Company Has Won Many Awards For Safety And Best Practices

Mountain Aviation celebrated 20 years of service to the Denver and Rocky Mountain region community. Along the way it has picked up a trophy cabinet of awards for safety and best practices. From small beginnings it has grown to become a mature, ARGUS Platinum safety-certified air charter and aircraft management business, with a managed fleet of 19 airplanes, over 100 employees and 43,000 hours of safe flying logged in its books.

Mountain Aviation is run by Rich Bjelkevig, its present CEO. In 1993, Bjelkevig, a pilot, was unemployed, along with a distressing number of his fellow Americans. But Bjelkevig saw opportunity in the failures of others. "I had worked for several operators that failed," he says. "I was confident enough to think I could see why they were failing, and to think I could do better. So I set up an office in our spare bedroom, got hold of a good King Air, and gave it a go."

Mountain Aviation has come a long way since then, as has the industry it serves. In the 90s, ownership plans were pretty simple. Commercial fleets were owned by those who operated them, and private owners had little opportunity to market their airplanes for charter to defray their costs. Fractional ownership existed, but was in its infancy. As a result, commercial operators tended to maintain aging airplanes, and ownership of private airplanes was confined either to the very rich, or to those whose need for private transport was so great that they could bare the entire cost of ownership. The outcome was a bunch of aging fleets providing third-tier lift, and a tiny fleet of private airplanes, with no commercial connection between them.

Bjelkevig saw that private owners' needs could be reconciled with those of ad hoc charterers, given a carefully crafted management plan. He set about building the Mountain Aviation value proposition that a bridge could be built between the private owner and the charter user, to the benefit of both.

The King Air was soon joined by a jet, a Citation II. Others followed, culminating in a Gulfstream G400 which brought stand-up trans-continental capability. The spare bedroom was replaced by an office, at first in rented premises. Then in 2008 MA built its own hangar and office facility.

Each milestone required extensive collaboration with the FAA, and the rewriting of operations manuals, a cathartic process Bjelkevig believes help MA maintain its core ethic – "safety, hard work, integrity, and more safety."

(Image from Mountain Aviation YouTube video)

FMI: www.mountainaviation.com/