Anchorage airport: an east-west hub growing into cargo and e-commerce

Anchorage Airport, the furthest west of all the U.S.'s major airports other than Honolulu, serves an isolated community that is in the fourth least populous state, with only close to 740,000 residents.

But while a big part of the facility's job is to ensure that the remotest communities there are connected to the state capital, and thereby to the rest of the world, Ted Stevens International Airport has for decades filled an entirely different role on the global stage as an east-west, Americas-Asia, hub; one of its primary functions in the time when aircraft simply could not fly nonstop between origin and destination.

That role has reduced hugely since aircraft began to acquire much longer range, but the airport has remained an essential element of the cargo aircraft network because those planes often have shorter operating range.

Now one of the world's leading cargo and logistics companies is predicting a growing e-commerce role for Anchorage.