Okay, so like all corporate purchases, this gets a little tricky, but stay with me: Basically, HoTH is the holding company that owns Frontier Flying Service, Hageland Aviation, and Era Aviation, and they just signed an agreement to buy 100 percent of Arctic Circle Air Service's stock.
Arctic Circle Air is a tiny carrier. The carrier has two Shorts 330, cargo aircraft that can fly 700 miles at 190 miles per hour and can haul a mid-sized pickup.
HoTH is growing; it was only eight months ago that it bought Era Aviation for an undisclosed sum. That was in February, and at that time HoTH said it had about 700 employees and annual revenue of more than $100 million.
And it was only a year before the Era purchase that Hageland and Frontier Flying Service merged into HoTH.
Here's a fun quote from a News-Miner story about John Hajdukovich, Sr. It's told by his son Rob, now the CEO of Frontier Alaska (the main airline company that HoTH controls) and you can read the whole story here.
"Most people take ground school," Hajdukovich explained, "then the pilot's test, followed by a solo, later passengers. Not Dad. In 1970, while he was in Florida at the Piper dealership buying his first plane, Dad figured his first solo would be returning from Florida to Fairbanks. However the weather and sheer distance made the return a harrowing trip."