Connecting the PNW at SeaPort Airlines with Kent Craford - EP.281

Speaker A: Things are innovating so quickly. But transportation and especially air travel is one thing that we as a society have come to be conditioned to accept will only get worse every year.

Speaker B: Well, why.

Speaker A: Why should we accept that? I mean, we're just. We're calling BS on that. No, no, I don't. I don't agree with that. Don't. I'm not opting into that program. It doesn't have to be that way.

Speaker B: Well, Ken, thank you for coming on the Things like an Owner podcast. I'm excited to chat with you for many reasons. I'm a huge aviation geek, and I love hearing about airlines and learning about them. I'm also from Portland, where Seaport and you are based. So I'm excited to chat more specifically about Portland as well. But could you maybe start off with how did you get into airlines? Especially airlines like Seaport, where it's kind of a unique niche, unique business model. Um, I would love to kind of hear more about what got you excited about airlines and seaplanes and niche travel like this.

Speaker A: Well, I was not in aviation. I'm not a pilot. I didn't even really have much of an aviation interest. I came at, uh, it from the other side. I was a customer, a frequent business commuter between Portland and Seattle. And this was, you know, 20 years ago, and I was going up there often, like, every other week or so. And I did everything. I drove, and that was three and a half hours. Typically. I took the train that was usually three and a half hours. And then I'd fly, and that would be three and a half hours. And it just never made sense to me that if the, you know, the jet can't beat the car to Seattle, I mean, what's the point, you know? So I've been working on a project, downtown Portland, a waterfront project with a client. And I said to him one day when we were standing on the river, I was like, wouldn't it be cool if we could run flow planes from here to Lake Union in Seattle? And a couple weeks later, we were having lunch, and he's like. He says to me, hey, I was thinking about your idea. And I thought he was talking about something about the project we were working. I said, no, no, no, no. The. The. The. The airplane thing, the seaplane to Seattle. Let's do it. Like, okay. So that was the genesis of Seaport. Airlines thought about running floatplanes from the Willamette river to the Lake Union, and we did a, uh, whole engineering analysis on it. We hired this firm person, Sprinkerhoff, and I Think we spent like $15,000. There's a lot of money, you know, back then to come up with an analysis of the Willamette river as a sea drome. And after now having owned and operated seaplanes for 15 years. I mean, I could have told you in 10 seconds it wouldn't work. But back then, you know, we needed a big fanc engineering firm to tell us it wouldn't work because we didn't know anything. But it doesn't work.

Speaker B: Can you explain? Yeah, yeah. Why. Why doesn't it work? Because I, um. I don't know. I don't have the 15 years or experience.

Speaker A: Well, if you look at Lake Union, which is a wonderful place to operate float planes, although they are having a lot of challenges with recreational paddle boarding as that's become more popular. It's, it's, it creates a lot of potential conflict with flow planes. But Lake Union has no current. It's a lake. It has no bridges that cross it. There's bridges kind of in the corners right on the Ship Canal, but it's free of any, you know, structures hanging in the air. And then finally, because of. There's no current and it's, there's not much flow from elsewhere, it doesn't have a lot of debris in the water. Well, the Willamer river has all of those things. It's got a lot of current, it's got a lot of debris, and it's got a lot of bridges. And, you know, trying to get a float plane, uh, to land on the Willamer river would be a harrowing experience. I can only imagine, you know, what any of our pilots would think if we tried to send them down there to land. So it just doesn't work, unfortunately. And so when we determined that that wouldn't work, we started talking about wheel planes. And somebody, actually, it was Shane Carlson at Northwest Seaplanes said to me, you should look into a PC12. And so we did, and come to find the PC12 is this unicorn of an airplane that's pressurized and fast, incredibly capable, and yet all also tremendously economical to operate. And so we got the idea to run PC12s, which fall outside of TSA jurisdiction and run them either FBO to FBO or FBO to eventually Boeing Field and the King County Airport terminal there at, uh, Boeing Field. So that's, that's how Seapor got started. And we launched it for the first time in 2008.

Speaker B: You walk me through some of the those years because it seemed the, from the outside looking in, the strategy Evolved somewhat. You added eventually Essential Air Service, the Cessna Caravan was added as well at some point. What were the kind of different phases of the um, first version of Seaport?

