This Week In History, 1968: Grant McConachie Way named at airport

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A new terminal opened at the Vancouver airport on Oct. 24, 1968.

Federal Transport minister Paul Hellyer came west for the opening ceremonies, which included Hellyer scooting along the terminal floor in a replica of the Gibson Twin, the first plane to fly in Victoria in 1910.

A new highway linking the airport with the Moray Channel bridge in Richmond opened the same day. It was called Grant McConachie Way, after a Canadian aviation legend who helped make Vancouver an international travel hub.

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McConachie was one of the founders of Canadian Pacific Airlines in 1942. He was company president by 1947, and led it on a continuous expansion for two decades until he had a heart attack and died on June 29, 1965. He was only 56.

McConachie wasn’t a typical corporate executive. He started off as a bush pilot, an occupation that captured the public imagination in the 1930s.

“McConachie matched almost exactly the romantic image conjured up by us mundane earthlings,” the Vancouver Sun’s Stuart Keate wrote in 1972.

“He was big, handsome, athletic, the possessor of an irresistible grin and a booming laugh. He was also a fantastic salesman, with a gift for phraseology that endeared him to a hundred interviewers.”

One of McConachie’s big ambitions was to make CP Air a major international airline. Keate said in the 1950s that McConachie had a schtick where he would carry around an inflatable globe and a piece of string.

“With these simple props, he could demonstrate to his hearers — CPA directors and department of transportation officials — that a great-circle route over the top of the world is a shorter way to Europe than a straight-line route across the Atlantic,” wrote Keate.

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“He could prove very quickly that it was 2,000 miles nearer to the Orient ‘over the roof’ than flying Hawaii-Fiji and way stations.”

CP Air would became the first airline to fly the “polar route” when it launched flights from Vancouver to Amsterdam in 1955.

The airline seemed to be on the cusp of fulfilling McConachie’s international vision in 1965, when the federal government introduced a new national air policy that designated CP Air as the only Canadian carrier to service Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Latin America and southern Europe.

McConachie told The Sun he wanted his airline to be the first in the world to offer non-stop flights from Europe to Asia. But he died before he could see it through.

He was born George William Grant McConachie in Hamilton, Ont. on April 24, 1909, and grew up in Edmonton. He learned to fly in 1929, and was offered a job as a pilot in China.

But his family didn’t like the idea, and an uncle lent McConachie the money to buy a Fokker plane to go into business in Canada. McConachie started off with a company called Independent Airways, then added United Air Transport and finally Yukon-Southern Air Transportation.

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He thrived because he would fly anything, anywhere. According to a 1936 story by Jim Coleman, his company once flew in a whole town to remote Two Brothers Lake in northern B.C.

“Across an 8,000-foot-high mountain range, the McConachie motors carried 90 human beings, cattle, horses, a caterpillar tractor, a sawmill, an electric light plant, coal, hay, oats and every conceivable human need,” Coleman wrote.

McConachie had a lot of derring-do. Once he flew to Lake Athabasca, north of Edmonton, to rescue two brothers who had been severely burned.

He was able to land on a small strip of beach, but it was too short to take off from. So he tied a rope to the tail of his plane and a tree, gunned the plane’s engines, and had a trapper cut the rope.

“We shot down that beach and out over the lake,” McConachie said. “(But) there was a terrible vibration, and I thought the rope had fouled up somewhere.”

In fact, his propeller had hit an obstruction “and split down the middle.” But the skilled McConachie was able to fly the plane to Edmonton.

CP Air was formed when the Canadian Pacific Railway combined several small airlines, including the ones owned by McConachie. Initially based in Edmonton, McConachie moved the company to Vancouver when he became president in 1947.

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jmackie@postmedia.com

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