The MAX WARD STORY: A Bush Pilot in the Bureaucratic Jungle - By Max Ward.
QUOTES from the BOOK:
"There are times when I wish I had been born an American." - Chapter 1 HEADING, Page 1.
"This is a story of free enterprise that was not free. Wardair was strangled for too many years by government regulations and policies that brought charter carriers to their knees, that said to entrepreneurial companies like Wardair, 'You are not wanted in the business, and we are going to do our best to get rid of you.'" - Page 10.
"It is a personal story that demonstrates how Canada, a nation that, as early as 1929, moved more freight by air than any other country in the world, could, by the 1990s, be forced into the backwaters of aviation. How? By a fundamental federal government policy that consistently, for fifty years, denied private enterprise a free competitiive position in a fledgling but flourishing industry." - Page 11.
"I learned in time not to have great expectations of certain days or certain events." - Page 77
"I kidded myself for quite a while that I didn't miss flying. Who needed the hassle, and long hours, and the slow-[ayers, and endless headaches, and the danger? Well, as a matter of fact I did.
One evening, I was shingling one of my houses, and I was up on the roof and I looked west, out to the foothills of the Rockies, with mountains rising behind them, and the blue light of twilight. Out there, past that hill, I knew there was another hill, and another, and another, and here up on a roof, I was never going to be able to go chasing after them. I stood there on the roof, looking west, with my hammer dangling in my hand, and then I climbed down the ladder and went home and told Marjorie that there was an aching in my heart that would not stop.
I was going North again." - Page 92.
"People don't realize how difficult it is to see a little aircraft in the vast land." - Page 100.
"I learned something new about airplanes, something that I would have cause to observe many times in the future; you could get shot down without leaving the ground." - Page 104.
"The licence to operate my business was issued by the Air Transport Board on June 3, 1953, which thus became the official launch date of Wardair Limited, incorporated in Alberta. My competitiors immediately announced that I would be broke by fall. There is no way, I was assured, time and again, that you can fly a $100,000 aircraft around the bush and make it pay. I sure hoped they were wrong." - Page 108.
"Take care of your customers. Their cargoes, those jpeople in the seats, are paying your wages and the costs of your business.
Take care of your aircraft, and it will take care of you.
Buy the best equipment available to do the job.
Give the best service at the lowest possible price." - Page 109
"Calamity was always hovering just off-stage when we flew in the Arctic; primitive airstrips and communications, incidents were an almost routine part of the flying business - so much so that, after a while, all we pilots got relatively immune to disaster." - Page 143
"There is an air of romanticism about the flying feats of an earlier era in Canada, and, while I don't deny that there were great men and great deeds of derring-do, the truth is that much of what we did was hard, exacting work that required technical skill more than bravado." - Page 151
"We had to get permission from the government to buy the 727 aircraft in the first place, as we've seen. Then we had to apply for permission, months in advance, for each and every charter flight; very often, we would not get permission until the last minute. Sometimes, we were abruptly refused permission, which always produced a monumental scramble. Air Canada and CP Air did not have to get permission for their charters. If they wanted to fly one, they did." - Page 192.
"Then there was the insanity of the "affinity" charters rule. We counldn't fly passengers, only club members; we couldn't tell the public about our charters, we could only advertise to groups and organizations, and the regulations forbade us to tell these groups and organizations, or the public, how much it would cost per passenger for them to charter an overseas trip. The logic was perfectly remorseless." - Page 193.
"We were unpopular with our own government and unpopular with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which was the international cartel for the major airlines, and the guardian of their regulated rates." - Page 194.
