When Santas sleigh breaks down ...

Founded in 1932 as McGee Airways and currently offering 118 destinations, the famous smiling face on their tail fin cements them as a part of American/Eskimo history - but what is their name, exactly? Many swear it is "Alaskan Airlines", yet all references today show it is, and has always been, "Alaska Airlines."

Sometimes a Mandela Effect can be explained by nothing more unusual than the way our brains like to smooth out any awkwardness in speech and communication. If I were to ask you if you'd like "a apple", it's not only grammatically incorrect, it sounds more jarring than "an apple". In fact, that's the reason we now use "an" rather than "a" in situations such as this. It could be argued the same process is taking place here, except this time Alaska Airlines is not grammatically incorrect being the actual name, so we unconsciously change it for the same reason as the apple example. 

American, African, Alaskan

People are used to a certain style of suffix, and the loose rules, if there are any at all, for a country seem to follow a pattern. The thinking is if there is a "ca" at the end of the word, as in the "America" and "Africa" examples, when using that term in the possessive, i.e. something that belongs to it, the suffix becomes "can". So people would naturally be used to doing this for Alaska, since they whole term is really "an airline that belongs to Alaska".  When this is unthinkingly done so often as the name is spoken, it gets reinforced to the level that everyone thinks it sounds "better" than the actual way it is because of these pre-existing examples they are more familiar with. The new phrase, even though it is technically incorrect, gets repeatedly passed on as a form of mental virus