Bering Air--20 years of flights to Russia: breaking the 'Ice Curtain' paved the way for international flights to Russian Far East.

• Author: Stricker, Julie

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In May 1988, a Piper Navajo Chieftain, carrying a handful of Americans, rolled to a stop with little fanfare on a landing strip in Providenya, Soviet Union.

The fanfare came a few weeks later when an Alaska Airlines jet, carrying about 80 passengers, landed at the same airstrip. That jet, dubbed the Friendship Flight, was lauded in the press for melting the "Ice Curtain" between Alaska and the Soviet Far East.

But the thaw had begun years before, helped, in large part, by residents of Nome who wrote letters to Soviet officials, launched helium balloons carrying gifts of shaving cream or tobacco and put religious messages in bottles, trusting the currents to float them to the forbidden Soviet shore 60 miles away across the Bering Strait.

It was a Nome-based airline, Bering Air, owned by pilot Jim Rowe and his wife Christine, that made the first foray through the Soviet Union's back door.

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Since then, the airways has flown to communities across the strait more than 4,000 times.

"They became real pioneers in keeping the border open," says Nome Realtor Jim Stimpfle, who used to send the balloons aloft and was a key player in setting up the first flights.

Bering Air was formed in 1979 and is a commuter airline based in Nome with offices in Kotzebue and Unalakleet. It flies to 32 destinations, mostly remote villages on the western edge of Alaska, and has a fleet of 22 planes such as turbine-engine Caravans, Raytheon Beech 1900Ds, Turboprop King Airs and Piper Navajos.

Bering Air also keeps the door propped open to the Russian Far East, offering charter service to cities such as Anadyr, Providenya, Khabarovsk and other locations in the region.

WHY RUSSIA?

To Rowe and other Nome residents, the Soviet, now Russian Far East, offered economic potential in mining, tourism and fisheries, and it was just a short flight away. It took years of negotiations and the introduction of "glasnost"--openness--during Soviet reforms in the mid-1980s to pave the way for the flights.

Economic expectations were high, and, with the benefit of hindsight, unrealistic, says Gunnar Knapp, a professor of economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage's Institute of Social and Economic Research.

Just opening the border was a tremendous feat, considering the mindset of the time.

"What we might call the fall of the Ice Curtain, which drew much less attention than the fall of the Iron Curtain, was part of a drastic global change that...