Alaska's Copper River salmon arrive in Seattle

The first shipment of Alaska's Copper River salmon arrived Friday morning at Sea-Tac Airport aboard an Alaska Airlines cargo flight from Cordova.


Pilot Trent Davey carried a 55-pound king salmon off the plane. He held it over his head, then took it down the steps, across a red carpet and handed it to three Seattle chefs, competing in the annual "Copper Chef Cook-off." Some raw salmon bits were handed out to airline employees and other guests.

Copper River salmon are prized for their high oil content and flavor. They typically bring the highest prices at restaurants and fish markets.

About 20,000 pounds of wild salmon from the plane are headed to restaurants and stores for consumers. The airline carries hundreds of thousands of pounds of Copper River salmon a year.

Following a brief hiatus, this Fall Alaska Airlines will once again be able to claim it owns the world’s largest flying salmon, and it’ll be even bigger than their first one.

 

Alaska announced on Monday that they will repaint one of their Boeing 737-800 jets (N560AS) into a King Salmon to be dubbed Salmon Thirty Salmon II.

To every sushi chef’s delight, the new fish will measure 129 ft in length and weigh around 91,000 lbs — about 9 ft longer and 10 tons heavier than the original 737-400 iteration (N792AS) of Salmon Thirty Salmon, which flew from 2005 until 2011. Other additions will include scales painted on the winglets and the Alaska Airlines titles colored in pink, along with an “Alaska Seafood” title.

The effort is part of an Alaska Airlines partnership with the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. Transporting seafood is big business for the carrier, which last year hauled over 25 million lbs of Alaskan fish throughout North America, much of it arriving to market within 24 hours of being caught off Alaskan shores.

The original Salmon Thirty Salmon (N792AS) swimming upstream at LAX. (Photo by Mark Hsiung)

Bowpicker type boats catch Wild Alaskan Red (Sockeye) Salmon and King (Chinook) Salmon using a gill net. We, On the F/V Equinox, buy their fish on the grounds. The fish drop into a Refrigerated Sea Water fishhold approximately 34deg/f then haul the fish to Cordova and deliver to The cannery. Copper River Seafoods...