ISLANDERS RELY ON HELP FROM ABOVE

OWLS HEAD – With cartons of groceries and mail, cases of soda and boxes of computer equipment neatly stowed behind the seats of his Cessna 206, pilot Kevin Waters fires up the engine and proceeds down the runway.

Soon the plane is soaring above trees that show tinges of their bright fall hues and over rocky shores and harbors dotted with lobster boats and buoys. Then the small plane angles above a cottony layer of clouds toward the island of Matinicus, 17 miles out to sea.

With three planes and a team of four full-time pilots, Waters’ Penobscot Island Air provides a year-round lifeline between the mainland and some of Maine’s most remote islands. In addition to bringing food and mail, they fly 120 medical evacuations a year, Waters said.

They bring in nurses and therapists for older and ailing islanders, contractors who are needed at once and can’t wait for slower ferry boats, and others who need a quick lift for business, recreational or personal reasons – such as missing a ferry ride.

Actor John Travolta – a pilot himself – hitches a ride from time to time to Islesboro Island, where he has a home. Families of Fortune 500 company executives who have island homes get hops with Waters’ service to and from larger airports in the state. One islander flies her dog to the mainland to get its nails clipped.

While wealthy estate owners make up much of the summer business, it’s the lobstermen and local business owners who comprise the bulk of the wintertime traffic, Waters said from the service’s home base at the airport in the coastal town of Owls Head.

“It’s a mission-oriented business,” said Waters, who worked as a bush pilot in Alaska for one of the 30 years he has been flying. “It’s the closest thing that we have in the lower 48 for this type of mission.”

The islanders aren’t dependent solely on Penobscot Island Air, which Waters sees as an alternative service that has found its niche. The islands still are served by a patchwork of state-operated ferries and private boats for necessities of life on the islands.

And sometimes the weather, which can be harsh and fickle offshore, shows a preference for the old methods. While the sun baked away a morning fog on a recent fall day, it lingered stubbornly offshore, keeping Waters from landing on Matinicus and forcing him to move on toward two other islands – North Haven and Vinalhaven – to check on weather conditions there.

Still, islanders have grown to depend on the Penobscot planes.

On Matinicus, the 65 or so year-round residents get many of their goods by mail order, and some prefer traditional mail service to the Internet, said Wanda Philbrook, postmaster on the island of graceful old homes, lobster shacks and where license plates are not seen on vehicles.

Ferries stop only three or four times a month in the summer and once a month the rest of the year, so mail service would be irregular at best without the planes, said Philbrook, adding that “we’d be in a real hard spot” without the air service.

“We’ve got the one-room schoolhouse and the mail” to hold the lobster-fishing community together, said Philbrook. “If we didn’t have the mail we’d probably have to turn our tails and go back to the mainland.”

More than 1,100 islands along Maine’s coast range from Mount Desert, where cruise ships stop at Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are located, to unpopulated rocky rises in the ocean. About a dozen of them are inhabited year-round.

Penobscot Island Air flies to eight of them, which have a combined year-round population of fewer than 4,000, in a pair of six-seaters and one seven-seat plane.

In addition to being a licensed air ambulance service, Penobscot Island Air flies for government agencies that do wildlife monitoring such as seal and eagle counts. It has contracts with cargo carriers UPS and FedEX.

Kathleen Colton depends upon UPS and the postal service to support her design scarf business based on Matinicus, where she lives with her artist husband. Her business, Kathleen Designs, must get velvet and other fabrics shipped from California in order to turn out 2,000-3,000 scarves a year for its customers.

Because Penobscot Island Air has the islands’ postal and UPS contracts, “they’re critical,” said Colton. Without Waters’ air service, “I could figure out some way, but it would probably be cost prohibitive,” said Colton. “He covers all the bases.”