About Premier West

Welcome aboard Premier West, the latest low cost air carrier to hit the West Coast of the United States.  Our airline serves our passengers in a all Boeing 737 fleet from Phoenix and Las Vegas.

We don’t just fly for hours.  Great Lakes Express and Premier West have moved to a new real-world financial system to track all aspects of the airline.  What this means is we do not grow unless we are growing financially.  GLE nad Premier make money with a very simple concept. Fly more flights.  There will be goals defined on a monthly basis and those goals that are achieved are rewarded with new aircraft and new routes.  It is a uphill battle every month but it gives us a purpose besides racking up hours.

The Story of Premier West

Back in 2001 Chuck Dickey and I had an idea to develop an airline using just PMDG aircraft, thus Premier Airways was born.  We were a small airline operating a small fleet, a rather modest operation with a handful of pilots.  Over time we grew and added new hubs, a Canadian Division (twice) and a large cargo division.  The airline was successful and all was well with the world.  One thing that really started to get to us was we were getting really big, huge fleet, thousands of routes and some of our pilots got overwhelmed.  Premier Airways began losing pilots and I made the decision to cease operations.  A little while later I got an email from Chuck King, he owns Voyager Virtual Airlines and offered Great Lakes Express to me for a small fee (virtual dollars of course).  Up till then I emailed Mr. King from time to time asking him to let me run Great Lakes Express for him, and either my persistence or my charm finally won him over, and GLE was finally mine.  Now almost eight months later after closing Premier Airways and turning Great Lakes Express around I have decided to Bring Premier Airways back in a limited form and change the name to Premier West.  Why you may ask?  Basically I am a huge fan of the Boeing 737 series of aircraft and I know there are a lot of you out there just like me.  I love flying on the West Coast, and again, there are a lot out there like me.  So this is designed to please both groups, 737 pilots on the West Coast, why?  Because Premier West is the Best of the West!

Why an all Boeing fleet… First and foremost if Premier West aint Boeing, we aint going.  OK, a play on words here but if you look at two very successful airlines out there, Southwest Airlines and Westjet, they have designed their business model around one aircraft, the Boeing 737.  It works and most people in the industry know it works.  We don’t have anything against the other equipment manufacturers, we just know what we want and we want Boeing!
 

So why the smaller Boeings, why not the 737-900?  Simply put we are all about takeoff and landings, turn the plane around in 30 minutes and get in the air again.  Premier West works hard to get as many flights in a day as possible, hit as many destinations as we can.  This is best done in aircraft that seat from 122-150 passengers; it works for Premier West just like it works for the other airlines mentioned earlier.

The Low Cost Airline approach.  Premier West operates as a true low cost air carrier, specializing in low cost flights throughout the West Coast of the USA.  Premier West watches and monitors all routes we share with our competition and make sure we offer the lowest fares in the industry.  Our unique point to point system insures our flights never return to our home hub flight after flight.  Each flight in our system will offer at least one flight to another airport before returning to our hub, this brings the virtual pilot more variety.  Welcome aboard Premier West.

Paul Herman