"This is your captain speaking...." (American Trans Air Inc.) (Cover Story).

• Author: Johnson, J. Douglas

"This is your captain speaking," and boy, what stories he can tell. J. George Mikelsons, at 54, is chairman and founder of Indianapolis-based Amtran Inc., senior captain of the American Trans Air fleet, top tour director for Ambassadair and Ports of Call travel clubs and the main man in a number of other flight-related corporations. To say he worked his way up through the company is not quite accurate. It would be more appropriate to say he worked the company up around himself into the largest charter airline in the nation and a commercial carrier with regular, scheduled routes.

Mikelsons is a composed, trim, dapper man with a Magnum P.I. mustache and a distinguishing dash of salt in his brown hair. You'd relax in your seat, sigh and not even bother to check the exits if you saw him at the controls of your jet. As do many pilots, Mikelsons tells a great story. He recalls highlights of his life in a deep, quiet voice and chuckles over some of the hands that destiny has dealt him.

There was that time when he was flying a charter from Indianapolis to Detroit. The single engine on his Cessna 210 started to conk out near Marion. Oil splattered the windshield and he had to look out of the left window to circle and glide down. His three executive passengers were white-knuckled while the engine sputtered and coughed. Mikelsons calmly lined up on a cornfield and did a smooth, dead-stick landing. His passengers, hysterical with relief, jumped on him, hugged him, slapped him on the back and rewarded him for saving their lives by stuffing his pockets with their expense-account money. Mikelsons was in more danger of a bruising from their celebration than from the landing.

He tells about driving with a girlfriend past the old Sky Harbor Airport on the Indianapolis east side and seeing a sign, "Airplane Rides $3.00." He shot the works on a trip for two. That did it. He was hooked. Not by the girl, but by the feeling of flight. Within weeks, he started flying lessons. Borrowing from every fellow Latvian he knew, he bought a 1956 Piper Tri-Pacer for $3,800. He convinced his countrymen that it was smarter to rack up hours in his own trainer than to rent one. So, he had his first plane, with many more to come.

Mikelsons recalls the day in 1973 when he quit his first big job with the Voyager 1000 travel club, where he was chief pilot and operations chief. "I was very sad to leave," Mikelsons says. "I became an entrepreneur by default. It was not that I was so driven to start my own thing. I was with them for eight years, but toward the last, I thought that they were on a course that would spell disaster. So I resigned."

Mikelsons explains his plan to start two corporations, American Trans Air, a charter airline, and Ambassadair, a not-for-profit travel club that would funnel passengers into ATA's seats. He says he couldn't start an airline in those days, several years before airline deregulation of...