Bush to Boardroom: A Personal View of Five Decades of Aviation History

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

For 53 years, Duncan McLaren lived and breathed airplanes. He began in
1933 as a mechanic, servicing aircraft that had struts, floats, and
fabric wings after their daily shuttle between Vancouver and Victoria.
The end of his career, in the 1980s, found him arranging leases for
Boeing 737s and troubleshooting for small regional airlines from Alaska
to the Philippines. In between, McLaren “lived” the first half
century of Canadian commercial aviation.

McLaren’s memoir of these years is a raw, unabridged narrative,
episodic and lacking an editor’s touch. Like many memoirs, it is long
on personal detail and short on context. Yet its very strength is its
rawness and directness. McLaren captures the essence of early commercial
flying in Canada—its precariousness and adventure. Roast caribou,
fur-lined toilet seats, and petrifying cold earmarked the bush
aviator’s life. A wonderful assortment of McLaren’s amateur
photographs punctuates the narrative, bringing the misery and joy of
flying alive.

Two themes stand out in this rambling memoir. Like the fur traders of
the 18th century, Canada’s 20th-century aviators have given the
country economic definition. Whether in search of gold, oil, uranium, or
furs, aircraft expedited Canada’s growth. McLaren’s career also
graphically illustrates the remarkable evolution of aviation technology.
The planes McLaren serviced in the 1930s were little more than
calculated risks in the air; by the 1980s, McLaren had seen aircraft
like the Beaver and Hercules bring safety, versatility, and
dependability to commercial aviation.

This is a book full of adventure and detail for flying enthusiasts;
others must winnow out a sense of what aviation has done for Canada from
its headlong narrative.