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This airport was key in the Cold War and the pandemic. Has your time returned?

2022-03-09T04:21:25.853Z


Now that more than 30 countries have banned Russia from their airspace, Anchorage could prove strategically important.


This is the airspace of Ukraine 0:40

(CNN) —

Against the snowy backdrop of Alaska's Chugach Mountains, serving a city of just 300,000 people, sits what might be the best-located airport in the world today.

While one look at a standard 2D map of the Earth might tell you that Alaska is an outpost, turn the globe on your head and you'll see that the US state is literally on top of the world.

Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is an unassuming cargo hub, equidistant between New York and Tokyo and, as its website states, just a 9.5-hour flight from 90% of the industrialized world.

Now that more than 30 countries have banned Russia from their airspace, and with Russia responding in kind — while Ukraine and Belarus have also closed airspace — Anchorage could prove strategically important.

You could almost say that is what this airport was built for.

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scale city

Anchorage International Airport photographed around 1965. (Harvey Meston/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Completed in 1951, Anchorage Airport was a popular stopover for passenger flights traveling from Europe to East Asia for 40 years, when the Cold War meant that flights over the Soviet Union were severely restricted.

When international relations thawed in the 1990s, airlines were finally able to take the most direct and cheapest routes over Russia's vast expanse, allowing them to cut costs, flight times and seats.

So Anchorage settled into its current role as a major hub for cargo traffic and a modest airport for seasonal passenger flights.

Today, it handles around five million passengers a year.

(For comparison, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport handled more than 110 million passengers in 2019.)

But then, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in early 2020, Anchorage was thrust back into the global spotlight when it played a key role in the international transportation of critical medical goods.

It even became, for a brief period, the busiest airport in the world.

While global passenger traffic is down more than 90%, "we're seeing increased demand for cargo capacity," then-airport manager Jim Szczesniak told CNN Travel in April 2020. "And that's because mainly because many of the supplies for the fight against covid in North America are produced in Asia ".

The planes "fly up and over the top [of the globe] to shorten the distance," he explained.

"Anchorage's advantage is that planes can fly full cargo, but only half full. They fly to Anchorage and then refuel and then to their destination."

Record air cargo volumes

At the height of the pandemic, the Anchorage Airport was handling about 130 wide-body cargo planes a day and had to use new areas of the airport to accommodate the planes.

In 2020, it also hosted the heaviest aircraft ever built, the Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane, recently destroyed in Ukraine.

But in 2022, airport divisions operations manager Trudy Wassel told CNN in early March that 115 wide-bodies a day has become the "new norm."

That equates to about 300 hotel rooms for cargo crews per night, says Wassel.

Anchorage is home to UPS and FedEx hubs and a strengthened supply chain means the airport is experiencing record air cargo volumes for the second year in a row.

It handled about 3.6 million metric tons in 2021 alone, and about one in ten jobs in Anchorage are related to the airport.

With Russian airspace now off limits again, Wassel told CNN that the airport is ready to adapt should carriers need to use the airport due to the current situation: "We are well aware of what is happening in the world and we are ready.

"We are working internally to ensure that operationally we have the infrastructure to handle when and if we receive requests from carriers to go through Anchorage."

This implies being prepared for any operational need of the airlines.

"For example, will an airline only need one technical stop, which means they'll just get fuel, maybe change crews, and then go?"

Wassel says.

"Our ground handlers can deliver an aircraft in about an hour and 40 minutes, depending on the airline's needs. Or will these airlines pass through Anchorage and need additional services? We don't know yet."

  • Image shows empty airspace over Ukraine and its border with Russia

Improved range

Airlines have been forced to make tortuous and unprofitable detours to avoid Russian airspace, and these longer flight times increase costs in terms of staff, fuel and maintenance.

However, Anchorage is unlikely to return to Cold War levels of passenger traffic because, explains Ian Petchenik, director of communications for global flight tracking service FlightRadar24, the range of commercial airliners has improved dramatically since the war. Soviet Union dissolved in the early 1990s.

"The range is now impressive, the plane can get from origin to destination without stopping," he tells CNN.

They are doing it less cheaply, "but they can cover the physical distance."

The most extreme deviation FlightRadar24 has observed so far is Japan Airlines Flight 43, which is going from Tokyo to London.

Ghost flights?

Know what they are 1:23

It's gone "from a 12-hour, 12-minute flight to a 15-hour, 15-minute flight," says Petchenik.

"Basically, instead of going west over Russia, it goes east and then hits Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and then goes down the northern route to the UK."

He adds that big diversions are also happening between Germany and Japan, but "those have moved south, rather than finding a new direction to travel."

He adds a few hours, "but it's not that extreme on the map."

  • Why the sky is still full of empty "ghost" flights

Time slots and schedules

No one knows how long the current situation will continue, but in the coming weeks and months, airlines will be working hard to figure out their new routes and schedules.

This is not just a matter of economic factors, but will also involve fighting over airport slots, as the world of aviation's carefully mapped flight routes and schedules has been thrown into disarray.

Although stopovers are no longer a technical necessity, Anchorage's strategic location will continue to be an attractive factor.

Before the geopolitical landscape changed so drastically, a new long-haul carrier, Northern Pacific Airways, was already planning to launch international service between the US and Asia via Anchorage as a base, though that is still subject to approval. of the government.

For now, Petchenik suggests we keep watching the skies.

"It's not necessarily the airports that are the busiest, but the airspace," he says.

"A lot of the traffic that would normally go through Russia is moving south, so you're seeing increased traffic over Turkey, Romania [and] places in Eastern Europe."

His prediction is that, in the near future, "we will see a greater understanding of where planes fly. For example, Finnair, their business model was based on taking a short cut through Russia to get to East Asia." And without the ability to do so, in which direction do they travel?

In the times ahead, he says, the polar routes — through Norway and then through Canada and Alaska — "could be the most interesting."

Alaska

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-03-09

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