BISHOPP FAMILY/ALASKA HELICOPTERS


By 1955, he was working for his cousin, helicopter pioneer Jim Ricklefs, who owned and operated Rick Helicopters in San Francisco. Rex was the general man- ager for the three-year-old company. “I ran things and paid the bills,” he recalled. Rex’s first trip to Alaska was in 1955 when he went there to manage six helicopters for the company. Ricklefs had purchased a branch of Alaska Airlines in 1951, gaining an operating certificate and a helicopter in the process. For the next few years, Ricklefs and Rex would migrate to Alaska every summer and work out of Merrill Field (PAMR) in Anchorage, flying support missions for oil exploration operations in Cook Inlet. Rex generally drove the truck from California to Alaska with two Bell 47


helicopters in the back. When the summer flying season was over in Alaska, he would take the helicopters back to California to use in agricultural spraying. During the early days of flying in Alaska, most of the


company’s operations centered on petroleum explora- tion and land surveys. As it grew, the company expanded into every conceivable mission segment avail- able in Alaska, such as mining, logging, communications, and even search-and-rescue work. “As you can imagine, there were a lot of accidents in the early 1950s,” Rex said. “There was one recovery in the 1970s that stands out. A fixed-wing pilot had crashed and was missing. It had been two weeks, and he’d been given up for dead. Turns out he was living off the land. We found him and returned him to safety.”


Columbia Helicopters purchased Alaska Helicopters in 1978, permitting both companies to expand their operations in Alaska, such as using a Boeing 234 Chinook (with both company’s logos) to support offshore petroleum exploration.


SPRING 2019 ROTOR 59


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