A canceled Boeing MAX 9 aircraft that had been leased by Samoa Airways but was soon grounded over safety issues has ended up in the hands of American carrier Alaska Airlines.

The flight radar website has located the aircraft at Seattle, the home base for Alaska Airlines.

Meanwhile, Aviation news outlet Simple Flying, the aircraft will soon be part of the Alaska Airlines 737 MAX fleet. 

A photo of the plane by Joe G. Walker shows that part of the plane's vertical stabiliser with the Alaska Airlines logo emblazoned on it

In 2019, Samoa Airways signed a dry lease with Air Lease Corporation for a new Boeing 737-Max 9 aircraft.

In the same year the world’s fleet of Boeing 737 Max aircraft were grounded after two crashes, one in October 2018 and March 2019 in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

The 737 MAX was grounded for more than a year after crashes in Africa and Indonesia; news that it was no longer allowed to fly came just a week before Samoa Airways was due to receive a model.

If Samoa had received the Boeing MAX 9, it would have made the airline the first in the Pacific to operate a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft.

But a week before the delivery of the new Samoa Airways aircraft, the Boeing fleet model was grounded following the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash, on March 10, killed 157 people.

It was the second crash from the aircraft model in five months.

The first was Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia, killing 189 people on October 29, 2018.

Samoa Airways was instead forced to move quickly into a new arrangement: to "wet lease" a 737-800NG from the Malaysian-headquartered Malindo Air. The lease arrangement was cancelled in April 2020.

Alaska is scheduled to receive 13 737-9s this year and their first 737-9 MAX will fly one daily round trip between Seattle and San Diego, and one daily round trip between Seattle and Los Angeles.

Alaska Airlines   accepted the delivery of their first Boeing 737-9 MAX in late January 2021, and before it is added to the fleet, a team of pilots, maintenance technicians and safety experts are putting the plane through its paces, flying more than 19,000 miles and over 50 flight hours to test the aircraft.

Last year, the aircraft  with its Samoa Airways branding rose to global prominence after a photo of it, taken by Lindsey Wasson of the Reuters news agency last year, has been widely used in stories about the return of the 737 MAX. Regulators around the world have given the plane permission to use their airspace again after technical faults were fixed,