Up in the air.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Air Transportation Holding CEO and Pres David Clark

When his dad died, Walter Clark got a crash course in how to keep a business flying. Will he fit to AirT?

Early last April, David Clark was on the verge of a daring deal. His Air Transportation Holding Co. had agreed to buy Piedmont Aviation Services Inc. and its holding company for $55 million. "It was a bit like the gnat swallowing the elephant," Piedmont CEO Jim Taylor recalls. Piedmont was three times the size of Clark's airfreight company, but the deal looked like everything AirT needed.

The Maiden-based company was pushing hard to expand its customer base, basically of one, and Winston-Salem-based Piedmont, which sells, fixes and charters planes, was a huge source of new revenue. It would also funnel work to AirT's new, underused hangar in the Global TransPark. On the other side of the deal, Piedmont needed quick cash to pay off its venture-capital debt, due Sept. 30.

But Clark, AirT's president and CEO, wasn't feeling well. His asthma had turned into severe bronchitis, and he checked into a hospital shortly after the letter of intent was announced. A minor setback, those who knew him thought. After all, he had come back to run the company after a car wreck made him a quadriplegic in 1989. In the hospital, he started worrying that Piedmont's need for speed would cause AirT to act hastily. "We need to take a look at the Piedmont deal," he told his lawyer from his hospital bed. "We need to slow it down a little."

It was Clark who got the closer look. When his bronchitis lingered, doctors poked around and found an ulcer. They cauterized it and thought they had fixed it. His family visited on April 17, a Thursday night, and Clark was in good spirits. But on Friday morning, the ulcer started bleeding profusely. Surgeons operated, but the bleeding just got worse. Clark, 74, never recovered. He died that day.

For the last few years he had been slowly grooming his youngest son, Walter, to take over, discussing business decisions and bouncing ideas off him. One week after the father's death, the leisurely tutorials became a crash course on how to run a transportation business. With the Clark family controlling 48% of the company, the board thrust inexperienced Walter Clark, 40, into the cockpit. A garrulous Charlotte real-estate developer, he joined AirT's board in 1996 but never expected to take over so soon. "I was kind of blindsided," he says.

He's no longer steering AirT toward the Piedmont deal, which his father's death sent into a tailspin. He sensed Piedmont's executives were uncomfortable selling to him, an unproven stranger, and AirT's executives were having second thoughts of their own. Both sides agreed to call it off so AirT could regroup and Piedmont look at other options. Because of the unusual circumstances, Piedmont got a three-month extension on its debt payment.

So Clark must find other ways to fulfill his mission, to maneuver the company from near total dependence on its top customer, Memphis-based Federal Express Corp., without FedEx bailing out. And he must figure out what to do with AirT's operations at the slow-developing Global TransPark in Kinston. A year ago, the company became the first tenant when two of its three subsidiaries, Mountain Air Cargo and Mountain Aircraft Service, set up maintenance operations there. It's still the only tenant.

He has to get AirT flying again after its ascent leveled off last...