West Coast was formed in 1941 and acquired fellow local service carrier Empire Air Lines in 1952.[3][4][5][6] The company was based at Boeing Field in Seattle and began scheduled passenger service in 1946 with a fleet of Douglas DC-3s, marketed as Scenicliners.[7]
A promotional film produced for the company in the 1960s said that in 1946 the federal Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) granted the first regional airline certificate to West Coast Airlines as local service air carrier.
In July 1953, West Coast scheduled flights to 32 airports in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho; in May 1968 it flew to 36 airports including 29 in those states. Like other Local Service airlines West Coast was subsidized; in 1962 its revenues included $6.6 million from passengers and $5.4 million for mail.[8]
West Coast was the first local service airline in the U.S. to use turbine airliners when it began Fairchild F-27 flights in September 1958. The F-27 was the U.S. manufactured version of the Dutch built Fokker F27 Friendship. In June 1968 West Coast was the first airline to order Fairchild 228 twin jets with the acquisition of three planned, but the F-228, a smaller variant of the Dutch manufactured Fokker F28 Fellowship, never made it to production.[9] The only jet operated by West Coast was the Douglas DC-9-14 with 75 seats, all coach.
On July 1, 1968, West Coast merged with Pacific Air Lines and Bonanza Air Lines
to form Air West, which became Hughes Airwest in 1970. In 1968, West Coast operated Douglas DC-9s, Fairchild F-27s, Douglas DC-3s, and Piper Navajos. The DC-3s were not transferred to Air West and were retired; the Navajos continued for a short time. The West Coast route system then included cities in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and several in Montana. San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento in northern California were added in 1959 with Salt Lake City being served later. West Coast's only international destination was Calgary, Alberta, which was served with F-27s from Spokane. Almost all West Coast flights at Seattle used Boeing Field (BFI) instead of Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA); after the merger Air West and successor Hughes Airwest continued to use BFI until DC-9 and F-27 flights moved to SEA in 1971.[10]
Jet service destinations in 1968
The April 28, 1968 West Coast timetable listed the following cities being served with Douglas DC-9-10 jets:[11]
In 2001 an attempt was made to resurrect the West Coast Airlines name, with plans for an airline based in Concord, California, to connect several Northern California cities with Las Vegas, Reno and San Diego. The effort ended in bankruptcy.[12]
On August 24, 1963, a Fairchild F-27 operating West Coast Airlines Flight 794, flying from Spokane, Washington to Calgary, Canada crashed short of the runway at Calgary. An investigation concluded that the pilot failed to maintain the approved minimum altitude during the approach. There were no fatalities among the 16 occupants.[13]
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