especially if there’s a crisis somewhere, we take a look at it and dispatch the aircraft to that area and route it to where things need to go.” Orot’s team of employees includes six people at the cargo facility and approximately thirty ground personnel. PenAir uses an in-house tracking system which shares information between departure and arrival stations to keep everyone on the same page. Customers that want up-to-date information can call PenAir with a request. Seybert says PenAir’s reliability rate for their flights “sits at about 98 percent,” meaning 98 of the flights they schedule they complete; however, their ontime performance is “not as good,” he says. “Take a place like Unalaska: the weather can be very difficult to fly in out there, so oftentimes we’ll fly as far as Cold Bay and then we’ll wait until the weather gets good enough to go and we’ll complete the flights—not necessarily on time, but we complete it… If you live in St. George, and the plane is scheduled to be there at noon on Wednesday, and it gets there any time on Wednesday, you’re going to be happy about that,” he says. Seybert says that the state’s current fiscal difficulties are going to further complicate the logistics of delivering to rural and remote communities. “DOT [the Alaska De-
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partment of Transportation] is now shortening its hours of operation because of the state budget cuts,” he says. Because of this, some runways that used to be open into the evening will now close at 5 p.m., such as in King Salmon. Additionally, in the past DOT has authorized overtime for runway maintenance during the winter. “My understanding is that this winter is going to be different; there is no more overtime allowed and they’re not going to be coming out to work on the runway after hours.” This will have a “significant impact,” Seybert says, on PenAir’s ability to service these communities, as flights which are delayed for weather until late in the day may not be able to deliver that day at all. Another logistics issue Alaska presents for PenAir is that planes are often flying empty: “We historically have a 60 percent load factor on both our freight mail product and passenger products,” he says. In comparison, many air carriers operating in the Lower 48 have 98 to 99 percent load factors. “Here in Alaska, by and large, most of us are flying around half the time empty,” Seybert says, which affects the cost of transportation. But PenAir is passionate about the communities it serves. Seybert, who has been flying since he was fourteen, grew up in Bristol Bay and has been with PenAir for
forty-three years. He says, “We understand what it’s like living in rural Alaska; we grew up in rural Alaska, so we try very hard to take care of the communities that we serve.”
Carlile
Tom Hendrix, VP of Oil and Gas for Carlile, says, “We’re definitely a multi-modal company and we do everything from very small one-off shipments for somebody’s yarn shop in Kenai to moving some of the biggest production plants and rigs.” Carlile is part of a family of companies owned by Saltchuk Resources that also includes TOTE Maritime, Foss Maritime, Cook Inlet Tug & Barge, and Northern Air Cargo, allowing Carlile to coordinate any shipment, whether it needs to come by land, air, sea, or all three. “We’re very much in the heavy haul business, and we had a pretty interesting project that we did for Blue Crest Energy,” Hendrix says. Carlile moved 160 loads from all over the continental United States and Canada to transport Blue Crest’s production facility into Alaska. Primarily Carlile utilized TOTE Maritime’s liner service to move the various components that would fit on a ship, but there were some pieces that were 18 feet tall which needed to be transported from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, down into Montana, through Idaho, and through eastern
Alaska Business Monthly | November 2016 www.akbizmag.com