On 4 September 2026 a Boeing 787-9 crossed the radar on my desk at 39,000 feet. The screen printed three lines, as it always does:

Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner N783HA ASA100 39000ft

ASA is Alaska Airlines. That part is straightforward: this was AS100, the daily Seattle to London Heathrow service, and the aircraft was somewhere over Scotland on its way south.

The registration is the part that does not fit. Alaska's own aircraft usually carry registrations ending in AS or AK. This one ended in HA.

HA is for Hawaiian

Airlines reserve blocks of registrations, and HA has long belonged to Hawaiian Airlines. N783HA is a Boeing 787-9 that was delivered to Hawaiian in June 2025, and it flew in Hawaiian's colours, with Pualani on the tail.

Then the two airlines became one company. Alaska Air Group completed its acquisition of Hawaiian Holdings in September 2024, and the combined fleet inherited Hawaiian's four 787-9s along with everything else.

The aircraft were not renamed. They kept their registrations, which is normal: changing an aircraft's registration is a paperwork exercise nobody undertakes without reason. What changed was the paint.

The Global livery

Alaska repainted all four ex-Hawaiian 787-9s into a scheme it calls "Global" — deep midnight blues and emerald greens, inspired by the aurora borealis, and quite unlike the rest of the Alaska fleet. The work was done at Fort Worth Meacham in Texas.

N783HA was the last of the four. It flew back to Seattle in its new colours on 11 March 2026.

How a registration is put together

Every aircraft carries a registration, and the first part of it is the country. N is the United States, G the United Kingdom, EI Ireland, D Germany, 9H Malta. That part is fixed by international agreement and you cannot choose it.

What comes after is far more flexible. Airlines ask for blocks of letters and numbers, and most pick something that means something to them: Hawaiian took HA, Alaska uses AS and AK, British Airways runs G-YM and G-ST series on its 777s. It is vanity plating, essentially, and it is the reason a registration can outlive the paint scheme it was issued under.

Why it is on this side of the Atlantic

Alaska began flying Seattle to London Heathrow on 21 May 2026, daily and year-round, operating from Terminal 3. The outbound is AS100, leaving Seattle at 21:40 and landing at Heathrow the following afternoon at 15:05. The return is AS101, away from Heathrow at 17:00.

The route is flown by those same Dreamliners, the widebodies the merger brought with it.

What the screen was telling me

This is the part I like. The radar was not showing anything clever. It printed the type, the registration and the callsign, exactly as the aircraft broadcast them.

But read together, those three lines said: a Dreamliner ordered by an airline in Hawaii, now painted for an airline in Alaska, flying to London. All of that was sitting on a 240-pixel screen at 39,000 feet, for anybody who happened to be looking.

Next time a registration looks like it belongs to a different airline, it probably did.

Sources