02:26 PM PDT on Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Associated Press and KING5.com

SEATTLE - Alaska Airlines has drawn attention with its 737 painted to look like a king salmon. But it looks like "pork" to some. Taxpayers paid half a million dollars for the paint job. The money came from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board to encourage people to buy Alaska salmon.

Alaska Airlines

The Salmon-30-Salmon will remain a passenger plane.

The giant king salmon portrait on the side of a plane is meant to represent the tons of salmon that have been a steady and lucrative source of income for the airline.

According to The Seattle Times, the plane’s paint job cost five times the standard rate and was paid for with a $500,000 federal grant designed to encourage people to eat Alaska salmon.

The tab is being picked up by the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board. It will expose the idea of eating Alaskan fish to every city it flies to. It could also entice more sport fisherman to the nation's biggest state.

The board has doled out $29 million the past two years to market fish, all of it taxpayer money.

Another taxpayer-supported group, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, gets $5 million a year from taxpayers, according to the Times.

The one-of-a-kind "Salmon-30-Salmon," as the airline is calling the specially painted jet, was unveiled Saturday. As a passenger plane, the design is targeted at potential seafood consumers.

It took a team of 30 painters 24 days to adorn the 120-foot-long Boeing 737 passenger jet with the shimmering likeness.

The paint job is expected to last five years.

Routes include Anchorage, Cordova, Yakutat and Juneau in Alaska. It will fly West Coast passenger to Denver, Chicago and the Dallas-Fort Worth. It will also fly to Mexico.

Alaska Airlines is the only major carrier that flies into and out of many of the remote fishing outposts in Southeast Alaska. It expects to fly more than 30 million pounds of seafood from Alaska to the United States, Canada and Mexico this year.