Wilfred Ryan Jr. has been with Ryan Air his entire life — literally. His parents started the company the year he was born.
Last week, Ryan celebrated the airline’s 70th anniversary outside the Ryan Air’s hangar in Kotzebue. “I’ve tried to maintain the reason that my parents started this business, to assist their friends and families in the rural communities,” he said. “I hope I have instilled that same value to my son. I hope we carry it onto the third generation.”
Ryan’s parents started the airline in Unalakleet in 1953. Back then it was called Unalakleet Air Taxi — and they had just one plane. Today, Ryan Air operates a fleet of 20 planes serving more than 70 remote Alaska villages.
Ryan said his father, growing up in rural Alaska in the 1940s, saw flying as a distant dream.
“My father saw his first airplane as a teenager,” Ryan said. “He always wanted to become a pilot, but he didn’t have the resources to fund himself personally to become a pilot.”
Many Alaska Native pilots of his father’s generation got their start through military service in World War II and the GI Bill, Ryan said. He said that being Indigenous, and knowing the land, gave those pilots an edge.
“Many of those pioneer Native pilots started their career mushing dogs,” he said. “Because they knew the territory from the ground, it became very easy for them to navigate through the air, and they all had that innate sense of direction.”
Ryan’s grandfather delivered mail between Unalakleet and Kaltag, by dog sled in winter and by foot in summer, until airplanes took over the job. And Ryan’s father ran dog teams for the Alaska Territorial Guard during World War II, before he learned to fly.
After the war, he flew for Alaska Airlines but wanted to return home.
“He didn’t want to live in Anchorage because he loved the bush,” Ryan said. “He grew up in Unalakleet, born and raised there. Only way he could stay in the village, providing a life for the family that he was raising, was to remain and be a pilot.”
Ryan eventually took the airline over from his father and expanded it. By 1979, the company had grown beyond the Norton Sound region and was renamed Ryan Air. By the late 1980s, it was the largest commuter carrier in Alaska.
That changed in 1987, when a Ryan Air flight from Kodiak crashed on its approach to Homer, killing 18 of the 21 people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the airline the following year.
After the crash, the company shifted from passenger service to cargo only, changing its name to Arctic Transportation Services. It reverted to the Ryan Air name in 2010.
Ryan said the aviation industry has shifted over the decades from a focus on ambition to an emphasis on safety.
“I like the environment that we’re in today, where we have global positioning system, GPS navigation,” he said. “We have weather reporting stations, new and improved runways with good lighting systems.”
He credits investment in rural infrastructure for much of that change.
Ryan Air has changed as well. The company now employs about 150 people and flies mostly cargo, with one exception: passenger service out of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta community of Aniak. Ryan Air took over that route in 2014 after Ravn Air left the village of about 600 people without scheduled passenger flights.
“In total, we serve 73 communities, from Point Hope to Platinum, out of eight hubs of operations,” Ryan said.
Ryan now chairs the airline’s board. In 2019, he handed the company to his son Lee, who now serves as its president. Lee Ryan said he still loves flying, but what matters most to him is carrying on his grandfather’s vision of serving rural Alaska.
“At the end of the day, it’s the people we meet, friendships over my five decades of flying in Western Alaska,” he said. “I cherish the friendships that I’ve made over that time period.”
