Horizon Air

Is Horizon Air safe?

Yes. In 45 years of flying, Horizon has never had a passenger or crew member die in an accident, and it now flies one young jet type, the Embraer E175. We score it 86, two points ahead of its owner Alaska Airlines and of SkyWest, which flies the same jets on other Alaska routes. Its weak spot is not flying skill but two strange security events: an employee who stole an empty aircraft in 2018 and an off-duty pilot who tried to shut down the engines of a full one in 2023.

Most Horizon passengers book with Alaska. Horizon Air Industries, founded in 1981 and owned by Alaska Air Group since 1986, sells every seat to Alaska under a capacity purchase agreement, so flights carry AS numbers and the booking says "operated by Horizon". In 2025 it carried about 6 million people, 55% of Alaska's regional passengers, with 3,846 employees, according to the group's annual report.

Has Horizon Air ever crashed?

Not with any deaths on a Horizon flight. The Aviation Safety Network database lists 17 Horizon events since 1981. The worst was on 15 April 1988, when a Dash 8 leaving Seattle had a fuel leak and a large fire in its right engine. The crew turned back, but the fire burned through hydraulic lines and they lost control on the ground. The aircraft ran off the runway and into two jet bridges; all 40 people on board survived. The NTSB found a fuel filter cover had been fitted wrongly, probably by the engine maker, and that Horizon's mechanics had not caught it.

Since then the record is mostly bird strikes, runway slides in snow on older Metro turboprops in the early 1990s and turbulence injuries. A flight attendant was seriously hurt when severe turbulence hit a Q400 approaching Reno in 2013.

The only death in a Horizon aircraft came on 10 August 2018. A ground-service agent at Seattle-Tacoma climbed into an empty Q400 at a cargo ramp, started it and took off without clearance. He flew for over an hour over Puget Sound, chased by fighter jets, and crashed on Ketron Island. The FBI concluded the final dive was deliberate. Under ICAO rules this is unlawful interference, not an accident, so it does not count in our accident score. It does count as a security failure in the incident score.

The flight 2059 jump-seat attack

On 22 October 2023, an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot was riding in the cockpit jump seat of Horizon flight 2059 from Everett to San Francisco. Over Oregon he pulled down both engine fire handles, which can cut fuel to the engines. The captain and first officer stopped him, the engines kept running, and they diverted to Portland with 84 people on board. In September 2025 an Oregon court convicted him on 83 counts of reckless endangering and one of endangering an aircraft. He also pleaded guilty to a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew and in November 2025 was sentenced to time served and three years of supervised release.

The pilots did everything right. But it was the second time in five years that someone with airline access put a Horizon aircraft at risk, which is why we score incidents at 70, below SkyWest and Alaska.

Other incidents and FAA oversight

• Pullman, December 2017: a Q400 crew landed at night on the parallel taxiway instead of the runway at Pullman, Washington, an airport with no control tower. A flash flood had knocked out the runway lights, leaving only the blue taxiway lights on. The taxiway was empty and no one was hurt.
• 2019 to 2021: a pilot had a seizure on an E175 in 2019 and the other pilot landed safely at Seattle; a bird strike near Boise fractured part of a Q400's wing spar; turbulence hurt two cabin crew on a Seattle to Pasco Q400 flight in 2021.
• 2024 and 2026: an E175 diverted to Portland with a hydraulic fault in August 2024. In February 2026 a passenger's power bank caught fire after take-off from Wichita; the cabin crew put it out and the flight returned.

The FAA proposed a $1,005,000 penalty in 2012, saying Horizon had fitted blind rivets instead of solid ones when it installed new cockpit doors on 22 Q400s that then flew 186,189 flights. We found no newer FAA safety penalty. Horizon is not an IATA member, but it holds IATA's outside safety audit: the IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary registry lists it as registered until 22 January 2027. In 2023 the FAA's inspector for Horizon told it that an E175 with a broken collision-avoidance system (TCAS) may not carry passengers, a stricter line than other airlines were held to at the time.

One jet type

Horizon flew its last Dash 8 Q400 in January 2023 and has been all-jet since. At the end of 2025 it owned 47 E175s with 76 seats and had three more due in 2026. Alaska Air Group does not give the age of Horizon's jets alone, but its regional E175s, including SkyWest's, averaged 6.6 years. A single type helps: pilots and mechanics work on one aircraft, and the E175 is a current model with partial fly-by-wireFly-by-wireA flight control system in which the pilot's inputs go to computers, which then move the control surfaces. Many such systems also stop unsafe manoeuvres.More in the glossary controls.

Where Horizon flies

Horizon's routes run from Seattle, Portland and Everett to cities across the West, from Pullman, Redmond and Medford to Boise, Sacramento and San Diego, with some flights into Canada and the middle of the US. Winter in the Cascades and the inland Northwest brings snow, ice and low cloud, and some smaller airports have no tower. Expect weather delays and cancellations there in winter. On an E175, sit over the wing if bumps bother you, and keep your seatbelt fastened whenever you are seated: turbulence is the most likely way anyone gets hurt on a Horizon flight.

How we scored it

The accident record (93) and a young, single-type fleet (88) carry the score. FAA oversight with IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary scores 88, level with Alaska. The 2018 theft and the 2023 jump-seat attack pull incidents down to 70, and a Northwest network with mountain and winter airports sits at 74. The total is 86.