PORT ANGELES — Two airlines have expressed interest in linking Port Angeles with Seattle, and at least one of them may make up its mind this month.
The carriers are SeaPort Airlines of Portland, Ore., and Seattle-based Alaska Airlines.
Jerry Ludke, airport and marina manager for the Port of Port Angeles, said Tuesday one of the carriers is enthusiastic about serving Port Angeles, while “the other’s interest seems to have waned a little bit.”
Ludke declined to identify which airline was which.
However, Seaport officials have surveyed community leaders about their support for service to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport while Alaska has raised concerns about adjusting pilots’ schedules to extend them to William R. Fairchild International Airport in Port Angeles, according to port officials.
SeaPort Airlines flies nine-passenger Cessna Caravan single-engine turboprop aircraft like those flown by Kenmore Air before it stopped serving Port Angeles last November.
Alaska, possibly through its subsidiary Horizon Air, would fly 76-passenger Bombardier Q400 twin-turboprops.
At least one port commissioner has supported more flights by smaller aircraft to give passengers the most choices about when to fly.
“I’m very concerned that one flight a day won’t be sustainable,” Colleen McAleer said in May after consultant Ben Munson of Denver-based Forecast Inc. reported on efforts to re-establish air service to Fairchild.
Munson said then that SeaPort proposed three to five flights daily from Port Angeles to Sea-Tac.
Kenmore flew into nearby Boeing Field and shuttled passengers to the larger airport.
The initial service would be heavily subsidized.
The Port of Seattle will waive up to $225,000 in annual landing fees, gate and lobby fees, and ticket counter rental fees for each daily flight to Sea-Tac for up to two years.
The Port of Port Angeles also would waive all landing and terminal fees the first year and half of them the second year.
It would contribute $6 per outbound seat on any airline to market the service. That would drop to $3 after a year, Munson said.
Munson said he hoped the cities of Forks, Port Angeles and Sequim, plus Clallam County, could contribute another $20,000 of annual marketing support.
The port also will spend about $103,000 more for Forecast Inc.’s market survey and marketing overtures to airlines.
It hopes to recoup its costs after two years.
The incentives to a carrier flying Caravans would be worth $300,000 a year for three flights, more than $350,000 for four flights and more than $400,000 for five flights, he said. For a carrier flying one 70-passenger plane per day, they would total around $600,000.
If SeaPort starts the service, it will be its second entry into the Seattle market, having once shuttled between Seattle and Portland.
It currently does not fly into Washington state. Its scheduled flights serve southeast Alaska, Oregon, California, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi, plus San Felipe, Mexico.
Kenmore provided the only scheduled commercial air passenger service on the North Olympic Peninsula for 10 years starting in 2004, when it took over from Horizon Air.
Horizon had replaced San Juan Airlines, which flew from Fairchild to Boeing Field in 2003-04. San Juan Airlines had replaced Harbor Air, which went out of business in 2001.
In a related development Tuesday, port commissioners decided to accept 95 percent federal and state financing for a new airport master plan that would precede an environmental assessment of trees in the city-owned Lincoln Park that grow in the Fairchild flight path.
Commissioners, however, said they would prefer to negotiate directly with the city of Port Angeles and drop the $658,237 study, although almost all of it will be financed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the state Department of Transportation.
The study wouldn’t be finished until early 2017, Ludke said, with trees slated for removal the following summer.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
