Bush Pilot with a Briefcase: The Incredible Story of Aviation Pioneer Grant McConachie

Patricia A. Myers is a historian with the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development, and the author of Sky Riders: An
Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945.

First published in 1972, this book is a personal tribute to Grant
McConachie, written by a man who served as his assistant for 12 years.

McConachie was one of the builders of Canadian aviation. Starting with
little more than the proverbial wing and a prayer, he began bush flying
and barnstorming in western and northern Canada in the early 1930s. A
big, brash man with an eye for a deal and the powerful personality to
get it done, McConachie founded a succession of flying companies,
pioneered air service between Edmonton and points north, and worked on
aerial surveys for the Alaska Highway and other wartime projects.
McConachie’s Yukon Southern Air Transport was one of the regional
airlines purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1940. McConachie
joined the new national airline, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Limited,
becoming its president in 1947. He continued in his pioneering ways,
establishing CP Air passenger routes to Australia and eastern Asia. He
died in 1965, when he was only in his mid-fifties.

This new edition features an introduction by aviation writer Sean
Rossiter. Neither Rossiter nor Keith strays far from the portrayal of
McConachie as a great man who let nothing get in the way of his building
a flying empire. Sober analysis doesn’t intrude on this adventure
story. Nor does a list of sources. The reader of this high-flying tale
of rollicking aerial adventures is left to navigate a flight path
between fact, fiction, and legend without compass or altimeter.