Sierra Pacific Airlines

Sierra Pacific Airlines, Inc.
IATA code :	SI
ICAO code :	XS (obsolete) SZ (obsolete) SPA
Call sign :	SIERRA PACIFIC
Founding:	1965 (California) 1978 (Arizona)
Seat:	Tucson , Arizona , United States
Home airport :	Tucson International Airport
Company form:	Inc.
Management:	Mark Thorsrud
Fleet size:	2
Aims:	American domestic charter flights

Sierra Pacific Airlines (sometimes also Trans Sierra Airlines ) is an American charter airline with headquarters in Tucson , Arizona .

History and destinations

The origins of today's Sierra Pacific Airlines go back to the first Sierra Pacific Airlines , founded in Oakland in 1965 . The company, which offered freight and passenger connections from Oakland via Lake Tahoe to Reno with a de Havilland DH.104 Dove , only operated for one year. An originally planned interlining agreement with Western Airlines could not be implemented, so that the commuter airline, which also used Beechcraft Model 18 machines in addition to the Dove , ceased operations in 1966.

Almost six years later, in early 1972, Sierra Pacific Airlines was reactivated and initially renamed Trans Sierra Airlines . Once again, the company was active in scheduled and feeder operations: using the Piper PA-31-310 Navajo , Cessna 402 and Convair CV-340 , connections to Los Angeles , Fresno , Bishop and Mammoth Lakes were provided from Burbank . After a short time, Trans Sierra Airlines changed its name back to Sierra Pacific Airlines . When a Convair CV-340 crashed on Sierra Pacific Airlines Flight 802 on March 13, 1974, the company had lost a machine until the gap that had arisen was closed on October 15 of the same year with a Convair CV-580 . The company faced growing financial problems over the next three years and so the second Sierra Pacific Airlines was acquired in July 1978 by Mountainwest Aviation, founded in 1976 and based in Tucson , Arizona. Its managing director Garfield M. "Gar" Thorsrud - a former CIA pilot and one of the first smoke jumpers in the Special Activities Division - was consequently responsible for the management of Sierra Pacific Airlines.

Sierra Pacific Airlines Convair CV-580, September 1987

The same takeover was accompanied by a relocation of the company's headquarters; the third Sierra Pacific left California and moved to Arizona. From then on, like Mountainwest Aviation, it operated from Tucson and formed the most important company of the parent company Sierra Pacific Corporation, which was then founded . In 1978 the fleet consisted of six Convair CV-580s and two de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters . With flights for civil and military customers as well as scheduled connections to the ski region around Mammoth Lakes, Sierra Pacific Airlines was able to look back on 27,000 passengers at the end of 1979. However, the utilization was unsatisfactory and the company was close to ceasing to operate several times due to the onset of an oil crisis.

Nevertheless, Sierra Pacific Airlines managed to continue operations in the years to come and gain a foothold in the wet lease business. In the summer of 1984 two CV-580s were rented to Horizon Air before another Convair could be leased to Aspen Airways in 1989. In addition to Aspen Airways, companies such as Express Airlines I and ERA Jet Alaska also leased Convair CV-580 aircraft from Sierra Pacific Airlines. In 1991 two leased Boeing 737-100s joined the company's fleet. They were the first jet aircraft in the Sierra Pacific fleet and so in the following year, 1992, another Boeing 737-100, four Boeing 737-200s and one Boeing 737-300 were temporarily leased to the fleet and given to customers such as America West Airlines and Morris Air sublet. Although Sierra Pacific was able to transport around 498,000 passengers on charter flights by the end of 1992, the company was faced with a net loss of US $ 742,583 in 1993; 65 employees were laid off. After a decline in sales of 21.8%, which was due to the downsizing of the company, the following years also remained in deficit. The net loss in 1994 was $ 69,000, only to rise to $ 198,000 in 1995. Only when the passenger numbers could be stabilized in the following year, 1996, was the Sierra Pacific , which at that time operated with a Boeing 737-200 Advanced and seven Convair CV-580s, in a position to report a profit. Nonetheless, the company continued its charter services: While the machines of the type Convair were taken out of service in the following years, logistics and passenger transport for various US government agencies were and still are among the main fields of activity of Sierra Pacific Airlines. In addition to the US military and the United States Marshals Service , the part of the United States Forest Service that specializes in firefighting can also be found among Sierra Pacific customers. In contrast to its beginnings, Sierra Pacific Airlines has turned its back on scheduled flight operations.