"The pattern was always the same: a regulation would come out laying some new burden on us; we would change our operations to meet the regulation; a new regulation would promptly be drafted, and we would be back at square one again." - Page 196-7
"There was, it seemed to me, a political vindictiveness behind some of the actions taken against us, based on the conviction of the Liberals in charge that Canada needed only one airline - their own. On the day it was announced in the Liberal caucus in Ottawa that Wardair had acquired a 727 jet aircraft, Prime Minister Lester Pearson told his colleagues in so many words that it was the last jet aircraft we would ever purchase, he would see to that. Within a few minutes of the break-up of that caucus, I received a telephone call reporting what had occurred from a western MP, Hu Harries, who was almost incoherent with rage." - Page 198-9
"In fact, most commercial pilots made more than I did, a pattern that continued for some time to come, and whenever we did make any money, as Marjorie noted, patiently, it was ploughed back into the business for expansion." - Page 201
"One of the most exciting tasks to come our way was something I had nothing whatever to do with, although it was one of the proudest moments of the Wardair saga and deserves a place in this story. In early 1967, the international Continental Polar Project mounted a joint Canadian-American expedition to the northern geographic Pole. This would require setting down a lot of equipment at the top of the world, and the obvious way to do this was to use a Bristol Freighter for the job, so we were contacted and asked to take it on." - Page 206
"Every time the Royal Family were in northern Canada, they flew in our aircraft, and that included visits to small settlements, fishing trips, and all." - Page 209
"De Havilland was almost tearful in its gratitude when we bought the first Dash 7s to be sold in this country, in May 1978. The then-Minister of Transport, Jean Chretien, made an appearance with me at the Paris Air Show to announce our purchase and to show that the plane could be sold in Canada." - Page 212
"When I made the decision to close the Yellowknife office, we sent out a press release, which read: 'Mr. Ward stated that his association with northern Canada started in Yellowknife in 1946 and he is sad indeed to see his close ties with the North end after all these years.' That was the understatement of the year. The closure of the base cost thirty-seven jobs, although some of these employees joined our international operations." - Page 214
"When we pulled out of Yellowknife in 1979, after so many years, it was as much a matter of exhaustion - physical, mental, and moral - as anything else. In the decade before that fateful decision was mde, I spent so much time in fruitless battles with entrenched bureaucrats over the international charter operations, that I simply had nothing left for the North." - Page 215
"As it was, although I was too stubborn to acknowledge this for decades, we never stood a chance in the long run. our competitors could well afford to see us named 'Airline of the Year' by industry magazines and travel agencies, praised in the press, feted at ward dinners, because in the end, they knew, we weren't going anywhere serious." - Page 229
"Fortunately for us, Western Canadian politicians received so much heat from their constituents over the grounding of Wardair that the government found it politically expedient to limit its duration to nineteen days." - Page 236
"... we were still subjected to a great many rules that did not apply to our competitors." - Page 237
"... Air Canada was operating under an entirely different set of rules." - Page 238
"To this day, I've heard (the) Trust Account ruling referred o in the airline business as "the ruling that was designed to put Wardair out of business." - Page 245
"By the early 1970s, I was spending more than half of my time running from pillar to post to try to keep up with various regulatory rulings the CTC kept showering upon us. I finally lost track of the number of times they threatened us with suspension. We were buying new aircraft, trying new marketing approaches, and doing our best to keep up a standard of service far above other carriers; we certainly didn't need the hassles that were constantly our lot in life. I therefore concluded, after the trust account incident that I was never going to be able to operate on my own." - Page 247
"The truth is , I guess, that Canadians had either become so used to being told what to do by their governments that the spirit had gne out of them, or they had actually bought the line that it was in the public interest to pay high fares to travel with the government-designated scheduled airlines." - Page278
"One of our most interesting jobs grew out of frying the Queen around Alberta in the Dash 7 early in 1979. About nine months later, Brian Robertson, one of our northern employees who had been in charge of that tour, got a phone call from Lieutenant-Colonel Terry Thompson, who had handled the military aspects of the tour. He told Brian that the Canadian Armed Forces were having great difficulty keeping up with the flood of refugees then coming out of Vietnam and Cambodia. He wondered if Wardair could help. of course we could. Soon after, Brian went to Ottawa to arrange the first of three trips between Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Edmonton and Montreal aboard our DC-10s. There were five more trips during November and December and, on one of these, when the refugees arrived in Edmonton, the ground was covered with snow. The captain ran down and brought up handfuls of snow for the refugee children, who touched it and drew back in shock. They had never seen snow before." - Page 284
"I, myself, was not so lucky. On the second 747 purchase, in 1974, the financial institutions wanted more equity, and the noly way we could get the money was for me to take out a personal loan from the Alberta Treasury Branch. My position would be subordinated to all other corporate debt. I gave the money to the company and got in return preferred shares. The dividends on the shares would pay off the loan a the prevailing rate of interest. However, when the company began to bleed, there were no dividend payments, and the bank payments, plus the accruing interest, became overdue. We were under personal threat of losing everything, our corporation, our home, everything but the clothes we stood in. I couldn't sleep at night for worrying, and every day was an agony to drag through." - Page 292
