Alaska Airlines plans to add a new route from Paine Field, adjusting its network at the Seattle-area airport less than a year after beginning service.

The Seattle-based carrier will announce a new route later this week with service beginning in November, Alaska network planning Noelle Fredrickson tells FlightGlobal on the sidelines at the Airports Council International-North America's JumpStart conference in Nashville today.

"We've got some adjustments coming to Paine Field later this week, stay tuned," she told conference attendees.

Alaska inaugurated the first commercial air service to Paine Field in Everett, Washington, in decades in March. It offers 18 daily flights to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland (Oregon), San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose (California) with 76-seat Embraer 175 aircraft.

The airline will have to adjust either its network or frequency at Paine Field, which is capped at 24 daily flights, to add the new route.

United Airlines operates the remaining six flights to Denver and San Francisco from the airport.

Alaska views Paine Field as a the equivalent to a 6% increase in departures at its congested Seattle Tacoma base, which is a 57km (35.7 mile) drive to the south, the carrier's chief commercial officer Andrew Harrison said in December.

Source: Cirium Dashboard