Ravn Spin-Off Buys 757s For Asia Routes

A New Rival for Alaska Airlines

Northern Pacific Airways also aims to link Anchorage with out-of-state domestic destinations, including a marathon hop across the entire continent to the vacation hot spot of Orlando, Florida. “Orlando’s not that much different than Korea,” McKinney says, “about seven and a half hours each way.”

The only other flights from Alaska to the East Coast are provided by Delta Airlines seasonally to Atlanta and New York-JFK and by United Airlines’ seasonal flights to Newark, New Jersey. Northern Pacific also intends to fly to the New York City area via Newark.

“We’ve looked at the numbers and there is enough traffic to justify year-round service,” McKinney says.

Year-round flights to Las Vegas would have Northern Pacific compete directly with Alaska Airlines. A planned route to the Los Angeles suburb of Ontario, California, would echo Alaska Airlines another way. Once exclusively an air carrier in Bush Alaska (as Ravn is now), after deregulation in 1978 Alaska Airlines expanded beyond its namesake state and its headquarters in Seattle to include flights to the Ontario airport. At the time, Alaska Airlines had just ten planes in its fleet.

McKinney says Northern Pacific could eventually have fifty planes in its fleet. He also expects to eventually acquire more modern, efficient jets, resorting to the aging 757s only to get the new route structure started.

The company is expanding its workforce, as well. “We’re hiring a whole new depth of talent,” he says. “We have over a dozen people working specifically on the Northern Pacific side of things that all have that level of expertise in Boeing aircraft, international operations, and those kind of things.”

Ravn currently flies only propeller-driven DeHavilland Dash-8s. Northern Pacific would need to hire new crews of jet-certified maintainers. McKinney says they would be based outside of the Anchorage hub, at a Lower 48 airport with the capacity to service 757s.

The jets have a price tag of about $10 million each. McKinney did not detail exactly how the start-up airline can afford the acquisition, except that he does not anticipate going into too much debt while the fleet expands. “Our majority investor is leading the charge,” he says. “We are confident we’ll have all the money that we need in the next couple of months to get the airline launched.”

A Rest Stop at the Air Crossroads

McKinney has said he wants to revive the disused North Terminal as a stopover midway between Asia and the Lower 48, much as Iceland has positioned itself as a trans-Atlantic waypoint. Also, just like Iceland has convinced travelers to leave the airport and spend money on tourist activities, McKinney figures Northern Pacific will offer layovers in Anchorage that would benefit Alaska’s visitor economy.

“We know we can do it at a lower price point than these large, wide-body jets that have to tanker the fuel to go non-stop fourteen or fifteen hours all the way across the Pacific,” he says. “We also think it’ll be a better experience. Total trip time will be about the same, flight times will be about the same, but you’ll be able to stop and in Anchorage, stretch your legs.”

McKinney became Ravn Alaska CEO in 2020 when his California-based commuter airline, FLOAT Shuttle, acquired the bankrupt company and its subsidiary, PenAir. FLOAT (which stands for Fly Over All Traffic) operates a single small plane out of Pomona, yet the tiny operation spun off a holding company to take over Ravn, which now becomes the parent company of Northern Pacific’s international fleet.