Paine Field, in Everett, Washington, has taken off as Seattle’s second airport, with its first commercial flights Monday, with an Alaska Airlines flight to Portland going first.
The airport, 25 miles north of Seattle, is expected to be popular with people living north of the city; the main airport, SeaTac, is well over an hour, and longer when traffic is heavy. Paine also hopes to attract passengers from Vancouver, Canada.
For now, Alaska and United are the only airlines serving Paine, but Southwest has been interested in the past and others may wait to see how popular the field becomes.
It’s actually not the first commercial use for the field, which is also home to Boeing’s large-plane factory and delivery center—it opened to commercial aviation in 1939, but was taken over as an Air Force base during World War II and the Korean War.
