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

A visual of this entire trips journey: 

Total distance flown will be 2567 mi / 4132 km

introduction

Welcome to another trip report! This report will be part 1 of 3 flights I will be taking with Alaska Airlines from Salt Lake City down to Puerto Vallarta via San Diego & San Jose.  A few months prior when planning a trip to visit Mexico for the first time, Alaska was having some decent sales offering many flight options. There were one stop options with connections in PDX, SAN, & SFO. Then there were those that offered two connections with a short overnight layover in SJC which is the one I chose for this journey for the same price. My inner avgeek self couldn't help myself but to choose this itinerary as it would give me a chance to try AS on newer routes. This first leg of the journey would technically be new to me as I've flown this route before on AS but in reverse from SAN to SLC (which you can find here) a few months prior on the same aircraft type. 

check-in

Since my first flight out to San Diego was a 4pm flight I had no problem getting prepared and arriving at around 2pm into SLC airport. After getting dropped off I proceeded to the Alaska check-in desks to print a paper boarding pass for my records.

Alaska's check-in desks are located smack in between UA and Frontier's check-in desks which was barely visible if it wasn't for this signage they placed here. It's quite evident that AS doesn't have a huge presence here in SLC with only a handful of daily flights out of this airport. 

Upon checking in there was a notice that my flight was delayed by about 30 minutes. 

I collected my boarding passes and for all my 3 flights to PVR and proceeded straight to security.

Security was a breeze and I was through and airside in only 10 minutes.

plane spotting

Since I had some time before we started boarding our flight to San Diego I decided do some plane spotting.
Here we have a Delta A220-300 departing for Santa Ana (SNA) flight time: 1h 24m.

DL Boeing 737-800 departing for Portland (PDX) flight time: 1h 36m.

DL Airbus A330-900 departing for Paris (CDG) flight time: 9h 4m. I had the great opportunity to fly this route back in 2017 (you can find that trip report here) when DL at the time operated the B763 which has since been upgraded to the larger A339 aircraft along with the SLC to AMS route.

DL Airbus A321 arriving from San Diego (SAN) flight time: 1h 27m.

United Express E175 arriving from Houston (IAH) flight time: 2h 30m.

Frontier A320 arriving from Phoenix (PHX) flight time: 1h 20m.

Boeing 757-200 arriving from Atlanta (ATL) flight time: 3h 35m.

Here comes my Embraer E175 arriving inbound from San Diego.

Some information about my plane:
Flight number: AS 3488
Aircraft: Embraer E175LR
Registration: N413SY
Delivered: May 5, 2022
Age: 1.5 years

Boarding

Boarding was shortly announced and I boarded with group D.

Boarding our relatively new aircraft being only just over a year old at time of flight.

My view for the next 1.5hr.

Legroom is pretty good, these seats offer 30" of pitch. I'm 5'9" or 176cm for reference. 

Boarding is complete. And as with last AS flight from San Diego this flight is a 100% full flight. 

I spotted a rare operator which was a Discover Airlines Airbus A330-200 departing for Frankfurt, Germany. They have been offering seasonal flights between SLC and Germany since the reopening of the airport. 

A few moments after boarding was completed, the captain came over the PA and announced that there was a technical fault with one of the onboard computers and that they would need to get it checked out and apologized for the delay. For this the aircraft was turned completely off for what seemed like forever but in reality was only for 30 minutes. 

pushback/takeoff

In total we would be delayed just over an hour getting into San Diego which worried me as I originally had 1.5h to connect in SAN for my onward flight to SJC.  

The pilot came on the PA and announced that we would be number 1 for departure.

Lining up on the runway 16L for takeoff.

There was a large storm cell just south of the airport which made for quite a bumpy climb out.

Eventually we broke through the clouds and made it to cruising altitude. 

tray table/seat back contents

The tray table is of normal size.

Seat back contents:

inflight Entertainment

There are no PTV's on any of AS mainline jets let alone their regional jets. They went with the unfortunate route along with AA of bring your own device for entertainment which I'm not a fan of. However, I was quite impressed by the complimentary selection of movies, tv shows and the interactive map that was offered.   

Since at the time I was a T-mobile customer I was allowed one hour of free wifi as part of their partnership promotion. I wasted no time to log into Flightradar24 to check around what aircrafts were nearby. In the distance was a KLM B787-10 Dreamliner en route to Amsterdam from LAX.  

inflight service

About 35 minutes into the flight the FA's made it to my row and offered complimentary drinks & snacks. Alaska along with all other legacy carriers offer complimentary soft drinks and a snack which on this flight consisted of buttery pretzels.

Cheers for more travels to come!

Flying over Las Vegas.

Flying over the Mojave desert.

I-15 Highway

A few moments later the Captain announced our initial descent into San Diego.

landing

It's always very impressive when landing into San Diego. Especially flying close over buildings on final. We'll be landing on runway 27.

I didn't know it at the time but our next aircraft taking me to San Jose is this E175 (N173SY) which I'll be running over to due to my now very tight connection ?. 

arrival at gate

We arrived at the gate an hour and 10 minutes behind schedule.  

A brief look at the cozy first class cabin.

This concludes the trip report, thanks for reading!