Alaska confirms the move, when contacted by FlightGlobal. Virgin America, which Alaska acquired in late 2016, operates Airbus A320 family narrowbodies, while Alaska Airlines operates an all-Boeing 737 fleet. "Today, we took an important step closer to completed our merger with Virgin America by combining our flight inventories into one," Alaska managing director of process engineering Sandy Stelling says in the memo. Alaska, on its website, sells Virgin America flights until 24 April 2018. The next day, it lists and sells those same flights as Alaska flights. In early September, Alaska chief executive Brad Tilden said that he expects to merge Alaska and Virgin onto a single operating certificate on 11 January 2018. The company intends to merge the airlines into a single passenger service system by the second quarter of 2018.