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The story
History
In the early 1940s, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company purchased, in a short time span, ten bush airlines: Ginger Coote Airways, Yukon Southern Air Transport, Wings, Prairie Airways, Mackenzie Air Services, Arrow Airways, Starratt Airways, Quebec Airways, Montreal & Dominion Skyways, and finishing with the purchase of Canadian Airways in 1942, to form Canadian Pacific Air Lines. Early management were largely bush flying pioneers, including president Grant McConachie, superintendent Punch Dickins, and Wop May, who would become a repair depot manager in Calgary.
In 1968, Canadian Pacific Air Lines was rebranded as CP Air. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company (renamed Canadian Pacific Limited in 1971) had decided to align the airline's name and "Multimark" design to that of its other subsidiaries, including CP Hotels, CP Ships, and CP Transport (CP Rail was spun off from the parent company later).
Competition with TCA
CP Air competed with the government-owned Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA, later Air Canada) for international and transcontinental routes for much of its history. Despite early attempts to merge into one national carrier, CP Air continued to operate routes based on its previous bush flying heritage.
The federal government established limits on domestic market share and, through international agreements, limits on which countries CP Air could fly to. This barred CP Air from the traditional routes such as London and Paris and limited their access to major Canadian routes such as Vancouver-Toronto and Toronto-New York.
Overseas and international routes
The development of the great circle or polar route to the Far East from CP Air's Vancouver base would become one of the cornerstones of the airline. Grant McConachie managed to secure flights to Amsterdam, Australia, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, which helped the airline's revenue grow from $3 million in 1942 to $61 million by 1964. Flights to Sydney via stops in Honolulu, Kanton Island (which was a technical stop) and Fiji as well as to Hong Kong via Tokyo (preceded by a technical stop at Shemya Island in Alaska) started in 1949, with Canadair North Star aircraft (which was a version of the DC-4); Douglas DC-4s then took over in 1951 followed by Douglas DC-6Bs in 1953. Flights to Lima, Peru started in 1953 (extended to Buenos Aires in 1956) and to Amsterdam in 1955. In August 1956 three Douglas DC-6B flights a week departed Vancouver for Amsterdam, with two flights departing for Tokyo and Hong Kong, one flight to Auckland, one flight to Sydney, and one flight to Buenos Aires.
Several of the key routes in the early days were as follows:
Flight numbers 1 & 2, flying Hong Kong – Tokyo – Vancouver – Edmonton – Winnipeg – Toronto – Montreal
Flights 301/302, flying Sydney – Nadi – Honolulu – Vancouver – Edmonton, and non-stop via the Polar route to Amsterdam. Other flights to Europe included Lisbon, Milan, Rome and Athens.
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Flights 401/402, flying Vancouver, Mexico City, Lima, Santiago and Buenos Aires
Flights 501/502, Mexico City – Toronto – Santa Maria (Azores) – Lisbon – Madrid
Other routes duplicated parts of the above, but from the 1959 Intercontinental Timetable these appear to be the main routes, and show the inventiveness that Canadian Pacific Airlines needed to employ and how they developed other overseas routes for Canada. The airline was flying DC-4s and DC-6Bs internationally in the 1950s, introducing turboprop Bristol Britannia aircraft in 1958. Douglas DC-8 jetliners began to replace them from 1961, but the Britannias continued on routes that were unsuitable for the new jets well into the 1960s – for example on the route to Auckland until Whenuapai closed to civil traffic in November 1965. The Britannia was also used to fly non-stop service from Windsor, Ontario to Mexico City with this flight originating in Toronto before being replaced by a DC-8. Closer to home, non-stop Boeing 737-200 service from Vancouver to San Francisco was being flown by 1970 followed by non-stop Boeing 727-100 service from Vancouver to Los Angeles by the mid-1970s. Also during the mid-1970s, CP Air was operating stretched Douglas DC-8-63 jetliners (which the airline called the Super DC-8 "Spacemaster") on the Vancouver-Honolulu-Nandi-Sydney route twice a week. Service to New Zealand resumed in 1985 along with non-stop flights from Vancouver to Hong Kong, and in 1986 CP Air became the first North American airline with a non-stop flight between North America and Mainland China with a weekly flight to Shanghai. Flights to Beijing, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo were added in 1987.
Although Canadian Pacific was not allowed scheduled routes to certain European countries, they were permitted to serve countries which Trans Canada Airlines/Air Canada did not choose to serve, so they developed schedules from 1960 onwards to Netherlands (Amsterdam), Italy (Milan and Rome), Greece (Athens), and later several other international destinations. Amsterdam was their principal European destination for these services, with direct flights to both Eastern and Western Canada, and connections were emphasized onwards to other countries. They also developed extensive charter flights (operated mainly in summertime) beginning in the mid-1960s and through the 1970s and 1980s to Britain, France, Germany and other European points which permitted them some access to these markets. Unusually for charter flights, they were listed in detail in their system timetables to show the full reach of the airline.
Open skies
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of the routes CP Air had pioneered such as Vancouver–Tokyo were now very lucrative and the previous distribution of routes was considered unfair. In 1979, the federal government eliminated the fixed market share of transcontinental flights for Air Canada (the successor to TCA). While this was a condition that was pressed by CP Air for a long time, it now scrambled to upgrade its fleet to expand on newly available routes such as new nonstop service from Vancouver to Hong Kong and Shanghai to go along with adding more flights to its then current routes like Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo and Sydney to prepare for increased competition from Air Canada in its traditional territory. This required massive fleet renewal and an associated debt of $1 billion.
This debt load, the increased competition, and the economic downturn in Asia would all work against CP Air's future.
Rebranding and sale
Having been renamed CP Air in 1968 with a new orange livery, the airline in 1986 reverted to its original name, Canadian Pacific Air Lines, with a new navy blue colour scheme and logo. This occurred shortly after the airline had taken over operations of Eastern Provincial Airways.
This new incarnation, however, was short-lived. Less than a year later, in 1987, Canadian Pacific Air Lines was sold, along with Quebec's Nordair, to Calgary-based Pacific Western Airlines (PWA) for $300 million. PWA assumed the airline's debt of $600 million. In April 1987, PWA announced that the new name of the merged airline would be Canadian Airlines International. In 2001, Canadian Airlines was taken over by and merged into Air Canada.
Historical fleet
Barkley-Grow T8P-1
Bellanca 66-76 Aircruiser
Boeing 707-138B (leased in 1968)
Boeing 727-117 (1969–1974) (included Combi aircraft capable of mixed passenger/freight operations)
Boeing 727-217 (1975–1984)
Boeing 737-217/284 (1968–1987)
Boeing 737-3D1 (1983-1987)
Boeing 747-1D1 (1973–1984)
Boeing 747-211B (1978–1984)
Boeing 767-217ER (ordered but later cancelled)
Bristol Britannia
Convair CV 240 (operated on northern Canadian routes)
Curtiss Wright C-46F Commando
Canadair CL-4 North Star C-4-1
de Havilland D.H.89A Dragon Rapide
de Havilland Comet (destroyed in an accident before being placed in revenue service)
de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter
Douglas C-54
Douglas DC-3
Douglas DC-4
Douglas DC-6
Douglas DC-8-40 (1961–1980)
Douglas DC-8-50 (1965–1966)
Douglas DC-8-63 (1968–1983) (stretched Super DC-8 model)
Lockheed 18 C-60A Lodestar
McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 (leased from United Airlines)
McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 (1977-1987)
List is incomplete and uses data primarily from the Boeing Sales Database.
From Wikipedia’s article on Canadian Pacific Air Lines, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3