Arctic On-Demand, a new Alaskan cargo and passenger air charter service, has begun serving the state this week with flights for its first customer, Copper River Seafoods.
According to Arctic On-Demand President Tom Stenglein, the Anchorage-based seafood company has flown a handful of trips to move their employees to remote fishing locations and processing plants.
The charter service is a collaborative venture with Ascent On-Demand, based in Detroit, which uses a marketplace bid model to do ground and air shipping or the automotive industry and has been in business for more than three decades.
The Alaskan project has been in the works for “about eight months,” Stenglein told SeafoodSource.
“We’ve had it in mind for a while now … It came out of a strategy discussion we were having with our collaboration partner MonoCoque Diversified Interests,” Stenglein said. “They were helping us on another project, and they had a couple folks who learned a little bit about our business, and they came back and asked us if we would be interested, because they thought the model would work in Alaska.”
Though the company expects to move seafood and industry workers to Alaska’s remote towns and villages, Arctic On-Demand is “trying to establish partnerships with anyone who moves cargo and/or people [and who] want a market-based approach,” Stenglein said.
“[We’ll fly] anything from fish to people to oil rig parts," he said. “We see the bid model playing a big role in [distant communities]” that were hit hard by the RAVN Air collapse, Stenglein said.
“RAVN leaving the market was kind of a blow to capacity,” he said. “We were working on getting them onboarded to this bid model marketplace.”
The regional airline in Alaska ceased operations and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, which led Stenglein to acknowledge there are challenges to the expansion into the Last Frontier.
“The whole landscape [is a challenge, it’s] a huge state,” Stenglein said. “The challenge that we have with the model is going to be getting big aircraft up there. Alaska Airlines plays a pretty big role and has a big presence. Our goal is not to supplant [existing carriers], but to provide support by taking the final mile-type moves into the smaller towns and villages.”