"... On June 29, 1984, we got our first scheduled route." - Page 295
"The minister wanted futher changes to follow, but the civil service dragged its feet and not much happened until the Tories came back to power. On September 4, ..." -Page 295
"On October 29, 1984, the Advanced Booking Charter requirements were abolished on flights to the United States." - Page 295
"On May 10, 1985, Wardair was officially designated as a scheduled carrier to the United Kingdom - the first time a Canadian airline other than Air Canada or CP Air had ever been licensed for scheduled service over either the Atlantic or the Pacific. The licence came into effect on September 9, 1985, but we would not be ready to go with promotion of our new fare structure and schedules until May 4, 1986. In July 1985, Don Mazankowski had produced a discussion paper called "Freedom to Move," setting out proposals for what was being called, in the kind of buzz-phrase beloved of Ottawa, Economic Regulatory Reform." - Page 295-6
"On March 20, 1986, we were granted a Class 1Licence to conduct scheduled service within Canada, and we soon launched our first scheduled flights in the Canadian market, starting in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, And Edmonton." - Page 296
"... and at the end of 1985, we had carred more passengers than ever before - 1,567,000 - and had gross revenues of $473.8 million. Although our profit was a comparatively modest $24 million, it looked mighty good to us." - Page 296
"Our friends over at Air International magazine reported in September 1986 that the year was 'already marked as the year in which Wardair achieved the status of a fully scheduled long-haul international airline, in line with the service standards it had already been demonstrating for many years." - Page 297
"But, as I have mentioned before, the barriers to entry into the scheduled airline business were many: network and schedule, pricing, agent commission structure, computer reservations systems (CRS), consumer-incentive plans such as frequent-flyer programs and secretaries' clubs, interline agreements, terminal facilities, consumer habits, gates and landing slots, airline image, supplier relationships, licences, entrenched competition, and numerous others." - Page 303
"What a strange business is air transportation! We spend billions of dollars on aircraft, facilities, training, complete with huge world-wide infrastructures. And yet the marketing of our product is in the hands of others. This is a throwback to the old International Air Transport Association (IATA) cartel and the artificial forces inherent in government interference in the marketplace. As the airline industry is dominated by fewer and fewer carrieres, I wonder what will eventually happen to the fole of the travel agent." - Page 306
"By Fall 1988, we were increasing our share of business traffic at unprecedented rates, but not fast enough, and we knew it. Time was running out. The issue is not whether our competitors or government policies were playing dirty pool. The issue is, in fact, whether we were able to 'grow' the airline into scheduled operations over a long period of time and thus adjust to marketing techniques as they were developed. Had we been permitted to compete in scheduled services when the computer-reservations system came into being, we would have had the necessary strength in place in that area. Had we been able to build a scheduled airline step by step we would have had public awareness of our service; we would have had a secure base to work upon, because we had by far the best productivity and the dedication to provide a good service. Airlines are major and complicated businesses that cannot be built overnight. All of these pressures came to a head in the fall of 1988. We now had a long-term debt of $300 million, which was about to go up. That was because a projected loss of $50 million for the - not unreasonable in the scramble to launch scheduled services - now looked more like $100 million ... we needed another $200 million." - Page 311
"So, Wardair was sold, for $17.25 a share, a total of just under $250 million." - Page 312
"It was bizarre that a government that had fought for so many years to put us out of business was not fighting hard to keep us there !"
"For its money, CAIL (Canadian Airlines) not only rid itself of a competitor, but gained access to the international routes we had built. We carried about one third of all the Canadian passengers to Britian every year, a market we had served for twenty-six years, and we had rights in two French cities - Paris and one more to be decided - where CAIL did not. Finally, our fleet of eighteen up-to-the-minute jets represented the youngest fleet in the Canadian industry, and CAIL was transformed into an equal of Air Canada, with almost as many planes (101 compared to 111), slightly lower revenue ($2.2 billion for the first nine months of 1988, compared to Air Canada's $2.6 billion), higher passenger-miles (13.1 million to 12.3 million for the same period), and higher productivity (18,000 employees to 22,000)." - Page 313
"Government doesn't create anything, and ife are to compete in the world market, the entrepreneur must be permitted to build commerce unhampered, in order for this country to survive as an independent nation. Deregulation, free trade, and other swiftly moving events are forcing us to become competitive in the international community, and unless we more to mee the challenges they bring us, we will face a bleak future indeed." - Page 315
"On the heels of half a century of total protection, how can an organization such as Air Canada, completely devoid of the free-enterprise philosophy, possibly think of the competitive environment inherent in today's and tomorrow's air-transportation industry?" - Page 315
"It is interesting and unfortunate that even today, as I write this in the spring of 1991, the Bay Street boys and the press chew up free-enterprise CAIL, while supporting what was the former national airline. I guess after fifty-odd years of brainwashing, that is to be expected." - Page 316
"After all my pain and agony, and the dedication of hundreds of civil servants to the pursuit of government air-transport policy, it is not gratifying to be confirmed in my belief that their policy was wrong from the outset, and may now lead to the destruction of what they strove to protect." - Page 316
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