Southeast Air Cargo Looks North to Anchorage.

• Author: SWAGEL, WILL
• Position: Brief Article

Mail once got to some Southeast communities faster from Seattle than it did from Anchorage. No more.

Since the Gold Rushes of a century ago, Seattle has been Alaska's provisioning point. Washington's Emerald City was built on the profits from selling shovels, boots and eggs to Alaska-bound fortune seekers.

In Southeast Alaska, the commercial connection to Seattle has been even stronger. Until the 1980s Juneau and the rest of Southeast shared the same time zone with Puget Sound--then two hours later than Anchorage. Airfares from Southeast cities to Seattle are generally cheaper than the fares to Anchorage. It still costs more to call Anchorage from Southeast than to call Seattle and other points in the Lower 48.

Southeast's habit of looking southward for business has been reflected in the level of air cargo service coming to Southeast from Seattle, as opposed to that coming down from Anchorage.

U.S. mail, for instance, comes up to Southeast on Evergreen International Airlines, an Oregon-based firm that also runs cargo flights to Anchorage and the Far East. Evergreen's plane leaves Seattle early every afternoon for stops in Ketchikan, Sitka and Juneau, where it picks up and drops off mail. Then the plane returns to Seattle.

Evergreen's nearly direct connection to Seattle has been a boon to Washington-based Internet and catalog retailers, such as Amazon.com. It's common knowledge in Sitka, for instance, that U.S. mail is not only the cheapest way to have a package shipped in from Seattle, it's also the fastest.

Shippers sending supplies from Anchorage to Southeast--and most overnight services have used Anchorage as their sorting hub--found southbound connections were not nearly as strong. Again using mail as an example, packages and letters bound for Juneau have long been limited to transport on Alaska Airlines passenger jets--where people and suitcases are given priority over the mail.

Jams of summertime tourists have too often competed with gluts of fish trying to find space on the same planes. Sitka-bound mail, for instance, might make it only as far as Juneau, where it would wait for the next Alaska Airlines jet to Sitka.

Enter Anchorage

On Alaska Day 1999, Sitka residents, as usual, celebrated hard. Most stores and businesses closed up or took a half day to enjoy the holiday, which commemorates Sitka as the site of the 1867 transfer of Alaska from Imperial Russia to the United States. So no one was really noticing the landing of an Alaska...