For high rollers, casino charters have been sure bet

Tuesday, May 23, 2000 | 11:16 a.m.

To some, everything is a gamble - whether it's playing blackjack, getting out of bed or boarding an airplane.

"Walking across the street is a gamble. You can get killed doing that, too," said Rick Perrin, 55, of Toronto, who took a casino charter home Monday after spending the weekend gambling at Tropicana Casino and Resort.

"Life is a gamble. We take it as it comes," said another Toronto-bound passenger, who declined to give his name.

In twin-engine commuter planes 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.

But there's a price for the convenience, says one expert.

"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," said aviation attorney Arthur Wolk, of Philadelphia, who handles only air crash litigation.

As a result, charter travel is typically riskier than airline travel, he said Monday.

"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.

Typically, the junkets are paid for by the casinos, which bank on the customers to lose enough money at the tables to compensate the casino for the aviation expenses.

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.

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:

-In May 1986, two people died and another was injured when a company Cessna hit an automobile after overshooting the runway at Bader Field, a small general aviation airport owned by the city of Atlantic City.

-In October 1995, one person died and five were injured when the engine of a Piper aircraft returning gamblers from Caesars seized on descent to JFK Airport and fell into the ocean near Rockaway, N.Y.

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.