Speaker A: Well so I launched Seaport is the original CEO and co founder in June of uh, 2008 and then I left in November of 2009. My, my partner and I had a falling out and he was the money guy and I was the idea guy. So he got the house and I got the dog and, and um, went off to Alaska. So I don't, I can only tell you what I know from observation. After I left they got into the caravans and everything long after I left. But originally the Seattle, Portland, you know the eponymous route was all we were going to do. And then the economy decided to go into recession and fuel prices spiked in July of 2008. Just as a uh, you know, especially as a, as a historical comparative point from what's going on right now. To put things in perspective, that month oil hit $147 apparel. And so it puts, and that was in 2008 mind you. So it puts our today's $95 uh, on barrel oil in perspective. I mean it's still high but comparatively we've been through much tougher times. And so we were scrambling. I mean we were under capitalized fuel, uh, prices were spiking, the economy was going into recession. We were looking for way we had to scale the business or it was going to sink. And so just so happened the state of Oregon was putting out an RFP for air service to Newport and uh, Astoria. And they had put together this collection of funding both from a Connect Oregon grant and from some congressional funding. And we bid on that service and won. And then we also went after a Central Air Service contract for Pendleton and bid on that and won against Horizon by the way, who was the incumbent there. So that felt pretty good. And you know, pretty soon we had a little business going there. All PC12s, all Portland based, all serving the Northwest. And then you know, the EAs we decided we wanted to scale further. And so we put in a bid to serve three communities in Arkansas, Little Rock, Harrison and Jonesboro, Arkansas out of a base in Memphis. And my plan for that was always to just set up the EAS uh routes and then turn and serve the major markets out of there. So get the EAS routes established as a way to get some cash flow going because again we were under capitalized and then turn and serve Nashville. And at that time Delta was the only operator serving Memphis to Nashville and One way tickets were as much as $600. And that was in 2009. So we could have taken the Seaport Seattle Portland model, applied it in Memphis to Nashville and just gone back and forth all day long and you know, made, made money doing that. So however, after I left the business, my partners had other, other ideas and they decided to go whole hog into the Essential Air Service program. I, I had always treated the Essential Air Service program as kind of a means to an end. You know, let's use it to get ourselves established, supplement our cash flow, you know, pay for the equipment and everything else and then let's turn and you know, do what we set out to do, which is major market to major market, high frequency business commuter service. After I left, they abandoned that whole business plan went, went straight after EAs. They, they went all over the country. I mean they had, I think they had a couple dozen routes at one point. Everything from Southern California to Mississippi to. I think there were some, even some things up in Michigan or Minnesota or something like that. And they failed. Ultimately. They failed just as every, just about every 135 operator that has gone headlong into Essential Aero service has done in the past. It's, it's a trail of bodies that program. And you know, we could spend hours dissecting the reasons why there. But bottom line is Seaport ultimately failed. And it wasn't because anything, you know, on the Seattle Portland route failed. It failed because they went chasing, you know, subsidy mirages that turned out to be vapor. And I'll, uh, just. There wasn't any there there.

Speaker B: From an airline's perspective, how does the Essential Air Service program work?

Speaker A: Well, it's a bid process. And so the, the fundamental, the fundamentals of the program are this. The communities that are entitled to essential Air Service subsidy were on the list in 1979 when the airline industry got deregulated. They had scheduled commercial air service on that day in 1979. And so the Civil Aeronautics Board approved at that time the precursor to the faa. They determined that, well, these communities, in order to protect them from deregulation, we will guarantee air service to these communities for a period of time and we will. If the CARE air carriers determine that they can't be served economically, we will subsidize them. Well, you know, what did Ronald Reagan say? There's nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. You know, here we are, what is it? 47 years later? You know, we're, we still have Essential air service. We're still subsidizing air service to these communities. And the cost of the program is just unbelievable. Now the government, the U.S. department of Transportation, allows an air carrier, uh, a 5% profit margin. And so what carriers do is they tally up the costs of operating air service, they take the organic revenue that they think they can earn, and then the gap plus 5% is the subsidy. And so what's happened though is that as airports have built up around these communities. Let's take an example I just gave you. Let's see Hot Springs, Arkansas. I misspoke. I said Little Rock. Hot Springs, Arkansas is one of the communities we bid to. It's 45 minutes from little Rock. From Little Rock, you can get a flight in like, I don't know, 12 different directions. Uh, at that time, 2009, we had like, there were four carriers there. I know Southwest was there, which profit is way down. And so we're still subsidizing air service to Hot Springs 45 minutes down the road. When you can fly out a Little Rock anywhere in any direction. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense, you know, so Congress has tried to reform EAS a few times. Every time a full throated reform effort fails in favor of just some kind of like, tweaking at the margins, you know, to mostly to eliminate the most politically embarrassing bad examples of waste. And so. And there have been some terrible examples of waste, you know, where you're subsidizing air carriers to the tune of $1,000 per passenger, for instance. I think that was one rule that they put in. And so some of the worst examples are gone, thankfully. But there's still a lot of work to do. I mean, there's still, if you look at Essential Air service in Alaska, and we participate in that program at Alaska Seaplanes, our subsidy per passenger is incredibly low. It's a fraction of what you see down south. And, you know, a lot of Alaska operators would really like to see these subsidies, the more outrageous subsidies in the lower 48, curbed because they suck up so much of the fund funding of the program that they threaten the viability of the whole program by, by sucking up a disproportionate amount of the money. So that's kind of currently how it works. There's a lot of improvements that could be made to it.

