Alaska Airlines would like to be back to 2019 staffing levels and flight schedules by the end of the year.

"That's our goal," Tim Thompson, company spokesman in Anchorage, said Monday.

From the worst of the pandemic-induced collapse in air travel in the spring of 2020, when the airline carried 4,000 to 5,000 passengers a day across its entire route system, Alaska was back up to 108,000 revenue passengers a day for the quarter that ended Sept. 30, moving toward its pre-pandemic number of close to 140,000.

Carrying all those passengers has meant bringing planes back into service, along with p...