Unalaska, AK – The Department of Transportation is planning to build an airport for Akutan and open it by the fall of 2012. The $75 million facility will be built on neighboring Akun Island and passengers will travel to and from the airport on a hovercraft. Akutan Mayor Joe Bereskin explained that there was no good way to build the airport on Akutan itself.

"Akutan Island is pretty mountainous. That's one of our problems and there are only two sites that were recognized early on for possibility of an airport. The problem we ran into was trying to build a road access to it."

Building a road was extremely costly. Akun Island, which is seven miles away, is much flatter. Bereskin said they chose to use a hovercraft instead of a ship because it only requires landing pads instead of a dock. He said building a dock would require an environmental impact statement instead of just an environmental assessment. That would take about two more years to complete, and maintaining the dock could be costly.

Akutan Airport project manager Tom Schmid said that Surf Beach, where the new airport will be located, is very shallow and provides ideal conditions for a hovercraft but not a hulled vessel. The Aleutians East Borough will pay for the operations and maintenance of the craft for at least the next 20 years.

Schmid said the hovercraft alone will cost $11 million dollars. Building the airport itself and all of the hovercraft landing pads, maintenance buildings, and other facilities will cost an additional $64 million. Schmid said the project is complicated and unique because money is coming from diverse sources, including $52 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, $1 million from Trident Seafoods, $1 million from the community, and $8 million from state funding. Bereskin said the city has already contributed over $2.5 million toward the whole project by acquiring the land and subsurface rights from the Akutan Village Corporation.

The project received priority funding from the federal government because they do not currently have a land-based airport.

At the moment, the 90 residents of Akutan and the 1000 plus employees of the Trident fish processing plant travel to and from the island on an eight-seater Grumman Goose from Unalaska. However, no one manufactures parts for the aging World War II era plane anymore, so they are hard to maintain. The weather in Akutan makes it hard for other float planes to land there as well. Though the community is small, Trident's processing facility in Akutan is the second largest in the state.

Judy Chapman, from the state's department of transportation, said the project is also important because it will provide safer and faster medevacs. It's runway will be long enough for the SAAB 340Bs to land, too, which will help Unalaska.

"If there's a weather situation or some event where the Saab can't get into Dutch, it would have the option of doing a short hop over to Akutan if the weather's clear there and waiting a bit to get into Dutch rather than returning to Cold Bay or to Anchorage like it does now," she said.

The airport will be the first in the nation to be put out for design-build proposals. Proposals are due in 12 weeks.