Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2014 23:26:28 GMT -5
It's been a busy summer and autumn for Air Caribou. With a great deal of paperwork and legal investigations, a transformation has taken place at Air Caribou. Given its expertise and experience in very remote/deep bush operations, it was felt for some time that this expertise could be marketed far more widely than NW Ontario. As such, Air Caribou is now filling a niche market of being the first ACMI* carrier that specializes in bush, small aircraft remote operations (*ACMI = Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance & Insurance). Following in the footsteps of larger cargo operations such as Atlas Air, Air Caribou has adopted the same format as them, but is aiming at locations around the world that require the specialized services of remote area operations. To date, Air Caribou has picked up two contracts; one in SE Alaska and one in NW British Columbia. You will be hearing more about those later. Additional contracts are being discussed at this time, which could include operations in SE Asia. An ACMI carrier provides the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance for an operator on a contract basis, meaning the hiring operator has a minimum of logistics to deal with in getting their obligations fulfilled. When hired by a contracting agency, Air Caribou will send crew and equipment to the region and simply start operating in the same way it does at home. This means a minimum of downtime for the hiring agency and for Air Caribou. Services don't come cheap, but the type of flying we do warrants the rather high costs of an operation of this type.
With this new role, Air Caribou has been rebranded and re-outfitted. The smaller aircraft have been sold off, and the fleet paired to remote ops capable aircraft. The fleet currently includes the De Havilland Twin Otter (all gear configurations, both 100 and 300 series), the Fairchild/Swearingen Metroliner (cargo and pax), The Beech King Air B200 (with glass cockpits - our most modern aircraft at present), the Cessna Grand Caravan (cargo and pax), and are looking at adding the Porter and possibly a smaller Cessna to the stable. All aircraft can handle gravel strips and of course the Twin Otter and Caravan can handle unimproved runways. The Twin Otter will also be able to operate from water, ice and simply open areas such as tundra, beaches and so forth. Other machines being considered are the Beech 1900 and Cessna 414.
This is an exciting time for Air Caribou. Of course, the operation in NW Ontario will remain, although the camps have been sold off to smaller outfitters. Air Caribou will provide transportation for those camps for things like building supplies and some passenger work.
Below are some shots taken from our maiden flight under the new colours and role; going from our sea/skiplane base at Sioux Lookout, carrying building supplies for a new camp up near Lac Suel. We hope you like the looks of the new ops and that we can entertain over the coming months with some "interesting" tales as we go about our business.
