The Legend of Grant McConachie

Grant McConachie was born in 1909 in Hamilton, Ontario, but early in his life his family moved to Alberta where Grant completed high school and went off to study at the University of Alberta. He didn’t even finish first year, because the books bored him. His mind was always in the sky. In those early days of aviation, he knew exactly what he was born for, and couldn’t keep his mind on his studies.

He followed his dreams, dropped out, took flying lessons, and got his license. Somebody offered him a flying job in China but he turned it down, instead borrowing enough money to buy a Fokker airplane and becoming a bush pilot in Canada’s north, flying everything from passengers to sawmills and cows. If something had to get delivered over Yukon’s 8000 foot peaks, he was the guy.

Once he flew a rescue mission into a remote lake to carry out two woodsmen who had suffered severe burns. He was able to land on a strip of beach, but the beach wasn’t long enough for him to take off. He solved the problem by tying the tail of his airplane to a tree and gunned the engines until they were howling, then signalled a trapper to cut the rope. It worked, barely.

From one aircraft to two, then three, then a few more, Grant built up a tiny northern airline. When WWII broke out, McConachie was key to much of the aerial surveying for the Alaska Highway and pipelines built to get fuel to the north and the west.

In 1942 Canadian Pacific Railways decided to get into the airline business, and over time acquired twenty small airlines, most of them bush businesses such as McConachie’s, in the process onboarding such Canadian legends as Wop May and Punch Dickins, a key designer of the famous de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver. Dickins was also a “dropout”.

By 1947 McConachie was President of Canadian Pacific Airlines, building a fleet that reached international destinations and he essentially pioneered the Great Circle routes over the distant Arctic to European and Asian destinations.

As we’ve seen time and again, leaving school to follow a dream is not a sure bet for disaster, any more than grinding your way through school to earn the certificate and spending your life chained to a desk should be considered a success. It’s what you do with your Giftings and your dreams, it’s whether you spend your life doing what you love. If it takes a PhD to do that, get your PhD, but if you don’t need credentials, don’t waste your time, energy, and money, just “get at it”.