Alaska air had several planes in trouble and not more than about 3 years ago.
One crashed in the ocean, off California and it was a Mexico flight.
They had so many mechanical problems that they almost went bankrupt.
Re: weather balloon found in PA- was this ever truly identified?
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Strange object from sky turns out to be a weather balloon
8/14/2004, 12:02 p.m. ET
The Associated Press
CRALEY, Pa. (AP) — A plastic foam box with attached wires and antennae caused a brief stir after it was spotted on the side of a road in York County, but officials quickly determined that it was part of a weather balloon that had fallen from the sky.
A motorist in Lower Windsor Township called police Friday to alert them about the strange looking device.
Officer Jim Thomas located the box, complete with wires and a battery pack duct-taped to it. When he got close to it, he heard it humming.
"In this day and age, you never can be too sure," he said. "We weren't going to take any chances."
Police shut down the road and contacted Penn State's Hazardous Device Disposal Team. A bomb expert confirmed that the device was a weather balloon — a device that measures meteorological conditions at high altitudes, with the help of a helium balloon.
Markings on the box indicated it was from Colorado, Thomas said.
"It sounds like one of our instruments," Sam Oltmans, a research physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.
The balloon also might have come from Beltsville, Md., where members of NOAA and the National Aeronautical Space Administration have been sending up weather balloons every few days for an air quality monitoring project.
It is possible for weather balloons to drift, but they rarely end up on land, said Tom Tesauro of Scientific Sales, a New Jersey business that sells weather balloons.
"They go way up, into the upper atmosphere," he said. "They keep going until they get caught up in the jet stream, until they land, usually in the ocean."
Thomas said his department plans to return the weather balloon to Oltmans in Colorado. A $30 reward for finding the weather balloon will be given to the local fire company, Thomas said.