolulu (HNL)

Soon after it was approaching time for boarding and I made my way to my gate.

Boarding commenced on time and I was again assigned zone D on my main cabin ticket

Some information about my plane:
Flight number: AS 3488
Aircraft: Embraer E175LR
Registration: N170SY
Delivered: May 2015 

Our aircraft in configured in 3 classes: 12 First, 12 Premium & 64 Main Cabin seats for a total capacity of 88 passengers.

the flight

On this flight I chose to sit on the left side of the aircraft in 20A to hopefully get some great views on takeoff! Normally I don't like to sit this far aft on a plane however as mentioned in the previous report Embraer jets are known for having horrible window alignment thanks to their spaced out windows. When choosing seats at the time of booking there were plenty of open seats to choose ahead. However (thanks to aerolopa) the only seats that had great window alignment were row 20 (where I am) and 21, the last two rows of the plane. There were even rows I noticed that had practically no window due to the spacing of the windows.
Enough rambling this is my view for the next 1.5 hr ?  

Legroom was good. I believe these seats offer 31" pitch, I'm 5'9" for reference.

Boarding was complete. The load for this flight was 100%.

Pushback initially began on time.

Spirit Airbus A320N bound for San Jose (SJC)

Unfortunately we got word from the captain that there was an issue with one of the onboard computers and we had to return to the gate and get it checked out.

Since we also had an inoperative APU, the cabin lights & air-conditioning were turned off while the plane was getting restarted. It remained like this for over an hour with the lavatories also not working.  

By now we are expected to depart at 12:15p as we missed our slot for takeoff.

Once again we pushed back for a second time.

Passing by more E175's

Got a rare site of a winglet-less B757-200, probably one of those jets Delta uses for private flights. 

A Delta B737-800 arriving from Salt Lake City

Alaska B737-800 arriving from Austin (AUS)

You can checkout the entire pushback & taxi video below:

Taking off on runway 27

Making a sharp 270° left turn before heading northeast to SLC. I made a great choice sitting on the left hand side for this flight ?.

Views of San Diego airport from above.

Naval air station on Coronado Island

Reached cruising altitude of 30,000ft

A look at the tray table & seatback contents

Available drinks on the flight

Alaska has a great selection of inflight entertainment through wifi connectivity on your device, especially the moving map ?.

Onboard service was delayed for about 30 minutes or so due to some turbulence right as we were flying over Las Vegas.

inflight service

This is what was offered, a choice of a soft drink and and snack. I went for a Coke

These butter pretzels were super good.

Thanks to being a Tmobile customer I was able to access free wifi for an hour on this flight and use flightradar24 to see what aircraft were around. I managed to capture an Emirates A380 passing by heading to LAX. It had an hour left to go but had been in the air at this point for a crazy 15 hours!

Just like that we began our descent into Salt Lake City. The pilot announced that we will be passing by bumpy air and boy he wasn't joking ?.

You can check out the whole turbulent descent & landing below:

The turbulence was so bad that as you can see from the picture below a lot of people got airsick. It seemed though I was the only one enjoying the free roller coaster ride haha.

We broke through the dense layer of cloud and began to see the mountains.

Began our landing into runway 16R

Frontier A320N departing for Las Vegas (LAS)

Due to this relatively bumpy flight, we did not make up barely any of the time delayed in San Diego. Therefore we arrived at the gate a about  1.5hr behind schedule.

arrival

This concludes my final flight of two flying with Alaska today. Thanks for reading!