Small air carriers improve rural life.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Transportation

It is early afternoon in Brevig Mission on Alaska's Seward Peninsula and the kids are clamoring for fresh pizza for dinner. The nearest pizza joint is sixty-five roadless miles away in Nome, but all it takes is a phone call and a couple hours later a half-Hawaiian, half-reindeer sausage pizza from Nome's Airport Pizza is delivered, courtesy of Bering Air's regularly scheduled flight.

In fact, residents of more than a dozen remote villages from Savoonga to Kotzebue can order out--way out--and have dinner delivered straight to the airstrip, thanks to Bering Air, a small regional airline based in Nome that serves dozens of communities as well as charter flights to the Russian Far East. It's just one example of the way Alaska's small air carriers are woven into the fabric of rural life.

Lifelines

In a state a fifth the size of the Lower 48, with scattered communities far from the road system, airport runways are lifelines, says Lee M. Ryan, vice president of Ryan Air.

"It's a very fitting term," Ryan says. "If you're down to life and death, the only way to get out is the airport. The ability to feed communities, the ability to connect communities--you don't think about roads too much when you're driving around the city, but you really think about roads when you don't have them."

Ryan Air, which in 2013 celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, is a family enterprise that was started by Lee Ryan's grandfather, Wilfred Ryan Sr., as Unalakleet Air Taxi. Over the decades it grew to become one of Alaska's key freight carriers, operating out of seven regional hubs with a fleet of Cessna 207s, CASA 212-200s, and a Cessna Caravan 208x. It has more than ninety employees and is Bush Alaska's largest freight company, Ryan says.

For seventy communities, Ryan Air is the way residents get diapers, pilot bread, batteries, and all the things necessary for life in rural Alaska. They can travel between villages or to Anchorage to visit relatives, get medical care, or connect to the rest of the United States and the world.

"People have the ability to live their lives every day," he says. "They're able to be themselves, able to keep their culture, keep their traditions, keep their lifestyle, and still be able to reach the Lower 48. Still be connected.

"Our goal is to have everybody who makes their home out in the Bush to be able to live like they were in the city with all the amenities," Ryan says. Ryan Air's planes can handle just about anything that fits in the cockpit within weight limits, including cars, as well as more unusual cargo.

"We've hauled a walrus before--a live walrus," he says, recalling an instance in which the young walrus hauled out on the barges at the port of the Red...