Nome, Alaska ? Last Christmas, residents of the Yupik Eskimo village of Savoonga added a special dish to their everyday fare of whale, walrus, reindeer and berries – fresh pizza flown in from Nome, 170 miles away.

A tiny delivery joint, Airport Pizza, had opened several months earlier just steps from Nome’s busy runways, and many of Savoonga’s 700 residents were eager to try more than conventional pepperoni and plain cheese.

Nome’s first and only pizza delivery service does a robust business in the western Alaska town of 3,500. But it really stands out for its free deliveries via commuter plane to more than a dozen other remote subarctic villages spread over a region about the size of Washington state.

The village council in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island in the icy Bering Sea, wanted a special holiday treat for young families in the village. It ordered 50 pizzas, half topped with chicken and ranch dressing and the other half with Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Frontier Flying Service Agent Dennis Sinnok left, hands over a couple of pizzas from Airport Pizza to Willa Seetomona at the Shishmaref, Alaska Airport on Thursday, April, 6, 2006. The pizzas were half-baked by in Nome and flown on a scheduled flight to the Bering Strait village of 700 about 125 miles north of Nome. Nome's first and only pizza delivery service does a robust business in the western Alaska town of 3,500. But it really stands out for its free deliveries via commuter plane to more than a dozen other remote subarctic villages spread over a region about the size of Washington state.

Frontier Flying Service, an intrastate airline, volunteered last year to fly the pizzas at no charge to every village on its regular flight schedule out of Nome, a Bering Sea town settled in 1899 during a massive gold rush.

Craig Kenmonth, general manager of Frontier, said the free delivery service helps the carrier market itself in a way that benefits customers in the largely Yupik and Inupiat Eskimo villages.

“Our success is directly tied to the success of the communities we serve,” Kenmonth said. “And it’s a fun thing to do.”

Delivery of three or four pizzas would normally cost a village about $25, said Matt Tomter, who manages Airport Pizza. Tomter’s wife, Jeri Ann, owns the business. Freight is charged 40 to 60 cents per pound, depending on the village’s distance from Nome, with a $10 minimum.

The Christmas pizza order cost Savoonga anyway after a snowstorm grounded Frontier. Only 25 of the pizzas made it out on Frontier before the weather closed in. The council wanted to make sure no one felt left out by getting late pizzas on the holiday, so it paid freight charges of almost $100 to have another airline fly them in when the weather cleared later in the day.