Pilot killed in crash may be Alaska Air ex-CEO

Former Alaska Airlines Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bruce Kennedy is presumed dead after a single-engine airplane crash Thursday evening in north-central Washington.

The plane clipped a tree on its final approach to the airport in Cashmere and crashed in a nearby high-school parking lot. Chelan County Coroner Wayne Harris has tentatively identified the pilot as Mr. Kennedy. An autopsy will be performed Monday.

Mr. Kennedy's family issued a statement saying that his son, Kevin, drove to the site and thinks the crashed Cessna 182 was his father's plane. He had planned to visit his grandchildren in Wenatchee on his way from Hot Springs, Mont.

Mr. Kennedy, 68, was chairman emeritus of Alaska Air Group, a company he joined in 1972 when the Anchorage real-estate development firm where he worked rescued the small regional airline from near collapse.

He became chairman and CEO in 1979 and led its growth from a company with annual revenues of less than $100 million to more than $1 billion when he retired in 1991.

"He never called it retirement. ... He had a lifestyle change," said his daughter, Karin Kennedy Hejmanowski, from her parents' Burien home Friday.

She said her father probably worked harder on his latest endeavor -- chairing a trust that is building a new aircraft to reach small airfields in underdeveloped parts of the world -- than he ever did at the helm of Alaska Airlines.

While Mr. Kennedy led Alaska's acquisition of Horizon Air and Jet America, built the airline's reputation for customer service and added new routes to places like eastern Russia and Mexico, he still made it home for dinner by 6 p.m., his daughter said.

"He's just amazing," she said. "He's my hero."

Since 1975, Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Karleen, have helped refugees from war-torn countries, beginning with Vietnamese families, who lived with them until they could find their own housing.

Over the years, they helped people from "wherever the most recent war has been -- Kosovo and Sudan, most recently," Hejmanowski said.

The couple spent three months shortly after his retirement teaching English in a small town in China.

Mr. Kennedy also hiked regularly with close friend state Rep. Christopher Hurst, whom he had met at a shareholders meeting more than 15 years ago. Hurst taught him how to fly in 1992.

"Bruce was probably the best person I ever knew," Hurst said Friday. "He was the most decent, most honest and one of the most intense people. He was uncommon."

Mr. Kennedy was a serious, methodical flying student, Hurst said.

"He was also kind of private and humble," Hurst said. "Bruce never put on airs."

The Rev. Bryan Burton, pastor of John Knox Presbyterian Church in Normandy Park, said Mr. Kennedy, a longtime member and elder, would be embarrassed by all the attention lavished on him now.

"He mentored a lot of people about what it meant to be Christian in the business world," Burton said.

Mr. Kennedy talked about his faith to friends and family, but he did not discuss it much at work, said Lou Cancelmi, a retired spokesman for Alaska Airlines who worked with him beginning in 1985.

He was an effective leader, listening to people's opinions with an open mind. But when he decided to do something against the grain, he could be passionate and forceful.

Take the airline's decision to fly from Alaska to eastern Russia, beginning with a single "friendship flight" that included Mr. Kennedy in 1988.

That Nome-to-Provideniya flight marked a breach of the ice curtain that had divided Alaska from Russia for 40 years. The airline eventually flew regularly between Alaska and five cities in eastern Russia, but it stopped the routes in the late '90s because there was too little interest.

"The possibility of profitability seemed remote, to say the least ... but the bigger issue for Bruce was that it was important to the state of Alaska and the Alaskan people," Cancelmi said.

Jim Stimpfle, the Nome businessman who suggested the idea of flying to Russia, was surprised when Mr. Kennedy visited Nome within a week of his proposal.

"Bruce was a wonderful, insightful, very humanistic person," Stimpfle said Friday.

Most recently, Mr. Kennedy was chairman of the board of trustees for Quest Aircraft, an Idaho-based venture that is creating a plane to land on challenging airfields for commercial, missionary and humanitarian purposes. He stopped in Hot Springs, Mont., on Thursday after visiting the company in Idaho.

Quest and Alaska Air issued statements of sympathy on Friday.

Besides his wife, children and their spouses, he is survived by two brothers and two grandchildren.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com

Seattle Times researcher David Turim and staff reporter Hal Bernton contributed to this report.