Winging It: The Making of the Canadair Challenger

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

From its birth in 1944, Canadair has been a hybrid of government purpose
and private process. In the 1950s, it prospered as the Canadian producer
of other people’s airplanes. In the 1960s, it tried to develop
distinctive products for military purchasers. Then, in 1976, along came
Bill “Wild Bill” Lear, the eccentric American pioneer of small
business jets, with an idea: a new-generation business jet capable of
hopping oceans and offering passengers wide-bodied comfort. Lear’s
arrival coincided with the Canadian government’s $38 million purchase
of Canadair from General Dynamics. The subsequent marriage of plane and
company was to prove expensive and stormy.

Logie provides a very competent retelling of how the LearStar became
the Challenger, or, as industry wags put it, how the “Mickey Mouse
Learjet” became “Fat Albert.” (He is less decisive in arriving at
a “bottom line” on the Challenger.) Drawing on wide-ranging
interviews with Canadair executives and a smattering of archival
sources, the author captures all the frustrations and the slow
accumulation of success that accompany the development of a new
airplane. Proving new technologies, winning certification, and carving
out a market niche all receive clear treatment, as do the frictions of
management. Logie’s prose is not magnificent, but he is dealing with a
complex technological and managerial story here, and he seldom loses the
reader’s comprehension.

Logie is never sure whether he’s offering the story of a fiasco, a
case study of a botched government policy of industrial development, or
a heroic tale of Canadian perseverance. Each Challenger sold, he
concludes, “justified the faith of all those who created the dream and
fought to save it.” From the perspective of the deficit-plagued 1990s,
most readers will come away from Logie’s timid analysis wishing that
the Challenger had had its wings clipped at birth.