GULF SHORES, Ala. — Friday when a Cessna Caravan 208 lands at Jack Edwards National Airport, a new era in transportation will start on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.

Before the summer’s out there will be 12 flights – four per week from Memphis, Birmingham and New Orleans - landing in Gulf Shores with passengers and taking off again at the airport for nascent airline Southern Airways Express.

The startup company’s inaugural flight landed in Destin on June 6, has since landed flights in Panama City on June 7 and will land its first flight in Oxford, Miss., on June 20.

“The big dominant carriers of the region, in the Southeast, they just will never fly into Gulf Shores,” Southern COO and co-founder Keith Sisson said. “So here is an opportunity for us to fly into a market that is a huge vacation market, that’s got a large population center itself within 40 miles of a major city in the Southeast and there’s no air service in and out of that airport to buy a ticket on, no ticketed service.

“So it’s an opportunity for us to identify a market where there was really no competition and the challenging part then was to find the markets where we knew people wanted to travel like Gulf Shores and we think we’ve done that.”

But the main focus for Southern, Sisson said, isn’t other airlines.

“We’re really not competing with other air carriers, we’re competing with the car,” Sisson said. “We want to get people out of those long car rides. The original concept was ‘let’s take people from the mid-South to the beach. Let’s get them out of those seven- or eight-hour car rides.’”

The next two incoming flights to be added will be from Birmingham and New Orleans. Sisson said those aren’t excessively long drives, but can still be beat by his new company’s service.

“Birmingham and New Orleans, we know they are short drives into Gulf Shores, but at the same time they are even shorter flights,” he said. “The drive from New Orleans, even though it’s short by miles, it’s not short by minutes and that’s a 45-minute flight.

“And it’s beautiful. It’s a one-way sight-seeing tour because you fly out of that beautiful lakefront airport, you fly over the barrier islands of south Mississippi, you fly over the Beau Rivage, you fly over Dauphin Island and then you land on the Intracoastal Waterway. It’s just a beautiful flight.”

Another unique experience Southern can offer with the nine-passenger Cessna, Sisson said, is one of high-end travel most air passengers don’t get to enjoy.

“The aircraft themselves are the ultra-luxury executive-style aircraft with the leather seating on the inside, very similar to what corporate executives fly around in now” he said. “I would say prior to what we are doing the people in the past that have been on airplanes like this have either been corporate executives or people who are wealthy enough to own they own plane.

“The same passenger may not have been wealthy enough to have the private plane experience and now they can for the just the price of a single ticket.”

Posted ticket prices range from $129 for one-way flights to $249 for package trips, but Sisson said deals will be offered on a regular basis.

“There will be a good number of specials to get people on board in the beginning,” he said. “We’ll have those specials in Gulf Shores for originating travelers as well as tourists coming into the marketplace.”

And, Sisson said, you can keep your shoes on all through the boarding and unloading process.

“We say there are no TSA security hassles,” he said. “There is TSA security. We run everybody's passenger name and birthday through the TSA background check to make sure that everybody is on the OK to fly list.

“As far as frisking grandma at the terminal or telling you you can’t bring a big bottle of shampoo, we are not that.”

Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft said the new service will be a welcome amenity to the area.

“It’s just a fantastic addition to our community to have another way to get people in and out of here and I like that,” Craft said. “You’ve heard us talk about trying to focus more on economic development opportunities and that’s an exposure opportunity. We’re excited about it.”