Charter, Lease, Buy: Either way businesses got to fly.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

With only about 5,000 miles of paved roads to provide transportation throughout the 663,300 square miles of the Last Frontier, businesses know how essential air travel is to accessing clients, resources, and opportunities.

"We have a visible member company footprint in Alaska precisely because, for a lot of companies up there, they can't do what they want to do unless they have an airplane." explains Dan Hubbard, senior vice president of communications for the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA). "It's a state with'a lot of rural areas. It's a state where a lot of places are not accessible by road or other means of transport that are more efficient."

When air travel is necessary, there are five primary ways for businesses to access air transportation in Alaska: scheduled services, charter services, leasing a plane, fractional ownership, and full ownership of a plane. Which of these options will best meet a business' needs depends on a number of factors. For most situations in Alaska, businesses will likely use aircraft regulated under Federal Aviation Administration Part 135 licensing, which covers the majority of small commercial airplanes, those with nine seats or fewer. Large commercial carriers, such as Alaska Airlines, operate their aircraft under a Part 121 license.

Though Part 135 covers many aircraft in the state, there are a few exceptions for those using general operating and flight rules, or Part 91, for commercial reasons, explains Alaska Air Carriers Association (AACA) Executive Director Jane Dale. One such exception would be carriers serving lodges as incidentals to the lodge business.

"You might just choose to buy an airplane and own it outright for your company and then use it whenever you need it," says Hubbard, noting the type of plane a company purchases depends on its needs. "You might choose to charter a plane, which means you'd call a company that has a plane to get you where you need to go and bring you back."

Chartered vs. Scheduled Flights

Matt Atkinson of Northern Alaska Tour Company and Wright Air Service points out that though his company specializes in charter flights in the Interior, scheduled flights will always be the cheapest alternative.

"Certainly, if you can jump on a scheduled seat to pick-your-village and come back on a scheduled seat the next day or later in the day, depending on the amount of servicing needed in that community, that's by far the cheapest way to go--by far. A charter can't compete with that," Atkinson says, noting that there are some drawbacks. "Scheduled service is tough. You have to have full planes that have mail and freight sticking to a schedule. You don't have that flexibility [that comes with a charter flight]."

As a charter operation, the businesses that...