Air Canada - Air Canada: the history

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The poet William Blake wrote: Crooked roads ... are roads of genius. The road to this book was far from straight. From the moment I was born, I must have been hooked on aviation, for the place of my birth was the Battle Hospital in Reading, England. My parents returned to India soon after, where my father became a flight dispatcher for Trans World Airlines at Bombays Santacruz airport. My earliest memories are of playing in the garden as DC-3s and Constellations clawed their way into the air over the house. Rattled windows, conversations on hold, and sooty trails overhead were accepted and appreciated at least by me. My mother said that when I began to read, I would try to pronounce aircraft registrations. This familiarity with airports continued throughout my life since, when my father was posted to England, we lived near Heathrow, and on immigrating to Canada our backyard ended at the runway fence of Montreals Dorval Airport.

When I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, I assumed that I would put away childish things and from that point on it would be all cocktail parties and composing policy papers for the minister. But demonstrating that one cannot escape ones destiny, throughout my Foreign Affairs career, wherever in the world I was posted, it was my job almost daily to be at the local airport. There I met the Canadian diplomatic courier and exchanged the classified bags with him. Through the years, I got to know airports well, among them New Yorks LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, Viennas Schwechat, Amsterdams Schipol, and Hong Kongs Kai Tak. I spent so much time at the last, watching as Boeing 747s threaded their way through the Kowloon tenements, that my first book was a history of Kai Tak Airport for the Hong Kong government.

Back in Ottawa, I began churning out books on bush pilots and air aces in the Flying Canucks series on the history of commercial aviation in Canada and on Canadian airports and aircraft. Two major works followed these, both of which are the basis of this book. Wingwalkers celebrated the life and death of Canadian Airlines, and National Treasure detailed the same of Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA). As for Air Canada, by 2003, with the merger and effects of 9/11, the national airline was confused and in financial turmoil, and writing its history would have to wait. In any case, I was soon embedded in wars in Afghanistan and Sudan for other books and much later in the North researching Canadas Arctic sovereignty.

But in 2012, with the seventy-fifth anniversary of Air Canadas birth, a book detailing its history could be put off no longer. From the outset, I wanted to write what would be of interest to the general public a non-aviation audience. I kept technical details to a minimum and inserted poems, anecdotes, and personal insights to support what I hoped was a conversationalist text. As with my other airline histories, I chose a narrative style, using archival materials at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, Ottawa, and publicly accessible documents. I focused on the major milestones in Air Canadas history: TCAs creation as a means of joining the country closer together, the name change to Air Canada, privatization, deregulation, the Airbus order, the hostile near-takeover, the merger with arch rival Canadian Airlines, in its evolution from state-owned social instrument to competitive business.

Airline investor Warren Buffett once said, The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender growth and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. The airline industry has been compared to a circus bear riding a tiny unicycle. No matter how clever or lucky the bear is, there is any number of factors (think harsh weather, fuel prices, unfavourable foreign exchange, labour problems, safety issues, shortsighted CEOs, terrorism, meddling politicians, icing delays) to bring it crashing down. And this for minuscule profit margins generated by a few unpredictable passengers? The book is also written within the broad historical backdrop of the airlines relationship with whichever party was in power in Ottawa and policies of the ministers of transport, from C.D. Howe to David Collenette. But if there is a recurring sentiment throughout this book, it is that for all the advances in technology and cabin comfort in seventy-five years, the kudos and complaints of passengers have changed little.

Canadians have a love/hate relationship with their national airline. All airlines overbook, have eliminated once-complementary amenities, and lose luggage. But when Air Canada does, Canadians feel personally betrayed, because for most it is the only airline theyve ever known. If Canadian Pacific Air Lines and Wardair are forever enshrined as the spunky underdogs that took on the establishment, Air Canada is the Death Star, the lightning rod and everybodys favourite whipping boy. No matter that it was privatized in 1988, many Canadians still think of it as somehow being part of the federal government. And as former president and CEO Robert Milton noted, no one remembers the awards that Air Canada consistently wins, or the 99 percent of flights in which everything goes well.