THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 1937
The federal government created Trans-Canada Airlines, Canada’s first national carrier
Seventy-eight years ago, the federal government announced it was going to create a national airline. “A trans-Canada air service by next September, linking Halifax and Vancouver on a 21-hour schedule with a six-cent-a-mile fare, was held out to the House of Commons yesterday by Hon. C.D. Howe, Minister of Transport,” The Canadian Press reported on April 2, 1937. “The minister said Canadians would be able to travel between Montreal and Vancouver on a 16-hour schedule, leaving Montreal in the evening and arriving on the west coast at noon the next day.” The Vancouver Sun’s Bob Bouchette said the new airline was “possibly designed with a view to the conceivable gathering of war clouds in the future, and the importance of an airline as a military asset.” Bouchette also noted the “decision to establish the service resulted from the observation that Canada was dragging sadly behind in commercial aviation. In 1936, one million persons, many of them Canadians, travelled (on U.S.) flights. Airmail stamps sold in Canada carried mail routed across the United States.” Trans-Canada Airlines was officially launched on April 10, 1937. It was placed under the wing of the government-owned Canadian National Railway. “A chain of emergency landing fields 50 miles apart will mark the route,” The Canadian Press reported. “Landing fields from Winnipeg west are completed, and in the east will be completed by the fall. This, coupled with the impossibility of obtaining transport planes any earlier, is delaying opening the service.” In parliament, C.D. Howe said “the route of the transCanada line will be Vancouver to Lethbridge, Winnipeg, Kapuskasing, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax.” Bouchette said the transcontinental flights “would follow the Crow’s Nest Pass route” through the Rockies, which is why they would land in Lethbridge rather than Calgary. But there would be regional flights to connect travellers. “The first divisions to operate will likely be the Prairie and Pacific,” said Bouchette. “Winnipeg-Regina-Lethbridge-Calgary-Edmonton, and from Lethbridge to Vancouver.” TCA’s first flight was on Sept. 1, 1937. But it wasn’t across Canada, it was a short hop from Vancouver to Seattle. Regularly scheduled passenger flights between Vancouver and Montreal wouldn’t start until April 1, 1939. The airline was launched with $5 million and a fleet of three planes, a Stearman and two Lockheed Electras. The Electra was the plane of choice for commercial aviation at the time — Amelia Earhart was flying one when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937. The Electras and the rights to the Seattle route were purchased off Canadian Airlines of Winnipeg, a private company founded by James Richardson in 1926. Richardson had been trying to put together a cross-Canada airline company, and apparently felt betrayed when Howe took his concept and started TCA.
Richardson died in 1939, and in 1942 his company was sold to the new Canadian Pacific Airlines, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The first Montreal flight in 1939 carried 11 passengers. The Sun ran their names, along with the names of the pilots and stewardess Miss Norah Wallace, “a Vancouver girl.” The plane made great time until it ran into snow and “adverse flying conditions” in Ottawa, and the passengers had to complete their trip by train. But they fared much better than an east-west flight that left Montreal on April 1. The westbound flight encountered “severe icing conditions in the vicinity of Cranbrook” and was ordered back to Lethbridge for the night. It took off again the next morning, but had the same problem and had to return to Lethbridge a second time. Trans-Canada Airlines was renamed Air Canada in 1965. It became a private company in 1988.