The Bering Air night maintenance crew around 1995 with Jim Rowe in the Center and Chris Rowe second from right. Photo courtesy of Bering Air
fly with him. “So when I opened the doors, the phones were ringing off the hook for work we just couldn’t do,” he recalled. At the time, Chris was pregnant with Russell and Ben was just 19 months old. “After Russell was born, Chris put him in a box under the desk and worked as the customer service agent, dispatcher and finance director.” Alaska Airlines meets Bering Air “In March of 1983, Ray Vecci, future Alaska Airlines CEO, and Ken Skids, senior vice president, were in Nome looking for a code share partner,” said Rowe. “In 1974, the Alaska Transportation Commission (ATC) had kicked Alaska Airlines out of Nome and kicked Wein out of southeast. In 1983, that all changed with the sun setting of the ATC. In June 1983, Alaska Airlines planned to come back to Nome and needed a code share partner so they could obtain a share of the mail. Munz was already the code share partner for Wein.” Rowe turned them down, saying that Bering Air was not a scheduled carrier. Vecci and Skids thought Rowe was arrogant and cocky, but he felt that “people choose to come and fly with us and deep down I was still hoping to haul fish in the summer and run dogs during the winter. A week later Alaska called again and I had thought about it, probably had just written a payroll and began to wonder where the funds for the next one would come from,” he said.
After a call from Alaska to come to Seattle to discuss the option again, Rowe negotiated his airfare and hotel before agreeing to the meeting. Once in Seattle, Rowe was again approached by Alaska Air officials who offered to write up the Bering Air ops manual, and set the scheduled flights into play. Rowe again stated that he did not have the operating capital and needed aircraft for scheduled passenger flights. Eventually Alaska Airlines CEO Bruce Kennedy got their code sharing partner with Bering Air, but it cost them $150,000 and two Piper Navajo Chieftain aircraft—a debt Bering Air honored and repaid as part of a business deal. Eventually the code sharing was discontinued after an East Coast crash by a regional air carrier for American Airlines in 1999 that raised the NTSB’s attention to regional carrier oversight. “At the same time, Bering Air and Alaska Airlines continued to have a relationship, but we operated totally independently,” explained Rowe. Rowe insists that without his partner and wife, Chris, and many dedicated employees who became friends, none of his adventurous life would have been possible.
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