Juneau s airport is surrounded by mountains, the approach often buffeted by treacherous wind shear.

Captain Dan Kaplin and First Officer Tom Peebles go through their flight safety check before an Alaska Airlines flight from Wrangell, discount car rental in salt lake city Alaska, in mid-December. Because of Alaska's topography and extreme discount car rental in salt lake city weather, it was the first to develop satellite guidance, discount car rental in salt lake city a navigation technique that is now at the heart of the Federal Aviation Administration's plan to modernize the nation's air traffic system.
Flying over Alaska discount car rental in salt lake city in the wintertime is a spectacular experience. At 35,000 feet, the state s rugged beauty unfolds, a succession of white mountain peaks against steel-blue skies, icy lakes and frozen rivers that snake as far as the eye can see. It s an awesome sight, wild and pristine, that glows in a thousand hues of red, orange and pink when the sun sets against the horizon.
Juneau s airport is surrounded by mountains, discount car rental in salt lake city the approach often buffeted by treacherous wind shear. Sitka s one small runway is on a narrow strip of land surrounded by water. And in Kodiak, the landing strip ends abruptly at a mountainside. The airport approach is so tricky that first officers are not allowed to land there; only captains are trusted to do so.
Doug Wahto knows these airports well. He grew up in Juneau, worked as a commercial fisherman and builder, and started flying with Alaska discount car rental in salt lake city Airlines in 1970. As a pilot, he honed the art of reading wind conditions by looking at how snow blew over mountain ridges.
Wahto retired six years ago but not before seeing the transformation of flying in Alaska and of the airline where he spent his career. Alaska Airlines is puny compared to the major carriers: It has 124 planes, while United Airlines has more than 700 and four times as many passengers. But because of the state s topography and extreme weather, it was the first to develop satellite guidance, a navigation technique that has transformed landing at Alaska s tricky airports. The technique is now at the heart of the Federal Aviation Administration discount car rental in salt lake city s plan to modernize the nation s air traffic system, a project that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades.
Largely because of that technology, flying in Alaska is now remarkably reliable even in the dead of winter, when it is snowing, when there are just two hours of daylight, when runways are made slippery by ice or sleet, when winds blow at more than 50 mph and pilots can barely see out the windshield. When, in other words, no one in his right mind would want to land a Boeing 737 with 140 passengers on a 6,000-foot runway.
That reliability means a lot in a state where air travel is often the only option and where Alaska is the only commercial jet carrier with in-state routes. The airline flies to 16 towns accessible only by plane or boat and, in doing so, ferries food and medical supplies, takes thousands of oil workers above the Arctic Circle and operates as the biggest air shipper for the state s fisheries.
This role as primary in-state discount car rental in salt lake city transport is still a healthy business, but Alaska Airlines has prospered by expanding its services. From its Seattle base, it now has a bigger presence than other airlines along much of the West Coast. In 2007, it moved into Hawaii; its flights to the state now account for 20 percent of its available seat miles, an industry standard for measuring capacity. That is more than the 17 percent in Alaska itself.
Megamergers, most recently of US Airways and American Airlines, have redrawn the boundaries of domestic carriers, discount car rental in salt lake city concentrating the business as never before. Alaska Airlines, for its part, has cultivated staunch independence. Unlike carriers that have faced bankruptcy or acquisition, Alaska has turned a profit for 33 of the past 39 years. In 2012, it had a record $316 million in net income, discount car rental in salt lake city up 29 percent from 2011.
The weather around here can be unpredictable, says Clarissa Conley, the FAA manager for Juneau International Airport. You name it, we ve got it. And the terrain can make flying here pretty challenging, particularly when visibility is low.
For years, Juneau discount car rental in salt lake city was a singularly tough place for planes to land. The airport is sandwiched between discount car rental in salt lake city 3,000-foot peaks and lies at the end of a 15-mile-long channel that is notorious for gusty and shifting winds. Thick blankets of fog often envelop it.
In the early days of commercial aviation, engineers carved out a chunk of the hills on the west side of the runway so planes could fly in and out. For years, flying through the cut was the only approach to the airport, forcing pilots to perform hazardous acrobatics to line up with the runway just before landing.
If the weather was bad, planes couldn discount car rental in salt lake city t land, sometimes for days. The delays were so frequent that they threatened the status of Juneau as the state s capital. The city is not accessible by road, and campaigns sprang up to move the seat of government to Anchorage. In 1971, a Boeing 727 crashed into a mountain as it approached discount car rental in salt lake city Juneau in heavy fog, killing all 111 people on board. At the time, it was one of the deadliest accidents in domestic commercial aviation. Another plane nearly discount car rental in salt lake city crashed in 1993 after being caught in a terrible wind draft right after takeoff.
