Shortly after the war, aviation pioneer Fred Glass was hired as the first general manager of Saskatchewan Government Airways, the first provincial government-owned commercial airline. “So when Saskatchewan Government Airways was started, Dad was appointed the general manager,” said Dan Glass, president of Mitchinson Flight Centre. “And he ran it for several years for the government. And, that’s when the North really started to open up. The Fisheries Department, mining and exploration, you know, Uranium City was discovered, I think, around that time or somewhere in the mid 40s, mid to late 40s. That really opened up the north. And today they’re still exploring and opening new mines up north and creating employment for everyone up there. So it was it was a big deal back then. Tourism didn’t really come into play until probably the 1960s. But, yeah, my dad ran Saskatchewan Government Airways until I want to say the early 50s.” It was with SGA that Glass helped create Canada’s first smokejumpers program, training pilots to drop firefighters from a modified plane into a fresh fire to stop it from spreading. “They dropped them out of a, from what I recall, it’s a hole in the bottom of the airplane that was specially built for them,” Glass said. “And they could drop their equipment out and then they would jump out with it and drop down onto a fire. I want to say they dropped three or four guys and they could hopefully contain the fire fairly quickly and extinguish it, and they’d wander off to a lake and get picked up.” In 1950, Glass decided he wanted to see more of the country through his work. It took him out west, where he thought he would be flying in sunny skies. “He left, went out to the, B.C. coast and flew out there for a little while for a company called Queen Charlotte Airways,” said Glass. “He had an interesting time out there because the weather was very challenging on the coast, again, flying mostly in visual conditions. And when that fogged in, he’d get pushed out over the ocean. The fog would roll out over the ocean, he’d get pushed further out, and eventually he’d have to find his way back in. But he said, he said if I stayed out there, I wasn’t going to live long.” Time away from Saskatchewan made him appreciate home even more. So Glass came back and took on the monumental job of starting his own regional airline. “What really sort of clinched it for him was he landed a contract early on, for what they called the Mid-Continent line,” said Glass. “Which is not the DEW line that we’ve always heard about, the distant early warning line. The Mid-Continent line was a series of radar stations across the middle of Canada. And, he got a contract to fly concrete out to these stations and build the foundations for them. And, with two small airplanes flying concrete, you couldn’t haul a lot. So he was doing these trips nonstop for, I think one or two summers. And that’s what sort of got the business really off the ground, pun intended.” As the company grew, Glass saw an opportunity to reach more locations and serve more travelers using helicopters. “He brought two of his what he called the best bush pilots that I had. They went down to the Bell helicopter factory, trained them how to fly, and brought two of these helicopters back. And it just never stopped from there. The biggest thing that they were utilized for at the start was forestry,” said Glass. “Whether it was fighting forest fires or dropping guys, as you said, into remote locations, maybe it’s an area that floatplanes couldn’t get into or the shoulder seasons of, spring and fall where float planes, there’s still ice on the lakes or, in the fall, the weather getting bad and starting to freeze over. They could still use helicopters to get into some of these locations.” Having grown up in and around airplanes all his life, Dan Glass was destined for a career in the aviation industry. “I vaguely remember some early airplane rides,” he said. “Apparently the first one I was on, I was two months old, and we flew in a Beech 18, twin engine down to Mexico. Of course, I have no recollection of that. But my mom said I slept in her lap most of the way down and we had a vacation down there. But yeah, my earliest memories of being in airplanes, that’s all I ever wanted to do. And I really enjoyed it. In the last couple of decades, I’ve been more interested in the business side of it as well. And that’s why I got involved with Mitchinson Flight Centre and, helping to run the business there. My brother Jim was the general manager of Athabasca Airways when my dad sort of retired and then passed away, and then the companies merged, Athabasca Airways and Lawrence Aviation merged to form Trans West Air, which was then, bought out by West Wind Aviation and is now all called Rise Air. And the Trans West name still lives within Rise Air as the license to name, but they’re switching that all over. And they still operate up north, and Athabasca Airways is the oldest founding company of Rise Air when you trace its roots back, between it and Lawrence Aviation. So yeah, that’s kind of the genealogy of that company. There’s a lot of other companies folded in there as well. But yeah, myself and my brother Jim, were always interested in aviation. My brother Jim was really into the business end of it. He passed away in 2012, fairly early, but yeah, it was always kind of an interest for he and I to be in aviation.”
