Jim Olsen lost his job as a pilot when his employer, the storied Braniff International, folded in 1982. Soon after, he and other Minnesota-based Braniff pilots and flight attendants started their own airline and called it Sun Country.
On Tuesday, Olsen joined about 200 Sun Country employees to commemorate the 40th anniversary of an airline that — with 42 planes and about $1 billion in annual sales — still is relatively small but with an outsized influence on travelers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
"I don't think that Delta likes it, but on the routes we fly side by side with them, the fares are more reasonable than what you might find to a city that only Delta flies to and Sun Country does not," said Olsen, referring to Delta Air Lines, the dominant carrier at MSP.
Sun Country has been through several ownership changes and two trips through bankruptcy restructuring. The first came after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks disrupted air travel. The second was in 2008, after then-owner Tom Petters was arrested on fraud-related charges related to another business he owned.
Marty and Mitch Davis, the Mankato-based billionaires whose business holdings include dairy farms and the Cambria countertop maker, purchased the airline out of bankruptcy in 2011.
Jude Bricker, the chief executive the Davises hired in 2017, gave them credit for creating the stability that led the airline to be sold to an investment firm and, last year, to get listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange
"The beginning of our current phase started with the Davis brothers buying us out of receivership and the company's been expanding ever since," Bricker said.
Bricker came from no-frills Allegiant Air in June 2017. At Sun Country, he's overseen the diversification of its business model across scheduled passenger service, charter and cargo flights. Sun Country also started buying its own planes and updated its livery in 2018.
