S.J. airport’s new routes boost status
Alaska Airlines had a bit of news last week. It announced that it will launch nonstop service from San Jose to Newark next March, using a Boeing 737 that will leave San Jose’s airport every day at 6:30 a.m. and arrive on the East Coast at 2:55 p.m.
Although this was no worldbeating revelation — JetBlue already has a nonstop red-eye from San Jose to New York — it was good news all the same. Competition on a heavily desired route is always good. So is daylight. Hampered by competition from the San Francisco and Oakland airports, the Mineta San Jose International Airport has had to claw its way back into the big leagues. We cheer when there’s a new flight to Britain, China or even Canada.
So the civic booster in me had to applaud when Alaska honored San Jose. It took me back to September 1967, when I was about to depart my parents’ home in Palo Alto for college on the East Coast. (Yes, it’s painful to count the years.)
Mind you, these were the days before parents thought it necessary to cross the country to settle their kids into their freshman dorm rooms and introduce them to rock climbing walls and tofu bars. My parents, a Lutheran minister and a teacher, would have thought that strange.
So I was on my own. And as young people often are, I was mindful of status. Going to New York? I had to leave from San Francisco. There wasn’t any other respectable way.
Stand by, S.J.
Then a friend of our family suggested that I might have a better chance getting on half-price standby in San Jose. San Jose? I sniffed. Really? I thought they flew cheap flights to Orange County. Did they have big-boy flights across country?
They did. And I easily got on standby on a direct United red-eye flight to Kennedy Airport. The price: $75. As I waited in the old Terminal C, I thought I had gotten an incredible deal.
It was an ambitious time for San Jose: The city was growing exponentially, and direct flights to the East Coast seemed natural.
Then came a mistaken “hub” arrangement with American Airlines, expensive new airport construction and competition from nimbler airlines flying out of San Francisco and Oakland. The number of direct flights from San Jose fell. Over the years, I started flying more often from SFO. But if you follow the money, there’s an irony here. Accounting for inflation, that $75 I paid for a standby ticket from San Jose in 1967 is the equivalent of $532 today.
Cheap flights
On the Alaska Airlines website (alaskaair.com), the cheapest fares to Newark next April are $204. I’ve checked on JetBlue’s site and found redeye seats to New York as cheap as $217. From SFO, it’s $206.
I don’t know how many cheap seats Alaska has, or how long they will last. But even if they charge $50 more, it will still be less than half as expensive as that cheap flight I took so long ago. Penny-pinching seems almost beside the point, particularly if we’re actually getting more direct flights to the East Coast. This won’t stun anyone who has seen airline service decline, food cut back and extra charges imposed for luggage. But it makes me want to begin college all over again. With the rock climbing wall and tofu bar.