June 1 will be the golden anniversary of Alaska Airlines jet service to Wrangell and Petersburg, marking when the first scheduled Boeing 727 passenger flight touched down in the communities in 1976.

Before the arrival of the 104-passenger jets, which provided daily same-plane service to and from Seattle, travelers had to take a plane with one-fifth the passenger capacity and catch a connecting flight in Ketchikan or Juneau.

“It would be nice to get on a jet at Wrangell and relax all the way to Seattle, with a stop at Ketchikan,” a Wrangell Sentinel columnist predicted in January 1975. “It would also add some prestige for the community to have the big airplanes whistling in.”

Olga Norris, who has lived in Wrangell since 1938, remembers the start of jet service to town, and holds a special appreciation for the larger planes.

She also recalls air service before the Boeing 727 landed in town. “I remember the PBY,” she said of the 24-passenger twin-engine amphibious planes that landed in the harbor before the airport was built.

Later, after retiring the PBY, Alaska Airlines flew de Havilland twin-engine Otters with room for 19 passengers.

Norris didn’t like flying. “I couldn’t stand to be in a small space.” She took the state ferries as much as she could after they started running in the early 1960s.

“I had to force myself to go flying.”

The arrival of the jets — with their roomier cabins — made travel easier for her.

Jet service also brought more freight capacity to town, which she appreciated in the years she ran Norris Gifts downtown.

The 727 could fly almost three times as fast and carry about eight times the freight of an Otter, an Alaska Airlines official told the Wrangell Chamber of Commerce in May 1976, just days before the first flight.

“Jet service with Boeing 727s … was a big deal at the time and necessitated airfield improvements, paved runways, plus many required modifications to the existing terminal,” Ron Suttell, a retired director of facilities planning at Alaska Airlines, said in an email.

“Both terminals (Wrangell and Petersburg) were undersized for a jet operation, having been constructed in the early 1970s for twin-engine turboprop de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter service in Southeast.”

Building an area to screen passengers “took up valuable space in an already crowded terminal,” Suttell said. “This necessitated that a new standalone baggage claim be built adjacent to the main terminal — not the ideal, but it generally worked for the time being until terminal expansion took place in the early 1990s.”

The other part of preparing the town for the new service “was the paving of runways at both airports to accommodate the jets. Although Alaska had many years earlier pioneered the certification of its Boeing 727s to operate scheduled service out of gravel strips in the Arctic and charters to other remote points, it was prudent to lengthen and pave the runways, as well as improve the airport’s navigational aids in advance of jet service.”

Suttell was part of the company’s properties and facilities team when the switch was made.

Not everyone, however, was elated about the new service.

The late Winnie Grey, better known as Aunt Winnie, had prepared carry-out lunches from her Wrangell restaurant for Otter pilots since 1964. She wasn’t totally happy to see the Boeing jet land on June 1. The start of jet service meant the end of Otter flights, and the end to her carry-out pilot lunches.

“I don’t like them (the jets) because they’re taking my boys away from me,” she told the Sentinel the week of the new service.

Her “boys,” as she called the Otter pilots, treated their “lunch mother” to a day and lunch in Juneau, buying her a ticket on the first flight out of town. “They treated me royally.”

Still, she wasn’t convinced that the change to jet service was a good thing. “We’re moving too fast.”