Northern Pacific Airways premieres in island-hopping tour

Picture: Liu Chen

You may have heard about Northern Pacific Airways, the startup airline that aims to connect the US and Asia via Alaska (and if you haven’t, here is the piece I wrote after its public presentation earlier this year).

While the launch date for those promised Asian routes is still uncertain - the start was delayed by travel restrictions that were still lingering in Japan until just a few days ago and even Mexico had been touted as the first, temporary, destination for the airline - Northern Pacific is finally having its maiden trip! (UPDATE AS OF 20/10/22: SINCE WRITING THIS, I HAD THE CHANCE TO SPEAK WITH NPA’S CEO, ROB MCKINNEY AND GET SOME ADDITIONAL INO ON THIS, JUST KEEP READING…!)

The first of Northern Pacific’s Boeing 757-200s is heading for its base in Alaska…but not through the usual route!

In what is a rather extraordinary itinerary (with echoes of United’s legendary “island-hopper” route) Northern Pacific’s first aircraft will travel to Alaska, by making a long detour across the Pacific, touching down at two different island groups.

It has first flown from Ontario, California, to Maui, Hawaii, then on to Saipan, in the Northern Marianas, a US territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, before heading towards more northerly latitudes and finishing the trip at Ted Stevens International airport, in Anchorage, Alaska.

The purpose of this ‘Show & Tell’ tour is obviously to showcase the airline and its aircraft and product to a whole range of potential partners and customers throughout the Pacific Ocean region, a potential area of expansion for the airline.

UPDATE: shortly after putting together and publishing the first version of this post, I managed to speak with Northern Pacific’s CEO, Rob McKinney (he was in the Northern Marianas, but, surprisingly the time difference was not that bad, so early morning in Europe is sill afternoon there!)

So, basically, Northern Pacific is not yet cleared for ETOPS (although the B757s are), so, even if Japan is now reopening, it still faces a regulatory obstacle. Solution: they are exploring a partnership with Icelandair. The Icelandic carrier operates B757s as well and they would provide aircraft and crews for the time being. Icelandair is cleared to operated ETOPS so they would be able to circumnavigate Russian airspace, a must in the current geopolitical environment.

Icelandair also operates a seasonal flight to Anchorage, which opens up interesting opportunities to link up with Europe as well. But this is all hypothetical for now, since such partnership would also need regulatory clearance and they are working on this now. Temptative date of start for this would be around June 2023.

In parallel to that, there’s interest in the Northern Marianas to launch a local airline. In such scenario, Northern Pacific would be allocating two of its, currently, four aircraft, to this venture, operating in wet lease regime. If all goes well this could happen much earlier, sometime around April next year, but there are also quite a few details to work out. In this case ETOPS are not an issue, because, despite the distances being huge in the Pacific, there are plenty of islands around with diversionary airports.

So, come next summer, it could well be that Northern Pacific has two separate trans-Pacific operations: one in the north operated with aircraft wet leased from Icelandair and one in the central-south Pacific in which Northern Pacific Airways would be the one providing the aircraft in wet lease.

And what about Mexico? Northern Pacific had been considering the possibility of employing its B757s in flights between Ontario, California, and Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. This may still happen, but it will depend on the outcome of the other two options, since capacity is limited. If the trans-Pacific projects are launched, then the Mexico route would be discarded.

So, in sum, too early to tell what’s going to happen, but one way or another, Northern Pacific remains one of the most interesting airliner startup projects out there!