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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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Nonstop Ambition

Ted Vallas, the 96-year-old driving force behind California Pacific Airlines, stands in the bright February sun in front of the passenger terminal at McClellan-Palomar Airport.

His airline business has yet to start flying out of the terminal, and its only presence at the airport is a small office on the second floor of another company’s hangar.

Vallas, right, did not fly in the Navy,
but became a pilot later. Photos courtesy of Ted Vallas

Vallas gestures toward several points of the compass and names the buildings he has developed. “That one. That one,” he says, pointing a finger east to a building on the airport grounds and then south to San Diego County’s airport offices.

“And four over there,” he says, pointing west, though he adds they have been torn down.

Also gone is a bigger project down the hill and to the east, at the heavily trafficked intersection of Palomar Airport Road and El Camino Real. It’s a big-box retail center now. In its day, however, it had a hotel, swimming pools, restaurants and driving range. It was the Olympic Resort. Vallas built it in 1982 to accommodate people coming in by air. In a self-published book, he said he was hoping to provide overflow lodging for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — though that business never materialized.

For a short time, Ted Vallas was a pitcher for the minor league San Diego Padres, which played at downtown’s Lane Field. Vallas is at the center of the photo. Photo courtesy of Ted Vallas

The urge to build something new seems to be fresh with Vallas, who will turn 97 in March.

Down through the years, Vallas has continually returned to his forte: developing combination golf course/hotel properties. Seated in his office, he muses that before he leaves this universe, he would like to duplicate his Golf Inns of America concept.

Then there is the project that has required an inordinate amount of patience.

The Airline

Vallas owns 92 percent of California Pacific Airlines. For eight years he has been trying to get the carrier off the ground, though he has been frustrated in his attempts by bureaucracy at several levels.

With recent developments, Vallas and COO Paul Hook say California Pacific will be able to start scheduled service soon, perhaps as early as April. They plan to serve a handful of destinations with a small fleet of aircraft built by Embraer of Brazil.

Ted Vallas, right, and an unidentified sailor pose in Hawaii during the 1940s. Photo courtesy of Ted Vallas

Vallas has been here before.

A picture from a 1982 issue of The San Diego Union shows Vallas standing with six flight attendants in front of the bulbous nose of a Convair propeller aircraft. The article is about Vallas’ Air Resorts Airlines, a charter firm that Vallas ran for 19 years before its sale.

“It was an airline that I started primarily to support resort areas that I was in the process of building around the country, and it developed into a scheduled airline — and also a charter airline,” Vallas says. One of its best-known clients was Mikhail Baryshnikov; Air Resorts ferried the dancer around the United States.

The past eight years have been quite an odyssey. In April 2010, the San Diego Business Journal reported the California Pacific Airlines venture was a sign of an improving economy, adding that flights would begin in the fall or in early 2011.

Looking back, Vallas and Hook say the decision to get into the airline business came during a budget crisis. Sequestration, the across-the-board cuts in the federal budget, furloughed Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, Hook says. There have also been delays in getting San Diego County approvals necessary for the venture.

Vallas may now have reached a turning point in the establishment of California Pacific. In November, he bought ADI, a 58-year-old company with airline and charter operations that uses Kennesaw, Georgia, as its home base. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The airline currently flies federally subsidized routes between Denver and two cities in South Dakota.

The San Diego Union featured Ted Vallas on its financial pages in 1982, when he ran Air Resorts Airlines. Vallas is now trying to return to McClellan-Palomar Airport with California Pacific Airlines. Photo courtesy of Ted Vallas

The acquired company has “an excellent reputation” for safety and it gives California Pacific the “five wise men” that federal regulators want overseeing an airline, Vallas says. (They are a director of operations, a director of maintenance, a chief inspector, a chief pilot and a director of safety and security.)

Hook says that while California Pacific hopes to fly to several cities — including Phoenix, Tucson, Reno, Oakland and San Jose — the point is to bring visitors to Carlsbad.

If anything, the multiyear effort to set up California Pacific Airlines shows that Vallas is persistent, and then some.

“He has tried awfully hard,” says David Kulchin, a Carlsbad resident active in civic and political circles. “I give him credit for his perseverance.”

Says Vallas, “If you’re going to do something, see it through.”

Years of Experiences

Vallas has done a lot in his 96 years. He has flown helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. He has mingled with Hollywood royalty and real royalty. When you’ve lived as long as he has, the nonagenarian says with a smile, you can pack a lot in.

Theodore Vallas was born in 1921 in Idaho Falls to Greek parents, and joined the U.S. Navy in May 1940. Time in the Navy started a 76-year relationship with the game of golf; Vallas says he played his first round in Bermuda while on liberty. It was the same day Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack.

Vallas served on the USS Wasp, the aircraft carrier commissioned in 1940. A temporary assignment on the Wasp’s initial cruise (its shakedown cruise) eventually turned permanent. In 1942, the Navy decided to move the Wasp from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Vallas had the good fortune of being in San Diego, waiting to rejoin his ship, when a Japanese submarine torpedoed and sunk the Wasp near the Solomon Islands.

Vallas finished pilot training when he was out of the Navy. After the war, he went to college and played baseball for several teams. He had a very short stint as a pitcher with the minor-league San Diego Padres.

Later in the postwar era, Vallas got into real estate development, eventually buying the El Camino Country Club in Oceanside. He hit on the concept of developing properties that combined hotels and golf courses, and his work eventually expanded to Europe and North Africa.

In the late 1950s, the Carlsbad airport replaced a landing field in Del Mar. The site near El Camino Real was “nothing to speak of” when he first saw it, Vallas says.

He recalled founding four or five companies related the flight test and instrumentation. He also got into modifying aircraft, stretching the bodies of Convair aircraft. Working among large corporations, bureaucracies and foreign governments was an eye opener — and gave him a lesson in dealing with the frustrations of handling large projects.

Title: Founder, chairman and majority owner, California Pacific Airlines

Education: Master of Business Administration, California Western University

Age: 96

Birthplace: Pocatello, Idaho

Residence: Moonlight Beach, Encinitas

Recreation: Golf

Family: Wife, June and son, Tee

“Lots of times when you’re moving forward into a project, you have no control with somebody else coming into the picture,” Vallas says.

Some things are simply outside your control.

The Olympic resort, on 18 acres of leased county land, is no more. It’s now home to a Lowe’s home improvement store. Vallas, however, seems to want to look forward. At the terminal he hopes to serve again, at the airport he helped develop, Vallas shakes hands with a visitor and reminds Hook that Saturday is his golf day.

Then he strides away with a step that belies his 96 years, toward his car in the terminal parking lot.

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