Bering Air's Caravan Fleet Grows From One to Four in Five Years.

In five years, Bering Air's Caravan needs have quadrupled.

President James D. Rowe now admits to trepidation five years ago when he took delivery of his first Caravan.

"For a company our size, it was a big investment," Rowe said. "We wondered initially if we could keep our first Caravan busy enough to justify it, and we certainly didn't foresee the likelihood of adding a second. But as it turned out the airplane went to work the day it landed in June 1994, and it's flown 125 hours per month ever since."

Small wonder.

Bering Air services the villages and towns of Northwestern Alaska and across the Bering Strait to several Russian villages. The airline delivers 100,000 passengers, 8-million pounds of mail, and 5-million pounds of cargo every year throughout 250,000 square miles of the harshest territory on earth.

"That first Caravan turned out to be a real moneymaker, and it was utterly reliable," Rowe said. "So it quickly became apparent we needed a second one, which we added in June 1997. Now, here I am 18 months later with my third, and we'll take delivery of our fourth in June (1999). The first one already has 6,000 hours on it, and it's not even breathing hard; and the second one has accumulated 3,000 hours in the 18 months we've had it. Even though our service area has remained the same, our service volumes have seen considerable growth in the past five years. We've seen the need to grow from one to four Caravans, and it's likely we'll need to add even more."

The Caravans are replacing some of the older aircraft in Rowe's 22-aircraft fleet.

"We've retired our three Beech 18s," Rowe said. "They're historic aircraft, and they'd be more appropriate in a museum than in a fleet. It was getting hard to keep up with the maintenance on them."

The Caravan thrives in tough environments, even in tough economies

Even more remarkable is Bering Air's growth despite its service area's poor economy.

"It's not a depressed economy in the sense of having lost a good standard of living," Rowe said. "We've never had an economy. The idea of going to the kitchen sink and turning on a faucet to have running water in the house is beyond the scope of most of our customers, most of whom still chop a block of ice from the river to melt down for water and use honey buckets instead of indoor plumbing. Many of the villages don't even have electricity."