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A new terminal opened at the Vancouver Airport on October 24, 1968.

Federal Transport Minister Paul Hellyer traveled west for the opening ceremonies, during which Hellyer toured the terminal in a replica of the Gibson Twin, the first aircraft to fly into Victoria in 1910.

A new motorway linking the airport to the Moray Channel Bridge in Richmond opened on the same day. It was named Grant McConachie Way, in honor of a Canadian aviation legend who helped make Vancouver a hub of international travel.

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McConachie was one of the founders of Canadian Pacific Airlines in 1942. He served as president of the company in 1947 and led the company into continued expansion for two decades until he had a heart attack and died on June 29, 1965. He was only 56 years old.

McConachie was not a typical business executive. He started out as a bush pilot, a profession that captured the public imagination in the 1930s.

“McConachie fitted almost exactly the romantic image conjured up by us ordinary earthlings,” wrote Stuart Keate of the Vancouver Sun in 1972.

“He was tall, handsome, athletic, with an irresistible smile and a booming laugh. He was also a fantastic salesman, with a gift for phraseology that endeared him to a hundred interviewers.

One of McConachie’s great ambitions was to make CP Air a major international airline. Keate said in the 1950s McConachie had a plan where he would carry an inflatable globe and a piece of string.

“With these simple props, he could demonstrate to his listeners – the directors of the APC and the officials of the Ministry of Transport – that a circular route above the top of the world is a shorter path to Europe than a straight line route across the Atlantic.” Keate wrote.

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“He was able to prove very quickly that it was 2,000 miles closer to the Orient ‘through the roof’ than the Hawaii-Fiji flight and intermediate stations.”

CP Air would become the first airline to fly the “polar route” when it launched flights from Vancouver to Amsterdam in 1955.

The airline seemed poised to realize McConachie’s international vision in 1965, when the federal government introduced a new national air policy designating CP Air as the only Canadian carrier to serve Australia, New Zealand, Asia , Latin America and southern Europe.

McConachie told The Sun he wanted his airline to be the first in the world to offer non-stop flights between Europe and Asia. But he died before he could complete it.

He was born George William Grant McConachie in Hamilton, Ontario. on April 24, 1909 and grew up in Edmonton. He learned to fly in 1929 and was offered a position as a pilot in China.

But his family didn’t like the idea, and an uncle lent McConachie the money to buy a Fokker plane to go into business in Canada. McConachie started with a company called Independent Airways, then added United Air Transport and finally Yukon-Southern Air Transportation.

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He thrived because he could steal anything, anywhere. According to a 1936 account by Jim Coleman, his company once traveled an entire town to Two Brothers Lake in northern British Columbia.

“Across an 8,000-foot mountain range, McConachie engines carried 90 human beings, cattle, horses, a tracked tractor, a sawmill, a power plant, coal, hay, oats and every imaginable human need,” Coleman wrote.

McConachie showed great courage. One day he went to Lake Athabasca, north of Edmonton, to rescue two brothers who were badly burned.

He was able to land on a small strip of beach, but it was too short to take off. So he tied a rope to the tail of his plane and to a tree, fired up the plane’s engines, and asked a trapper to cut the rope.

“We shot down this beach and flew over the lake,” McConachie said. “(But) there was a terrible vibration and I thought the rope had gotten dirty somewhere.”

In fact, his propeller had hit an obstacle “and split in the middle”. But the skillful McConachie managed to fly the plane to Edmonton.

CP Air was created when the Canadian Pacific Railway consolidated several small airlines, including those owned by McConachie. Initially based in Edmonton, McConachie moved the company to Vancouver when he became president in 1947.

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