For Atlantic City high rollers, casino charters have been sure bet

John Curran

Monday, May 22, 2000 | 4:18 a.m.

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. - From Roanoke, Va., and Buffalo, N.Y., from Scranton, Pa., and Montreal, Quebec, they come - in hopes of striking it rich.

In twin-engine commuters and big-body 737s, more than 1,000 high rollers a day fly in or out of Atlantic City International Airport.

For casinos, the charter flights offer a quick way to bring their most prized customers to this seaside resort, which is home to 12 casinos and more than 35,540 slot machines and 1,330 blackjack tables, baccarat pits and poker parlors.

For the affluent gamblers, the planes offer a quick in and quick out of a town, where scheduled air service is limited to US Airways commuter planes and Spirit Airlines jets bound for Sun Belt cities.

About 40 percent of the 1 million people who fly into the airport annually do so on casino charters. The flights are generally paid for by casinos, which bank on the customers to lose enough money at the tables to compensate the casino for the aviation expenses.

"They're big business," said airport spokesman Peter Hartt.

It was a casino charter, carrying 17 casino junket passengers who had spent the day at Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino, that crashed near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sunday, killing all 19 aboard.

The twin-engine turboprop belonged to Executive Airlines, a Farmingdale, N.Y.-based charter service that has been flying gamblers here for 10 years.

One of 66 such companies that do business with casinos, Executive Airlines flies about one charter a day from the airport.

"Most of the people who come into Atlantic City come in to go gambling. It's not a business market; it's a leisure market," said Robert Moreland, vice president of safety for Spirit Airlines.

Arthur Wolk, a Philadelphia lawyer who works only on air crash cases, said Monday that charter travel is typically riskier than airline travel.

"Without saying either was a factor here, people have to understand: A charter operator is simply not operating at the level of safety or under the same regulation as an airline is.

"The typical charter operator will have pilots who are younger, building time to further their hopeful airline careers. The airplanes are typically older, too. So what happens is that unless there's an independent safety audit of the operator by the casino, there is literally nothing the passenger has to go by to decide whether or not that's an operator you'd want to fly with," said Wolk, a licensed jet pilot.

News of the crash had a chilling effect.

"It's not good to read something like this in the newspaper," said Katrin Sussman, a flight attendant on a charter flying out of the airport Monday. "Always, when you read something like this, you think about it and realize it's the same thing you're doing."

But others were unfazed. "Walking across the street is a gamble. You can get killed doing that, too," said Rick Perrin, 55, of Toronto, who was waiting at the airport Monday to board a charter home.

Other passengers on his flight echoed his comments.

"Life is a game. We take it as it comes," said a man who declined to give his name.

According to Federal Aviation Administration records, Executive Airlines, or its parent company East Coast Airways, has had 10 incidents reported to the FAA since 1981.

Two were fatal:

One of the survivors, Bharat Jotwani, 45, of Dix Hills, N.Y., lost $10,300 in cash he had won gambling. "I don't care about the money," he said at the time. "When you survive and are alive, that is the biggest win you can ever have."

Gamblers aren't the only ones who have died flying in or out of Atlantic City.

In October 1989, three Trump Hotels executives were killed when a helicopter taking them to Atlantic City crashed on a Garden State Parkway median. Two crew members died also.