Around August 2014, the first of later two Boeing 737-500s joined the Sierra Pacific Airlines fleet, which at that time still consisted of two Boeing 737-200 Advanced machines. The latter machines left the fleet in the following period; from mid-2017 only machines from the 737 Classic series were operated. At the end of 2014, Garfield Thorsrud, who was part of the management until his death, died.

fleet

Sierra Pacific Airlines Boeing 737-300 at Los Angeles Airport, August 1992

As of July 2019, the Sierra Pacific Airlines fleet consists of two aircraft with an average age of 23.3 years:

Aircraft type	number	Aircraft registration	Seats (Economy)	annotation
Boeing 737-500	2	N708S	110	-
		N709S	114

During its existence, Sierra Pacific also operated aircraft of the types Boeing 737-100, 737-200, 737-200 Advanced, 737-300, Convair CV-340, Convair CV-440, Convair CV-580, Piper Navajo, Cessna 402, de Havilland Canada DHC-6 and Handley Page Jetstream .

Incidents

Wreckage of the Convair CV-440, which was destroyed on March 13, 1974 in the White Mountains. The film material of the daytime recordings that was carried along could be recovered intact from the rear of the machine and was later included in the Primal Man documentation, as planned before the accident .

• On March 13, 1974, a Sierra Pacific Airlines Convair CV-440 (aircraft registration number N4819C ) crashed during a night take-off from Eastern Sierra Regional Airport at 6100 feet on the ridge of the White Mountains . The charter flight carrying a film team and actors from Wolper Productions with flight number 802 was originally supposed to lead in daylight from the airport in Mammoth Lakes (Mono County, California) to Hollywood Burbank Airport - due to a technical defect, however, the aircraft involved in the accident was only available in the late evening hours . Since the originally planned departure in Mammoth Lakes required daylight, the Wolpers film team were transported by bus to the Eastern Sierra Regional Airport in Bishop, Inyo County, California, 45 miles south . From here they were to begin their return journey to Burbank; the Sierra Pacific Convair was rerouted accordingly. In the accident shortly after take-off at around 20:20 local time, all 32 passengers and the four crew members were killed and the aircraft was destroyed. The cause of the accident could never be definitively clarified by the NTSB . In their final report, the authorities therefore only assumed the assumption that the excellent weather conditions prevailing at the time of the accident could occasionally have evoked a certain degree of negligence on the part of the crew. Since the first officer was on sick leave for four days due to flu for a period of four days prior to the accident and had been on duty for 15 hours on the day of the incident without ingesting food, the NTSB also noted that the first officer may be exhausted and inattentive. According to the investigators, this could have led to a misjudgment of the terrain, which the first officer had to monitor through his right side window. According to the NTSB, such an assessment was difficult only on the basis of the lighting conditions on the ground and, moreover, it left no scope for major errors. The NTSB further stated that the commander's misjudgment and the deviation from the actual flight path possibly went unnoticed, since he served as an instructor and thus distracted a third pilot who had also sat in the cockpit and had never departed from Bishop was. Witnesses at the foot of the mountain stated that the machine had been in an inconspicuous and even climb to the last. The aircraft also had no technical problems.

• On February 15, 1983, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter (N361V) operated by Sierra Pacific Airlines had an accident on Transwestern Flight 868 from Boise, Idaho to Hailey, Idaho. When the commander reduced the thrust for the final approach shortly before landing - at an altitude of 800 feet and 2 miles south of Hailey Airport - the aircraft suddenly tilted forward and went into a steep descent. The pilot in command still tried to intercept the descent by increasing the thrust, but the remaining altitude was no longer sufficient. As a result, the machine hit a highway, slipped off the lane and broke apart in a collision with a 1.2 meter high snow mound. The two crew members and five of the six passengers were seriously injured; only one person was able to leave the destroyed Twin Otter with minor injuries. The NTSB later determined that the connection elements between the controls and the elevator had torn on the final approach. The reason for this was the use of six inappropriate and incorrectly fastened bolts by the maintenance department of Sierra Pacific Airlines. The NTSB also criticized the failure to comply with maintenance intervals by Sierra Pacific Airlines and insufficient supervision and monitoring by the FAA .

