Essential Air Service To Remote Parts Of Alaska To Continue Funding Into November, Say Feds

It's October. The Essential Air Service Program Apparently Has Just Received Enough Emergency Money To Keep On Truckin' Into November, 2025  

Gulkana Airport is an Essential Air Services Hub, through Copper Valley Air. (File photo, Journal)

OCTOBER 11, 2025 

According to the website called Airline Geeks, the U.S. Department of Transportation has gotten $41 million in additional funding to continue its Essential Air Services Program.  This temporarily keeps the rural-based service from lapsing during the federal government shutdown. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said this week that the program, scheduled to run out of money this Sunday, October 11th, would be continued through early November. The program includes 169 communities in the United States, 40 of them in Alaska. 

Alaska's uniquely large, isolated and roadless territory makes it disproportionately the most vulnerable to serious community disaster if the program were to end or be suspended. 

The official list of subsidized Essential Air Service Communities in Alaska, as of October, 2024 included a number of communities and air carriers. Alaska Airlines was one of the heavy hitters, receiving (for example) over $2 million for service to Yakutat, as well as serving places such as Petersburg. 

But there are smaller providers, too. Two of them serve isolated communities in the Copper Valley, in Wrangell-St. Elias. 

40-Mile Air in Tok goes to Chisana.

40-Mile Air in Tok serves the Copper Valley. (File Photo, Journal) 

Copper Valley Air, located at the Gulkana Airport, north of Glennallen, had two contracts in October, 2024, the list shows. One was to May Creek and the other to McCarthy, also both Copper Valley communities. 

See National Park Service Map, Showing May Creek, McCarthy and Chisana in the Wrangells: 

Portion of U.S. DOT List Of Essential Air Contractors In Alaska: