Dan Wolf To Step Down As CEO Of Cape Air

After 32 years running the airline he founded with one small plane flying from Provincetown to Boston, Dan Wolf announced yesterday that he would be stepping down as CEO of Cape Air by the end of the year. 

Since that humble start more than three decades ago, Wolf has grown Cape Air into a regional airline with operations as far away as the Caribbean and Micronesia, with more than 800 employees on his payroll. The company named its current president, Linda Markham, as Wolf’s successor. 

“The timing is right from my perspective,” Wolf told the Current yesterday. “Linda is ready, the organization is ready, and it makes a lot of sense. My wife and I have three daughters, and I’ve always thought of Cape Air as my fourth child…No one likes admitting their age and relevance, but at this point, as emotionally difficult as it is, it’s the right thing for the company and the employees and the growth and the legacy.” 

Wolf will stay on as Chair of Cape Air’s Board of Directors. Meanwhile, Markham will become the only female CEO of a major or regional airline in the United States. 

A former state senator for the Cape and Islands from 2011 to 2017, Wolf ran for Governor in 2014 and considered another run in 2018 against current Gov. Charlie Baker. The timing of Wolf’s announcement this week, just days after Baker disclosed that he would not seek another term, led to speculation that Wolf could once again be seeking the top office in Massachusetts. But he dismissed that conjecture yesterday, stating the timing was just a random coincidence. 

“I still have a passion for public service, but our announcement had been literally three years in the making,” Wolf said. “At this point, the coincidence is just bizarre. But the answer is no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Gov. Baker’s announcement, but I can see people putting two and two together to make five.”

In the years after Wolf founded Cape Air in 1989 and expanded its services to include Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, it became an extremely popular mode of transportation with year-round islanders and visitors. On busy days, Wolf said, Cape Air’s Nantucket Airlines would fly more than 1,200 people to and from the island, doing 100 to 120 flights per day. But all that changed with the advent of the fast ferries that began servicing Nantucket in 1995. 

“We’ve been a fixture over there on Nantucket for 32 years, there was no high speed ferry, and the market was vibrant because the only other way to get there was the slow boat,” Wolf said. “When the fast ferry came, we knew our business plan had to change. We looked at the high speed ferry and said that is the transportation mode, it’s logical. Yes, there’s going to be a need for good air service, but the high speed ferry appropriately reduced the demand for air transportation. The market responded to that appropriately, and we pivoted our service to longer stage routes.”

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