Speaker B: And you said you left Seaport after you had a falling out and went to Alaska. What did you do in Alaska? And then bring us back to present day from Alaska?

Speaker A: Yeah. So the original Seaport was a DBA of a certificate that, uh, my partners and I had Acquired in Juneau, Alaska. And that company was called Wings of Alaska. And it was uh, at that time a wheel plane operator only. And it was flying VFR wheel plane service to communities around Alaska, Skagway, Haines, Hoon, Estavis primarily. And it was a town bus service that had been around for quite a while. The family that owned it was looking to retire and get out. And so we acquired it and we expanded it down into the Pacific Northwest under a new brand, Seaport. Well, after I left Seaport had the falling out with my partner, a lot of the folks in Alaska that still worked for that operation and which we had still owned, they started leaving as well. And one of them, Mike Stedman, was the president of Wings of Alaska. And he and I decided to team up and buy a little mom and pop flow plane operation in Juneau called Alaska seaplanes. They had 3D Havin Beavers and a Cessna 180 and they flew scheduled service to four communities all in floats year round business. A very small, I think we had 15 employees. We bought that in 2011 and since then we've grown it. We acquired another operator, Air Excursions, which was a wheel plane operation a uh, year later. And then we were competing against my former partners, which was cathartic. And uh, we just kept growing and growing into their market share and eventually they went out of business. And we've had other competitors come and go. And today we're the regional airline for southeast Alaska. So we cover 14 communities from Skagway in the north to Ketchikan in the south. Another airline joined our family of companies three years ago. That's Island Air Express. And so between Alaska seaplanes and Island Air Express we have about 250 employees, uh, about 20 aircraft. And we fly both wheel and float plane service across southeast Alaska. And we're the town bus. You know, it's an archipelago of islands and there's really only two ways to get there. There's the ferry and a, uh, small air service like, like ours. And so we fly people back and forth to the doctor. We, we do a lot of tourists in the summertime of course. We fly the mail ups. A lot of Amazon goes on our airplane. A lot of Instacart actually that's becoming more and more popular. You wouldn't believe the number of pizzas we fly or even McDonald's sometimes. You know, when you live in a small village in Alaska, there's, there's sometimes not a lot of retail options. And so people will, you know, they'll have stuff Shipped in from, from, from Juneau and catch can. So yeah, it's been a wonderful business. We have a wonderful group of people. My business partners and I have, most of us have been together for 15 years, almost since the beginning. And so it's a family owned business. There are seven families. And it was that same group that a couple years ago decided to restart Seaport Airlines. So Seaport is just another, it's just another dba. So all part of the same Alaska Seaplanes, Island Air Express family of companies.

Speaker B: Gotcha. And so what are you taking with, from what you learned in Alaska and applying today with Seaport that maybe would look different from the first iteration you had? Like if I, if I've shadowed you for a day in 2008 and then again today, what do you think I would notice?

