With Ravn Alaska leaving the Kenai Municipal Airport on October 20th, many are wondering what changes are going to be made to the airline to accommodate their departure.
According to Mary Bondurant, the Interim Airport Manager, both Grant and Kenai Aviation are going to continue flights out as usual, but continue to monitor the number of flights being booked, and see how they can adjust from there.
“Both Grant and Kenai Aviation are still operating, you know, seven days a week out of the terminal. They are watching the market. They’ll look at the demand for flights and they’ll adjust. Kenai Aviation is going to go from 5 to 9 flights a day to 13 flights on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And that’s basically the accommodate the slope workers on the days that they change out,” said Bondurant.
Dan Knesek, the VP of Commercial for Grant Aviation, says that Grant Aviation has been providing service between Kenai and Anchorage for many years, and have no intention of stopping that service anytime soon. But they are going to adjust flights as they see fit.
“We are planning to increase our the number of flights that we offer each week between Anchorage and Kenai to help fill the gap at that is there with Raven leaving,” said Knesek.
One big difficultly of trying to increase flights is looking for more pilots to hire. Considering there is a national pilot shortage, it may make things a bit more difficult to add more routes to the airline.
“We have a specific number routes. What we will be doing is with the increased number of flights we will have to add another pilot to the Anchorage Kenai Route. We we normally operate 2 aircraft to dedicate 2 aircraft to that route and one of the aircraft during the off peak season. And we basically have 3 pilots, but the number of flights that we’re going to be operating those two aircraft per day, we’re going to have to add a fourth pilot,” said Knesek.
On the plus side, both Grant and Kenai Aviation are determined to keep ticket prices as low as possible, and continue to service the people for years to come.