I'd Rather Be Flying: The Airborne Life and Times of Ted Pearcey

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Ted Pearcey was a teenager in wartime St. John’s during the 1940s when
he fell under the spell of the airplanes that regularly visited the
newly constructed Canadian airbase at Torbay. A chance encounter at
Gander with the Danish manager for the Scandinavian Airways System (SAS)
in 1948 led to his securing employment as an assistant dispatcher with
SAS. At every opportunity, he took training lessons with friends who had
access to a plane. By 1952, the 24-year-old had logged enough hours in
the air and was ready to move from a desk job to the cockpit. Subsequent
aviation-related work in Europe and the United States during the 1950s
enabled him to continue flying.

Back in Newfoundland in the early 1960s and out of the aviation
industry, Pearcey founded a flying club in St. John’s. Then Eastern
Provincial Airways, a Newfoundland company, hired him as a pilot. This
company did contractual work for the provincial government, ferrying
civil servants and politicians and delivering mail to areas without
adequate road transportation. By 1967, Pearcey was a check/training
pilot with the company. In 1968, the government selected him to
establish its aviation division; he remained director and chief pilot
until he resigned in 1978 and returned to the private sector.

This biographical account provides interesting glimpses into
Newfoundland’s aviation history. In addition to the story of wartime
aviation, it relates the development—a development Pearcey’s life
parallels—of the private aviation industry in the 1950s and 1960s.