Airport Equipment Rental has the largest rental fleet in Alaska with over $200 million in heavy equipment and vehicles available for sale, rental or lease, combined with factory trained service technicians, parts, supplies and 24-hour emergency services.
AER has the expertise, inventory and dedication it takes to meet any of your equipment needs, providing our customers with 6 convenient locations across Alaska (Anchorage, Kenai, Fairbanks, Delta Junction, Prudhoe Bay, & The Rental Zone).
We are the only John Deere dealer in Alaska for heavy construction equipment, and the #1 construction equipment rental business for the growing Alaska construction trade. We carry dozers, posi-tracks, loaders, skidsteers, Backhoes, excavators, forklifts, compactors, heavy & light trucks, cranes, graders, lifts, generators, light towers, welders, heaters and more! AER will get you what you need, when you need it.
After the Pipeline Days, Jerry and Jay Sadler, two hard working brothers who had a little extra money in their pockets, decided to start investing in the booming residential and commercial building market. From a simple duplex to a triplex and onward to fast food chains, strip malls, warehouses, and office buildings – Sadco Enterprises was born. Soon their portfolio of construction and workforce begin to grow. They had carpenters, electricians, welders, window manufacturing, their own title agency, and a growing fleet of equipment to go along with it.
Oil was flowing through the pipeline and right into the coffers of this bustling frontier. Housing and commercial real estate couldn’t be built fast enough. The brothers took everything they had, and the bank would give and put it into one project after the next. Projects were being finished, tenants and families were moving in, and all was well in the Golden Heart City.
Then it happened. The blanket of security dropped out from the entire state. The oil price had crashed, and the oil rich economy came to a crashing halt. Banks called their loans out of nowhere and suddenly, the two Iowa brothers. Hauled up in a station wagon on the original military highway as teenagers, were left watching their hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska turn into a ghost town. All but two banks in Alaska went belly up, housing prices dropped by 50%, and 15% of the population picked up and headed south.
With tools, equipment, employees, and buildings spread out everywhere. Sadco Enterprises needed to get everything consolidated in one place, see what was left, and liquidate what they could. They had a little building on Airport Road. They got some shelfs, gathered their tools, their dump trucks, their one backhoe, an old manlift, and tried to sell what they could and move on.
One day, a person came in and asked if they would rent some tools for half the day to finish a project on their house. Then a friend stopped in and asked if they could rent their backhoe for a few days to finish some landscaping. Quickly after that, the light bulbs clicked on. The two brothers with nothing to lose, houses on the line, and a baby on the way, decided to go for it and buy their first piece of equipment specifically for rent.
And there, during the summer of 1986 in a little building on Airport Road, through desperation and an unconsidered display of equipment; Airport Equipment Rentals was officially born.
