A look behind Bering Air’s expansion
Flyers coming in and out of the Nome Airport over the last few years may have noticed some big changes happening at Bering Air.
The regional airline has been steadily expanding its footprint. Now, the company can fit all its aircraft inside an expansive set of connected hangars.
Russell Rowe, vice president of the company, gave the Nugget a peek inside last week.
“This is the first year ever in Bering Air history that we’ve been able to park all of the aircraft inside,” Rowe said. “That’s a pretty important thing for us.”
Bering Air’s contractor, Alaska Commercial Development, started work on the brand-new Hangar 2 in the spring of 2021. In March 2022, the airline started using the vast building, which is 260 feet long and 130 feet deep. It extends from Bering Air’s original Hangar 1 and connects with Hangar 3, which was built by Hageland and later used by Ravn.
“You can kind of consider them all one building as they’re all connected inside,” Rowe said. “The total is around 66,000 square feet of inside space.”
He added that this change has been “pretty major” for the efficiency of their flights.
“We just have a lot less interruptions due to cold weather-related mechanical issues in the morning,” he said. “If an aircraft taxis out at -10°F, there’s just more likely to be issues with all the little moving parts of the landing gear and the engine controls and the avionics and instrumentation in the panel. We would have a lot of aircraft that would turn around in the really cold months.”
Aviation regulations dictate that an aircraft must be clean before taxing for departures.
“We can’t have any frost on any of the wings or any snow buildup or anything like that,” Rowe said. “Prior to having the hangars here, we had to spray de-icing fluid on the aircraft every morning or rotate them through the hangar. When we just had Hangar 1, if we were to rotate them all through the hangar, we wouldn’t be done thawing them all by the end of the day.”
Rowe said the company would sometimes go through one or two $1,200-drums of de-icing fluid a day. Now, of course, the company must spend more money on heating the huge space, but it gets all the other side benefits, too, Rowe said, such as keeping the aircraft warm for passengers and giving mechanics and pilots a warm, well-lit space for any work they need to do on the planes before flights. They also don’t have to worry about the aircraft suffering damage overnight when storms with 50-70 mph gusts inevitably hit the region.
On Tuesday morning last week, Rowe was getting ready to accompany one of the pilots on a flight to St. Lawrence Island. He was eager to check out one of Bering Air’s newest purchases, a Cessna SkyCourier that will be devoted to transporting mail and freight, which makes up the largest portion of Bering Air’s business. The massive door of Hangar 2 opened to let one of those cargo planes into the icy cold.
“The idea with it is to help move the bypass mail more efficiently,” Rowe said as the aircraft was towed outside. “A lot of times when the passenger flights are full, we have to run extras for the mail.”
Bering Air has two SkyCouriers now in operation and plans to add two more to its fleet this year. The company is expanding its hangar in Kotzebue to be able to house two of those aircraft.
“That’ll be a big change for Kotzebue because historically our big freight aircraft have been the CASAs and they’ve all been based in Nome,” Rowe said.
Changes are coming for Unalakleet’s airport, too. Rowe said the company is remodeling the old Hageland hangar there this summer to give it better insulation, better windows and new ticket counters.
After bypass mail and freight, passenger flights make up the largest portions of Bering Air’s revenue, followed by private charters. The company has added more helicopters to its fleet in the last decade, mostly for research charters to carry scientists into the field to collect data on permafrost and other features of the Alaskan landscape.
The smell of new construction still lingered inside Hangar 3. There, Bering Air has built a new set of training rooms for its customer service agents, pilots, mechanics away from all the distractions of Hangar 1. This area also has a new ticket counter downstairs painted with Bering Air’s signature retro stripes on the wall. Rowe said that the company envisions this section will be used to check-in group charters.
“Our current lobby is a little bit overwhelmed at times with passengers, so we wanted to have the option to potentially run the school charters through here,” Rowe said. “Some of those days when the weather isn’t cooperating for us, we have as many as 60 people sitting around waiting for the wind to die down or the visibility to pick up at their destination. To have a little more space to spread them out is going to be really nice.”
Hangar 3 additionally features a new ambulance bay where Bering Air plans to run its medevacs. The goal is to offer more space, privacy and warmth for patients who need to be offloaded from flights, Rowe said.
The airline was incorporated in 1979 by Rowe’s parents, Jim and Christine Rowe. The first aircraft in their fleet was a single engine DeHavilland Otter. At the time, they were just one of many carriers in the region. Russell Rowe said that the number of just how many operators there were varies depending on the memories of who you’re talking to, but it could have been as high as 11 in the mid 1980s.
The only game in town
“We never intended to be the only game in town,” Rowe said.
But after Ravn Air filed for bankruptcy and pulled out the region in April 2020, Bering Air was the only option left for many travelers from communities around Nome and Kotzebue. Some other carriers get portions of the region’s mail and freight deliveries, but thousands of passengers rely solely on Bering Air for flights to hub communities.
The line one always hears from Bering Air and its employees is that the leadership puts its profits back into the company.
“By reinvesting into these communities, I think we’re improving the overall look of the airport areas,” Rowe said. “By having all of our maintenance, accounting, and stuff like that in Nome and Kotzebue, we’re employing more local people. Had we moved to Anchorage and set up these same facilities there, it would have been easier to get parts and employees, but then we kind of short-change the communities that we’re serving.”
Bering Air currently has 176 fulltime employees and about 35 parttime employees, Rowe said. Though the company doesn’t list specific vacancies, it is always looking. Rowe said the majority of Bering Air employees—and the ones with the most longevity in the company—are people who are from the region, who have family and connections and reasons to be here.
“We’re not just bringing outside people in to do all this work,” he said. “That’s always been really important to us.”
Bering Air has been exploring new ways to help cultivate its next generation of workers. Rowe said the company has been working directly with the Northwestern Alaska Career and Technical Center, or NACTEC for short, to increase the awareness of aviation maintenance technology jobs.
A cameraman recently visited the facility to capture 360-degree photos of the insides of all buildings to create a virtual reality workspace. That means kids in communities like Shishmaref and St. Michael might be able to “visit” the space by simply putting on a virtual reality headset. They’ll be able get a get a tour of the workplace and see what’s involved in tasks like changing the oil on a turbine engine.
“The way I envision it is that it will give kids a little bit of early exposure to what a job might look like,” Rowe said. “We want to see kids from the region get their A&P mechanics licenses and come to work.”