Speaker A: Well, a lot less hair today,

Speaker B: um,

Speaker A: quite a few more wrinkles. Yeah. I mean, you know, at first blush you wouldn't notice much different, but from where I sit, everything's different because the first and foremost is just the people. I mean we have an incredibly experienced, fantastic team at Seaport Airlines. Today. We, we actually moved, uh, one of our chief pilots, Ian Fisk, a, uh, long time Juno guy, he moved his family down to Seattle to start Seaport for us. We also moved Brandon lapierre, who is a dispatcher for us in Juneau. An incredibly smart young guy. He moved down to Seattle to become the Seaport operations manager. And so those two, those two gentlemen have really built the business up. And so we call that, uh, ripping off a piece of our sourdough. You know, we took part of our operations in Alaska and brought it to Seattle and added flour and water and, and it tastes the same. You know, it really, uh, I'm very proud of the fact that we have the same culture here at Seaport, the same customer service centric culture, a very strong safety culture and a culture of just attracting and cultivating really good people. We've really assembled a terrific team here and I think that that's somewhat of a contrast with the first Seaport, which was a little more ragtag, I guess. The second thing I would say is that we're much more sophisticated about our backend systems. You know, we have the benefit of being a 15. You know, we, we've been doing this 15 years. Alaska Seaplanes itself has been in business since 1997, so almost 30 years. And we just have a much more sophisticated way of going about this, all this than we did the first time around. The third thing is we're much better Capitalized. Now we own all of our own equipment. We purchased all the PC12s to operate seaport. You know, we can. We have very high standards for our equipment and for how we maintain them, for how they look. You know, the first time around, we couldn't even afford to paint our fourth airplane. Even the first two, the first three got kind of a partial paint job this time around, you know, we. We had all the aircraft painted in same livery. We had. We've had avionics upgrades, interior upgrades. You know, we. We wanted to start out right on, um, on a good foot. So, you know, so we have the capital to do all that. And then I think the fourth thing I'd say is that in terms of being different the. From the first Seaport the first time around is that we have a strategy, you know, we have a plan. The first time around, it was. It was really true entrepreneurship. You know, I was like, hey, this is totally new. We're going to throw this into the market and we're going to kind of shuck and jive and, you know, figure it out. And I'll say that even to this day, there's. We're. You're having to make adjustments every day, right? I mean, things happen, you know, fuel prices spike. You know, sales are good here in this channel and not as good in that channel. You know, there's competing demands for aircraft capacity. There's, you know, there's all sorts of things that are thrown at you every day. We're really nimble, so we can, you know, we can absorb all those inputs and, um, and adjust our plans as necessary. And we have, you know, we've made a lot of adjustments to our plan, but we still have a plan, you know, and that's really not something that I can say we had the first time around. So that's a big difference.

Speaker B: What do you feel like has maybe changed the most within that planet? Maybe what's stayed the same and been fairly consistent and strong. I imagine the PC12 being a good aircraft in 2008 is pretty much the same as it is now. What tweaks around the edges have you made?

Speaker A: Well, uh, yeah, the PC 12 is just, hands down, the right airplane for the job here. There's just no question pilots love flying it. So that's been great. I don't know that there's been any huge surprises. It's harder, you know, than you expect, always. Right. I mean, there's just. Elon Musk said famously recently, we don't do these things because they're Easy. We do them because we thought they were going to be easy. And you know, I think that's true with anything, any business. It's like, okay, well, it's turning out to be a little harder than we expected. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. You know, you just gotta be patient. I mean, we, we always take a three year view of, um, anytime we do anything new or different, you gotta, you really gotta give it three years. It takes that much time for awareness to build, for you to work out various operational kinks for you to, you know, to, to have credibility and leverage with vendors to optimize your pricing on, um, you know, various input costs and things like that. So it just, it takes some time. You gotta, you gotta take the long view in this business. It's ever humbling too, you know, and like I said, you know, you make adjustments. So we made a decision to go to Spokane a little sooner than we had originally planned. So that was part of our plan. So that's a change. We ended up accelerating that in part because Spokane Airport was recruiting us and did an incredibly good job of making a persuasive case for that market. It's a booming economy out there, especially with Northern Idaho growing like a weed. And then when we went out and actually visited Felt Field, I mean, there's only so much you can see of it on the Internet. You know, sometimes you gotta really like go into someplace and like, holy cow, this is a gem. You know, I mean, it just made total sense. And so we ended up expanding to Spokane sooner than originally planned. And I'm, I'm just so happy we did that. I. And that's already paying off, so I don't know. I'm sure there'll be something else tomorrow, right? You know, you just, you just gotta keep adjusting.

