Sky's the Limit.

• Author: Newbold, Farrah
• Position: Brief Article

SkyWest Airlines used to try to stay Out of the red by flying illegal aliens back to the Mexican border. "It wet legal - (but) it sounds more twisted than it was," SkyWest CEO Jerry Atkin insists. Back in the days before SkyWest became the largest independent regional airline in the nation, transporting illegal aliens back to Mexico was just another moneymaking gig for the company. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) would contact SkyWest when the INS finished a raid, and SkyWest would fly the illegal aliens back to central California where they were processed and returned to Mexico. "It was kind of crummy work, but it usually happened late in the afternoon and was done by nightfall, so we could make money during the daytime," Atkin explains about the airline's unconventional approach.

The story of how Jerry Atkin came to be president of SkyWest at the tender age of 26 is equally unconventional. In 1972, Atkin's uncle Ralph, a St. George lawyer, and five of his friends bought a plane from a failing charter company with the idea of starting a "flying club." Eventually they hired a few people and initiated a daily roundtrip flight that picked up businessmen in St. George, Cedar City and Richfield end brought them to Salt Lake City. In the meantime, Jerry Atkin, an accounting and MBA graduate from the University of Utah, was living in Salt Lake City with his wife, and working as a CPA.

In 1974 Ralph Atkin asked Jerry to handle the finances of the fledgling company -- which at that time was broke (the original capital base of $50,000 was entirely depleted) and bleeding money fast. The partners had lost $1 50,000 in their first year of operation alone. "We tried to sell and even give the company away," Jerry Atkin says, "Nothing worked. I put together a simple 'save your (butt)' plan and I was asked, 'Would you be president of the company?"' Shortly thereafter Ralph Atkin went back to practicing law, leaving Jerry to run a dying airline.

Atkins first step as president was to pacify his creditors. "We had about 15, our biggest being Hughes Aviation, to whom we owed $15,000. I went over there with my little 13-column pad of paper that...