Flights run once weekly between July 16 and September 3. On this route, Yakutia uses a Boeing 737-800 in a two-class configuration, featuring 8 business and 162 economy class seats. Russian carrier Yakutia Airlines actually operates the flight - Air Russia is a brand of InterPacific Aviation and Marketing, a travel distributor based in Seattle that sells the Alaska to Siberia flights. This summer Air Russia will launch, for the seventh consecutive year, direct seasonal flights between Anchorage, Alaska, and Petropavlovsk -Kamchatsky, the capital of Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula. Today, you can move between Alaska and Russia far more easily than that.
That’s kind of like what the very first Americans did, when they walked from Asia to America over the land exposed by the dropping sea levels during the last Ice Age. At the peak of winter, if the sea ice is thick enough and if you have the right permits, you may even be able to walk between the islands. Less than two and a half miles, in fact, between the US island of Little Diomede and the Russian island of Big Diomede, in the Bering Strait off the western coast of Alaska. No, this isn’t the setup of a political joke - they really are. The United States and Russia are very close.