Flying high over Alaska: rural air carriers provide a crucial service.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Taking to the air over rural Alaska is an experience Bob Bursiel still savors, even after more than 40 years.

"It's completely different than the Lower 48 where you're flying over towns, crossing over roads and highways," said Bursiel, president and owner of Wright Air Service. "When you take off and go someplace, most of the time you just see the countryside, the natural beauty of the land, 'til you get to where you're going. Most of the time it's a little tiny village with a little runway there. Planes are kind of a lifeline, how they get their groceries and mail. It's their primary mode of travel, because they can't catch a bus, can't drive their car, because there are no roads."

Wright Air is one of several charter and scheduled passenger service companies that provide these aerial lifelines for people who live or work in rural areas of Alaska. These companies fly high school athletes to and from competitions, transport mining or oilfield employees to their workplaces and back, reunite families, place hikers and rafters and hunters in otherwise inaccessible spots and pluck them from those spots when it's time for them to return home.

Wright Air operates out of Fairbanks and serves northern Alaska, while Frontier Flying Service, Hageland Aviation, PenAir, Era Aviation, Egli Air Haul and Everts Air Alaska serve a host of villages and larger communities throughout Bush Alaska. Wings of Alaska provides charter and scheduled passenger service in Southeast, while Bering Air serves a variety of Bush communities, in addition to providing charter service to the Russian Far East.

'LIKE THE WOMAN YOU CAN'T HAVE'

Jim Rowe founded Bering Air in 1979, five years after ending a post-college graduation odyssey in his old Cessna 195 that took him from his home state of Michigan to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

"I followed the beach from Cabo to Nome," Rowe said. "This is where I ran out of money, ran out of gas. I landed here with a flat tail wheel. The owner of Munz Northern Airline walked out and said 'You made it out here in that thing? Want a job?' I went to work the next day."

Two jobs later, Rowe struck a deal to take over what had been Nome Flying Service. He got the business, but Alaska Airlines had bought the company's buildings, so Rowe operated newly minted Bering Air out of his own home, with his wife booking on-demand charter flights and ferrying passengers in the couple's Suburban to the plane Rowe piloted.

"We were operating off a gravel ramp," Rowe said. "My wife checked in passengers at the kitchen table of our house."

The company's fleet grew rapidly--from two to 16 planes in the first two years, Rowe said.

Bering now employs 90 people and flies 140,000 passengers a year. It performs scheduled passenger and charter flights, runs about 500 medevac flights annually and has a helicopter operation. Its charter operation shuttles passengers to the Russian Far East destinations of Provideniya and Anadyr.

"The border itself is only 120 miles away from here," Rowe said. "Just looking at that vast landscape just a few miles away remained like the woman you can't have. It stayed forever interesting. It's such a vastly different lifestyle--rugged, remote. It's very foreign for being so close, but it's only 55 minutes from Nome."

Rowe flew Bering Air's first 225 trips to Russia after receiving approval in May 1988 to travel there. "Initially, I was the only one with permission from the Russians to come," he said.

Bering Air reunited families split when the so-called Ice Curtain fell between Alaska and the now-former Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

Alaska Natives from the area have been reunited with relatives from places like Saint Lawrence Island, Savoonga and Little Diomede Island. "There were brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who hadn't seen each other in 35 years when they stepped off the airplane," Rowe said. "The last time they saw their cousin was when he was an 18-year-old kid in a skin boat who went whaling and never came back. Sometimes relatives thought their loved ones never returned because they succumbed in a hunting accident. Others heard talk about Soviet patrol boats whisking trespassers away to the other side of the Bering Strait, and...