Westair A319

Westair began it's operation in 1990 at Orange County's John Wayne International Airport with a small fleet of CRJ 200s, Avro RJ 100s and 737-300s. Primarily focused on low cost commuter travel between LA, San Diego and the bay area along with popular tourist travel to Las Vegas and Eagle Vail, the airline found a small but sustainable place among the large and established Californian and Sierra Pacific. One area where Westair succeeded was in connections to Central America once it acquired 8 Boeing 757-200 aircraft. The airline would rely heavily on the passenger streams from Latin America to their relatives in the Southwestern US, accounting for over 30 percent of the company's overall income. All in all the airline would still remain moderately small, only reaching a total fleet size of 65 aircraft with hubs in SNA, OAK, SLC, and SAT. Thanks to the existing stalwarts on the west coast, LAX, SFO, PDX and SEA never became very large areas of operation, only to ever be focus cities. The link between Mokupuni and Sierra Pacific also provided almost no room for Westair to expand to the Hawaiian market. The airline also ran into a wall in the form of Alden and Liberty in its expansion eastward. In late 2013, then CEO Ken Crawford decided to shift the airline's premise from low cost to full service, in a way of stealing market share as opposed to their already proven model of creating their own market. The airline revised their livery and released the current iteration you see before you. This new plan did extremely poorly for the first three years, but started to turn for the better in the fourth year of the experiment. however, due to the immense struggle of those three years, Westair exists on shaky ground. The covid pandemic and restrictions on international travel have hit the airline tremendously hard, more than most airlines. This compounded with California's own restrictions has made the airline sharply decline. The future is extremely uncertain for Westair.