"What I really wanted to do," he said, "is to show people that I can build an airline different from all those other dipshit airlines out there. That's a tough son of a bitch. . . . We still lose bags, we still piss off passengers, we still don't answer the phones at reservations fast enough, we still have late flights, we still have mechanical breakdowns, we still have all those things like other airlines, and ours ain't no better than. I can't stand that. You know, sometimes I wish I could be happy being number five, but I can't. I can't stand mediocrity. I can't stand incompetence."
His frustration was enormous, and I did not have to look far to find its source. It could be traced directly to the ferocious and turbulent growth of Horizon Air itself.
By all accounts, the first two years of Horizon Air were one of those magical periods wherein dwells the stuff of legend. Everyone involved remembers it as a time of heroic deeds, selfless commitment, total immersion in a common goal, and complete personal fulfillment. "It was," says Thomas E. Cufley, 42, currently assistant director of flight operations and a member of the start-up team, "absolutely electrifying." To Kuolt, fresh from the trials of Thousand Trails, it was like being born again. "God, I love it," he says. "That's what I live for. Take something that everyone else is absolutely convinced will never succeed, and then make the son of a bitch work, make it come alive. I love it."
In the beginning, at least, nobody was thinking about building an empire. Indeed, neither Kuolt nor his two co-founders, Scott Kidwell and Joe Clark, had any experience running an airline. "It was only going to be two airplanes in three cities," says Kuolt. "Just a little thing. That's all I wanted to do. There was no plan to take over the whole goddamn Northwest."
But what had started out as casual conversation among friends quickly developed a momentum of its own. In the late spring of 1981, Clark began assembling a start-up team out of a small office on Boeing Field, and, by the end of the summer, most of the preparations were complete. To this day, no one is quite sure how it was all done. Says Donald P. Welsh, 29, vice-president of sales, "We didn't have a manual on how to start an airline so we just kinda stumbled across things."
Yet it was productive stumbling, leading to the arrival, one afternoon, of the most conspicuous sign of the team's progress: the first of three used Fairchild F-27s, purchased from Quebecair Inc., in Canada. From a long bay window in the Blue Max Restaurant & Lounge, the start-up team, Kuolt, and some 20 of his personal friends watched Cufley land the plane on Boeing Field, and then ran out to the runway cheering. Early the next morning, Kuolt, Cufley, and several pilots began scraping the aircraft's body, getting it ready for a new paint job and the Horizon Air logo -- a blazing sunrise in hot orange, burning red, and smoldering maroon. "Milt was involved in everything," Cufley says. "We'd be cleaning the plane on the outside, and there'd be Milt washing a window on the inside."
On September 1, 1981, about 25 people walked along a red carpet stretching from Gate C-2 at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Horizon's first flight, to Yakima in eastern Washington, 120 miles away. On board the plane, they received champagne and an inaugural flight certificate. Watching from the runway were Welsh and Dianna Maul, vice-president of stations, who had stayed up all night fretting over some last-minute details. "It was like our baby," Welsh recalls. "There was a real feeling of pride. That sounds real corny, but it was like the baby walked for the first time." Maul cried. "It was a relief," she says. "'My God,' I thought, 'we did it."
Kuolt was aboard the flight as well, having left Trails that same day to become chairman, president, and CEO of Horizon. He had even greeted passengers at the gate. But he was already learning some hard lessons about the airline business. "I thought if we started an airline," he says, "we'd have to turn people away from the flights. Well, I think we had about half a dozen customers on that first flight. With the assistance of about 20 friends, we managed to put 26 passengers on a 40-passenger airplane, so when the press showed up, it looked pretty decent."
Out of the start-up experience came Horizon's extemporaneous, entrepreneurial style of management, which guided it for the next few years. It is perhaps best summarized by Kuolt himself, to wit, "When I see things working smooth, kinda good, I say: 'Shit, let's do some more." This approach offered the singular advantage of not cluttering intuitive flashes with market analysis. When a new market opportunity looked "kinda good," the folks from Horizon went after it -- family-style, everybody grab hold wherever you can.
When, for example, they wanted to begin service to a new city, they would list on a large easel pad what had to be done, and then divide up the tasks according to areas of expertise. "If one person finished first," says Cufley, "he'd help somebody else. We never asked if we were going to get any extra money for it. We just did it." At the same time, they would stage what Welsh calls a "city blitz," sending in a team of managers and sales representatives who would split into two groups and walk down the main street, introducing themselves to as many businesses as they could cover in a day's march. "We always brought along a pilot and a flight attendant in full uniform," Welsh says. "That's what really does it, the pilot and the flight attendant. You should see that work on a cold call."
