Out of the Bush

After more than three decades of seat-of-the-pants competition, two of Alaska's pioneer bush airlines have joined forces and moved toward the jet age. Wien Alaska and Northern Consolidated Airlines, with total revenues of $12 million, this month merged their 8,500-mile routes, named the company Wien Alaska Airlines, and went public.

Reason: to finance purchase of three Boeing 737s. Smoothing the way was the Civil Aeronautics Board, which hopes that the venture will offer better service to the 49th state, as well as can cel the need by the two lines for sub sidies that last year amounted to $2,100,000.

Beating the Dogsleds. Both lines had colorful histories. In 1924, with his pi lot license No. 39 signed by Federation Aeronautique Internationale Official Orville Wright, Noel Wien brought his Misso Standard biplane to Alaska and began servicing the gold-rich territory.

His passengers paid dearly -- $750 to fly 525 miles from Fairbanks to Nome -- and because his flying machines could beat dogsled competition, he charged double rates. In a few years, Wien acquired some of his less successful competitors, invited his brothers Fritz and Sigurd to join him in Alaska, and soon the Wien line's Ford Tri-Motors and Curtiss Robins were serving Barter Island on the Arctic Ocean and Eskimo villages along Norton Sound.

In 1934, Raymond I. Petersen ar rived from Chicago and formed a flying service to compete with Wien and others. After taking over some smaller operators, Petersen renamed his operation Northern Consolidated Airlines, an impressive title for a ragtag conglomeration of hard-drinking pilots and overworked aircraft. Petersen, who will be chairman of the new company, recalls that the biggest toll of pilots was not taken by crashes, but by alcohol.

The Alaskan bush pilot had to be resourceful as well as rugged. N.C.A. Veteran Jim Dodson remembers delivering babies on two separate flights from the wilds to Fairbanks while steering his single-engined Gull Wing Stinson with his feet. Petersen's line has never had a fatality, in spite of plenty of close calls. Once Petersen was forced down on frozen Rhone River. On the ground he laid a spruce-bough SOS, and after he had been spotted, had to wait helplessly for several more days while his rescuer stole some of his business.

Chicago to Siberia. For all the new jets, many of Wien Alaska's 81 pilots will continue to fly De Havilland Otters and Harland Skyvans. Their cargo may include anything from a load of snaggle-horned reindeer to groceries for Catholic missions at Eskimo villages on the Chuckchee Sea. Among their touchdown locations: Goodnews Bay, site of a platinum mine, and Katmai, where N.C.A. owns a world-famous trout camp. In 1967, Wien hauled some 5,000 passengers on its packaged Arctic tour, winding up at the line's Kotzebue Hotel location.

Even with the Wien N.C.A. merger, Alaska still has eight C.A.B. regulated airlines. This will soon change. Already merged are Cordova with Alaska Airlines, which now plans to take over small Alaska Coastal Airlines. Seeing this trend toward bigness among the competition, Chairman Petersen and President Sigurd Wien, the only family member still active, are seeking to expand the new line's routes to nearby Siberia and faraway Chicago.

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