Because of its terrain and vast distances, discount car rental in salt lake city Alaska has never had much radar coverage. Airports are few and far between, and radar beams are blocked by mountains. But this made it an ideal laboratory to test satellite navigation technology that was being developed in the 1990s, says Hal Andersen, a pilot who was involved in the effort.
The technology works much as GPS does in cars: It allows pilots to chart a precise course in the air and safely navigate hazardous terrain, weaving through valleys and around mountains with perfect accuracy right up to the edge of the runway. It opened a new landing discount car rental in salt lake city approach for Juneau in 1996, allowing flights to come through the Gastineau discount car rental in salt lake city Channel even in the thickest fog. Jet wingtips, coming within 3,000 feet of mountains on either side, practically graze the trees on the final stretch to the airport.
There is another discount car rental in salt lake city advantage. Before satellite guidance, pilots had to be able to see the runway three miles out in order to land. Now, with more precise navigation, that threshold has been cut to one mile, which greatly increases discount car rental in salt lake city the chances that a plane can land.
The cockpit used to be like a room full of rattlesnakes that pilots had to deal with, like so many threats, says Sean Ellis, a captain who until last year was Alaska Airlines chief pilot for the state. Now, we have a bigger safety net. That s the benefit of technology.
The airline s experiments with satellite navigation in Juneau helped prove the technology more effective than ground-based beacons and radar. The government has since outlined an ambitious program, called NextGen, to expand use of satellite guidance to airports around the country. discount car rental in salt lake city The FAA promotes this as a revolution in commercial flying, a transition from the analog world of radar to the digital age of satellites. It will probably take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.
Ultimately, it would make flying safer and more efficient by giving pilots and air traffic controllers a real-time view of traffic, as well as enhanced communications. But the project has moved slowly, in part because airlines have been reluctant to invest in the technology until the FAA musters the resources to update its own equipment.
Satellite navigation is now used at a few airports, including John F. Kennedy International in New York. It is also used in the Washington area, where planes headed for Ronald Reagan National Airport in northern Virginia can glide down gracefully along the curves of the Potomac River and comply with the federal capital s airspace restrictions.
Alaska Airlines put up a substantial sum, $40 million, to adopt the satellite technology and train pilots to use it. That paid off quickly: The airline estimates it saves $18 million a year by reducing flight cancellations discount car rental in salt lake city and delays.
The technology doesn t entirely replace pilot skill, and the airline maintains a rigorous training program, including an Arctic certification that takes six to seven years to complete. Many new hires have already flown bush taxis in Alaska.
On an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage discount car rental in salt lake city to Nome with a stop in Kotzebue, an Inupiat village north of the Arctic Circle Ellis explained how to maneuver a 120,000-pound passenger jet toward a short, icy runway. The trick, he said, is to land the wheels hard on the tarmac to activate the automatic braking and anti-skidding systems. Landing too smoothly, or gliding above the runway for too long, could make the wheels slide on the ice or snow and deprive discount car rental in salt lake city the pilot of braking discount car rental in salt lake city power.
It s just like landing on an aircraft carrier, he said as Flight 153 a Boeing 737 Combi, a custom aircraft that is half freighter and half passenger plane touched down with a heavy thump and rumbled down the runway to a quick stop.
Pilot skill matters, but even so, a lot of the guesswork has been taken out of flying, says Kenny Williams, an Alaska Airlines pilot who helped discount car rental in salt lake city devise another system that provides a real-time picture discount car rental in salt lake city of wind patterns around the Juneau airport.
Alaska Airlines goes back to 1932, when Linious McGee, known as Mac, bought a three-seat airplane, packed it onto a ship to Alaska and set up the first air link between Anchorage and Bristol Bay, off the state s southwestern coast. Commercial aviation was still in its infancy; it was only in 1926 that Congress forced the post office to turn over airmail routes to private operators, a moment that is widely seen as the birth of the airline industry.
The airline was one of the world s largest cargo companies after World War II and participated in the Berlin Airlift in 1948. In the 1950s, it was among the first to offer in-flight movies. In the 1960s, it chartered flights to the Soviet Union, a tricky business at the height of the Cold War. The flight attendants wore Russian Cossack uniforms and served tea out of a golden samovar. The planes were known as Gol