About This File
FS2004 Scenery--Bethel Area Airfields In Southwest Alaska. (AK), USA. This presumes you have already installed Bethel PABE (BETHEL-1.ZIP). In the Yukon River area of Alaska there are a lot of small villages close together, which is unusual for Alaska. Almost all of them are on the coast or a river bank, and the local economy depends on fishing. Some are larger than others and have a fish processing plant, such as in Emmonak. This is the largest plant and it exports prepared fish by cargo planes which fly in on a daily basis, using an extended runway. Emmonak will be included in a further post. This current post includes airfields to the south and west of PABE, 17 of them; some of them already included and now modified. There will be more airfields to the north and northwest of Bethel in a future post. There are revisions to Bethel to include parking spaces for Yute Air (newly included here) and extra spaces for Ryan Air. Both of these flew Cessna 205 planes into the smaller village strips from Bethel (past tense as Yute Air recently went bankrupt). The northwest area is served both from Bethel and also from St Mary's PASM, which is in the northwest and at a more economical range to the local airfields (100 miles closer than Bethel). The smaller airfields have few airfield buildings or any other creature comforts; featuring heavily are a new standard blue garage building (not always yet installed) and a small and old terminal shed (that has often been removed). Go to "http://vfrmap.com/" for free vfr maps of the area, There is a pic of the local chart area included here. The screenshots are a random sample. Kipnuk PAKI is the one that appears to have a second and long grass runway; what it actually has is the ground prepared for a new and long gravel runway but which hasn't been started yet as it has taken 10 years just to prepare the ground. I have no idea why. By Roger Wensley.