Speaker B: I can think of, I mean, there's lots of different advantages you think of when you operate smaller aircraft where you don't need TSA and security can show up 20 minutes before the flight and just fly to airports that are maybe closer to the major city. What are some kind of like unknown or un, maybe underappreciated values of the seaport model of smaller aircraft into smaller airports there, when you hear from customers after they use it for the first time and they, they take a flight, what are some of the things where they're like, oh my gosh, I never thought like this was possible. I could do this.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. Well, everybody loves free parking. Everybody loves the proximity of the parking. I mean, they just can't believe It, I can park 100ft or less in some cases from the check in counter. Yes, you can park 100ft or less from the check in counter and then the airplane is only another 150ft beyond the counter. So they're, they're, they're, they're amazed by the scale, the quaintness of Boeing Field and just you know, how charming that airport building is the night. The original 1930s Seattle Airport terminal. That, that always surprises people pleasantly. The speed of the service of course. I mean we, we advertise that. I mean that's our whole value proposition is we cut your travel time in half versus flying through SeaTac and all the rigmarole that, that, that is involved with that seven story parking garages and half mile walk to your boarding gate. And you know, all, all in all, you know, the whole, the whole experience. But you know, the one thing that I think almost every person that flies it for the first time when I ask them how it was or you see reviews on LinkedIn or uh, Google or something, is how wonderful the customer service is. And that to me is the most gratifying because that's not necessarily saving them any time. It's not even fundamental to our value proposition. Right. It's just, it's just our culture and it's the way we do things and we take a personalized approach to it and the fact that your airline agent knows your name, that is just something that some people find so remarkable. But it's true. You know, you walk into the Portland office and Gene or Anna greet you by name if they've seen you before. And then you barely have a chance to sit down before you're whisked onto the airplane and whisked off to Seattle. And so you know, that's, that's, that's been really gratifying, you know, the feedback about our customer service. And it's been one of the um, best pleasant surprises about, about Seaport so far.

Speaker B: I mean the whole experience is so much more personal just by default because you're, there's only nine seats, there's two pilots. So uh, at most you'll have almost a dozen people together. And it's already, already uh, a small group. It's easy to get to know each other. There's less apprehension about striking up a conversation with someone around you. The, it feels like the whole business is kind of built around like small groups that are inherently more personal.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I've really enjoyed getting to know some of our passengers on the flight. I always strike Up a, uh, conversation with the folks sitting next to me, around me. And they're so interesting who they are too. You know, just hearing their stories and why they're traveling. And, and of course, you know, where I'm, I'm always doing focus groups, right. So I'm always looking for feedback. But yeah, uh, it's, it is a much more personal experience. I mean, you're not, not getting herded onto the airplane. I mean, you're, you're, you are a small group. You're also kind of. I've, I've heard it. One customer described it to me as flying with a friend. You know, it's like you're, you're getting on the airplane with a friend and it's like, hey, yeah, it's like, how neat is this? And I think some of them have a feeling like, you know, it's so good, it's almost too good to be true. Like they're in on something, you know, you're in on a secret, you know, so it's, it's that classic I know a guy deal, you know, and that's, that's rewarding, you know, to, to kind of create that, that kind of a. I don't know how to put it, but it's kind of a tribe, you

Speaker B: know, when I'm wondering about new routes and developing kind of a route design for seaport. The current routes seem to be more oriented around frequency, like cities where there's a lot of travel between the two that you can make slightly more convenient for a portion of those travelers to Boeing Field from Felt, for example. But then there's kind of another category of travel that I imagine would benefit like Boeing Field to Victoria, Canada, or somewhere that's maybe harder to reach and a little bit maybe less frequent, but just the difficulty of travel is greater. How do you kind of weigh between the two and is there maybe one you want to spend your initial focus on?