The Convair CV-580 (N73160) had an accident on January 20, 1989 around eight years before the incident, here still in the service of its previous operator Frontier Airlines .

• On January 20, 1989, a Convair CV-580 (N73160) operated by Sierra Pacific Airlines, operated for Aspen Airways , was wrecked in an emergency landing on a dirt road near Buena Vista, Colorado . During the flight, which was supposed to lead from Denver to Durango , a warning light alerted the crew to insufficient oil pressure in the left engine. As the NTSB was later able to determine in its investigation, the commander, who was not working according to the checklist, accidentally switched off the right engine, which was still working properly, and brought its propeller into the sail position . Shortly afterwards the left engine failed by itself. Any attempts to start the latter again were unsuccessful. After an investigation, the NTSB found considerable heat damage. A restart of the right, intact engine was also impossible, since the propeller blades could not be moved out of the sail position. This step, which is necessary for restarting, required alternating current , which the machine had lost after the two-sided engine failure. During the subsequent emergency landing on uneven ground, the machine broke through a fence and hit a tree trunk, which caused the nose wheel to collapse. Five of the 21 passengers suffered minor injuries; the remaining passengers and the three crew members were uninjured. The badly damaged machine had to be written off as a total loss.

See also

• List of airlines

Web links

Commons : Sierra Pacific Airlines  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Sierra Pacific Airlines photos on Airliners.net

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Ronald EG Davies, Imre E. Quastler: Commuter Airlines of the United States . Foreword by George Haddaway. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington 1995, ISBN 1-56098-404-X , pp. 354 (American English).
2. ↑ ^{a b} Designators for Aircraft Operating Agencies, Aeronautical Authorities and Services . Doc 8585, 183rd edition. International Civil Aviation Organization, 2018, ISBN 978-92-9258-363-7 , ISSN  1014-0123 , 1-89 (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Myron J. Smith Jr .: The Airline Encyclopedia. 1909-2000. tape 3 . Scarecrow, Lanham / Oxford 2002, ISBN 0-8108-3790-0 , pp. 2375 (American English).
4. ^ Myron J. Smith Jr .: The Airline Encyclopedia. 1909-2000. tape 3 . Scarecrow, Lanham / Oxford 2002, ISBN 0-8108-3790-0 , pp. 2376 (American English).
5. ↑ Sierra Pacific takes delivery of first B737-500. In: ch-aviation . ch-aviation GmbH, August 14, 2014, accessed on July 30, 2019 (English). 
6. ^ Garfield M. "Gar" Thorsrud. In: Legacy.com. November 30, 2014, Retrieved July 30, 2019 (recited from an article in the Arizona Daily Star dated November 30, 2014). 
7. ^ Sierra Pacific Airlines - Airline Information . In: ch-aviation . ch-aviation GmbH, accessed on July 30, 2019 (English).
8. ^ Accident report Convair CV-440 N4819C . In: Aviation Safety Network . Retrieved July 29, 2019.
9. ^ Aircraft Accident Report Sierra Pacific Airlines, Inc. Convair 340/440, N8419C Near Bishop, California. Adopted: January 10, 1975 . File No. 3-0188. National Transportation Safety Board , Washington January 10, 1975, NTSB-AAR-75-1 (English, erau.edu [PDF; accessed July 29, 2019]).
10. ↑ Accident report de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter 300 N361V . In: Aviation Safety Network . Retrieved July 29, 2019.
11. ^ Aircraft Accident Report Sierra Pacific Airlines deHavilland DHC-6-300, N361V Hailey, Idaho. National Transportation Safety Board , Washington March 6, 1984, NTSB-AAR-84/03 (English, erau.edu [PDF; accessed July 29, 2019]).
12. ^ Accident report Convair CV-580 N73160 . In: Aviation Safety Network . Retrieved July 29, 2019.
13. ^ National Transportation Safety Board, Aviation Accident Final Report, Buena Vista, Co, 01/20/1989/0925 MST, Convair 580. National Transportation Safety Board , Washington 1991, DEN89FA064 (English, aviation-safety.net [PDF; accessed on July 29, 2019]).