Anchorage: Small airport on top of the world

Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is a normal cargo hub, equidistant between New York and Tokyo, with a flight time of only 9.5 hours compared to world airlines. With the snow-covered backdrop of the Chugach Mountains in Alaska, serving a city of just 300,000 people, it's arguably the best-located airport in the world today.

City stop

Completed in 1951, Anchorage Airport has for the past 40 years been a popular stopover for passenger flights from Europe to East Asia, after the Cold War restricted flights over the Soviet Union. serious restraint.

As international relations thawed in the 1990s, airlines were finally able to operate the most direct, economic routes over Russia's vast reaches, allowing them to cut costs, reduce flight times and lower prices.

Anchorage International Airport photo circa 1965.

So Anchorage has settled into its current role as a major hub for freight traffic and a modest airport serving seasonal passenger flights. Today, it handles about five million passengers a year.

But then, when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, Anchorage became the focus of global attention again, playing an important role in the international shipping of critical medical items. It even briefly became the busiest airport in the world.

While global passenger traffic is down more than 90%, "We see a need for increased cargo capacity," then-airport manager Jim Szczesniak told CNN Travel in April 2020. "And that's it. mainly because a lot of the supplies for the fight against Covid in North America are produced in Asia." 

The plane "raised and flew over the top of the globe to shorten the distance," he explained. "Anchorage's advantage is that planes can be loaded with cargo but only half filled with fuel. They fly into Anchorage and then refuel and then reach their destination."

Record volume of goods by air

At the height of the pandemic, Anchorage Airport was handling nearly 130 cargo wide-body aircraft a day and was using new areas of the airport for parking.

In 2020, it is also hosting the heaviest aircraft ever built, the Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane.

But by 2022, the airport's divisional operations director, Trudy Wassel, told CNN in early March, 115 wide-body per day had become "the new standard." Wassel says that equates to about 300 hotel rooms for the freight team each night.

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

It handled about 3.6 million tons in 2021 alone, and about a tenth of jobs in Anchorage are connected to the airport.

Wassel told CNN that Russian airspace is ready to adapt if carriers need to use the airport because of the current situation, "We are well aware of what is happening in the world and we are waiting." .

"We're working internally to ensure that operationally, we have the infrastructure in place to handle when and if we receive requests for carriers arriving via Anchorage."

This involves preparing for any operational needs of airlines.

"For example, would an airline need a technical stopover, meaning they would just take fuel, maybe change fleets, and then depart?" Wassel said. "Our ground handlers can spin an aircraft in about an hour and 40 minutes depending on the airline's needs. Or these airlines will pass through Anchorage and need additional services. ".