Speaker A: Well, Boeing Fields of Victoria is a great idea. It's already being done by, uh, Kenmore. They do a great job. So that one's covered. You know, there's other places. I mean, it's. With anything, there's a fixed cost. This is a high fixed cost business, right? You have incredibly expensive aircraft. You have base costs, you have just, I mean, just your labor costs. Just to flip the open sign on the door every morning is pretty significant. So you need to have some volume to be able to, you know, to justify all that. So I'll tell you what we're not interested in doing is Developing new air service to any place that doesn't currently have it. That's a tough one. That's just a tough one. I'm not saying it can't be viable, and maybe someday we'll look at it. But if a community doesn't have air service, it doesn't mean people in that community don't fly on airplanes. They just drive to an airport nearby and fly out of there. So, you know, you think about places like, well, Astoria, for instance. We've, we've, we operated out of Astoria in the initial seaport. And I have a particular interest in this. I got a cabin in Ocean Park, Washington, right across the river. So I spent a lot of time in the lower Columbia. It was personally, you know, just really gratifying to me to be able to initiate air service to, uh, Astoria. And, and it was helping serve my former client based down there in the seafood industry as well as tourism. So I was really excited about it. I spent a ton of time working on developing that air service, on marketing it, on partnerships with the local community and everything else. And I remember this would have been in the. I think it would have been in the fall of 2008. I was out pounding a lawn sign for a political candidate. I was doing some volunteer work at Camp 18 on Highway 26. Are you familiar with that, by chance? It's a big restaurant. It's a big log cabin style restaurant. Anyway, it's on Highway 26 between Portland and Astoria. Ah. And I was stopped there on the side of the road, pounding this lawn sign in. And this SUV comes and stops right in front of me, pulls off the highway, and the executive director of the Port of Astoria jumps out of the car. And he was the guy who had been the architect of this whole air service development project, Astoria. Uh, and I said, hey, Peter, what's up? Where are you going? He said, oh, we're, we're driving into Portland. I'm like, oh, you, you go shopping or something? No, we're going to PDX to catch a flight. And I was like, well, why, why didn't you take the se. We're flying three times a day at that point. Why didn't you take the seaport flight? Oh, you know, we're gonna go to Costco on the way back and, you know, this, that and the other or whatever. And it's just, I don't know, they, you know, we live on, on the west side. And driving back to Warrenton to, to catch, to the airport to catch the flight out, it just didn't seem to make sense. And so anyway, and that's when I knew right then and there that air service Testoria was gonna fail. Because if the port director who developed the whole idea wasn't even using it himself, then it just wasn't going to work. And that's an example where that community, Astoria, uh, is simply too close to Portland. It's too close. The airport is in Warrenton, which is to the west of the population density. The population density is therefore, you know, closer to Portland. And so, and they've gotten so used to driving after two decades of no air service that you know, it's like the people are creatures of habit. Especially nowadays, you know, with blue to you know, hands free calling and we all have heated seats and you know, your car is comfortable. So there's probably somebody out there that thinks that they can go make a business out of starting your service to underserved communities that don't have it. Hey, more power to you. I mean I was that guy, I was, you know, kind of the pride eyed entrepreneur, uh, just starting out and recognizing opportunity and, and, and it may be there, but it will take a long time. It'll take a lot of effort, a lot of capital, a lot of sweat equity and you really ultimately will have to change people's habits, which is a tough thing to do. And we're seeing that firsthand with Seaport. You know, that's, that's kind of the hardest part is, you know, even after the awareness challenge, you got to change people's habits. So you know, that's, so that's one thing I guarantee you you won't see us doing is starting your service to places that don't have it currently. But yeah, make no mistake, we want to grow for sure. Yeah, we want to grow. There's, there's opportunities out there.

Speaker B: What do you want Seaport to look like in a few years here?

Speaker A: In a few years I would like to see Seaport as the new regional business commuter service for the Pacific Northwest, connecting more communities to Seattle, serving as really the go to for same day business travel to be able to get to Seattle and back in, in a day or from Seattle to these outlying communities and back in the same day. That's really my vision is to bring the communities uh, of the Pacific Northwest closer together and to make intra region travel easier, less friction quicker and just simply more doable. I mean you think about all of the travel that doesn't happen currently simply because the barriers are too high. And in this day and age it really makes no sense. It shouldn't. It shouldn't be the case that air travel within the Pacific Northwest is slower and more difficult today. It was 25 years ago. I mean, think about that. You know, we. We live in a society where you have all of the knowledge of the history of the world in the palm of your hand now, especially with AI And I can ask my AI any question and get the answer in milliseconds, you know, and things are innovating so quickly. But transportation and especially air travel is one thing that we as a society have come to be conditioned to accept will only get worse every year.

Speaker B: Well, why.

Speaker A: Why should we accept that? I mean, we're just. We're calling BS on that. No, no, I. I don't. I don't agree with that. Don't. I'm not opting into that program. It doesn't have to be that way. We are not prisoners of CAC and the Port of Seattle. You know, we can, uh, free ourselves and cast off those chains and move over to the People's Airport, Boeing Field, and fly out of there without all the hassle and rigmarole. And, hey, you get to park for free, too. You know, I mean, it's. There's no reason we can't do that. So that's what we're doing, and we're going to make that available to more communities across the Pacific Northwest. And it's going to be a golden age of travel again.

Speaker B: Yeah, that'll be really exciting. Ken, thank you for coming on the podcast. This has, um, been a ton of fun. I'm fascinated by airlines and have a bunch more questions, but I'll save them until we get to have lunch or a coffee in person, hopefully here pretty soon. But thank you for sharing your time.

Speaker A: All right, you bet, Alex. Appreciate your interest.

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