Business View Magazine | September 2020

168 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2020 communities, parked all 72 of its planes, and laid off 1,300 employees. Grant Aviation, upped its flights to increase capacity for people trying to make the route, which is an approximately 20-minute flight compared to a three-hour drive. Kenai Aviation also offers air taxi and charter service. Mary Bondurant is Kenai’s Airport Manager. She operates the airfield with one administrative assistant and a three-person operations staff, which can increase to five during the winter with temporary call-outs, when the weather is particularly bad. “We’re renowned for our snow and ice control in the winter time,” she exclaims. Bondurant hopes that before the next winter comes, regularly scheduled Part 121 air service will return to Kenai, which is, at least a possibility, currently. This past July, at RavnAir’s bankruptcy hearing, Float Shuttle, a southern California commuter flight service, bought six of Ravn’s Dash-8 planes and Corvus’s Part 121 federal operating certificate, with the intent of re-instating scheduled, regional service by in September. Should that come to pass, Bondurant wants to be ready. Current Airport improvement projects are the purchase of a new piece of snow removal equipment and construction of a sand/SRE equipment storage building. “We hope to get this sand storage building kicked off this fall,” she says. “We’ll be able to store a winter’s worth of sand – that’s 1,200 to 1,500 yards of heated sand - which will give us more dedicated time for snow and ice control.” “Last year, we secured a grant of approximately $6 million to upgrade our Alaska Fire Training Facility,” she adds. “It included an upgrade to the building and also the Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) training equipment. That had not been upgraded since 1998, and parts were becoming hard to find. Two new ARFF fire trucks were ordered and will be here next year.” The Center will provide state-of-the-art props that will provide the skills and training requirements