With a mouse click he reveals an image of workers at the company’s Calgary plant assembling a Twin Otter, the first to be manufactured in Canada since de Havilland Canada stopped making the legendary 19-passenger workhorse more than 20 years ago.
“De Havilland made 844 Twin Otters. This is number 845. It’s a pretty cool milestone,” says Curtis, sounding for a moment like a little kid who has just glued the last propeller onto his first model airplane.
For Curtis the resurrection of the Twin Otter is the crowning achievement of a 25-year career with Viking Air Ltd. that began when he was a young man fresh out of high school with aspirations of becoming a pilot. Curtis’s father, former Saanich mayor and Social Credit MLA Hugh Curtis, introduced him to Viking Air founder Nils Christensen, and he has been with the company ever since. “I got the aviation bug in the 1980s. I was learning how to fly, then I got hooked up with Viking,” the 47-year-old recalls. “It just sort of happened.”
At the time, Christensen was shifting from repair and maintenance into custom manufacturing of replacement parts for de Havilland aircraft. In the ensuing years, Curtis took a lead role in expanding the manufacturing business, helping Viking secure new customers such as Bell Helicopters Textron Inc. and Bombardier Inc. But he began to see the limits of creating parts based on designs owned by others. “There’s much more potential if you’re selling and manufacturing products where you own the design,” he says.
When Viking was bought by Toronto-based Westerkirk Capital Inc. in 2003, Curtis suddenly had the resources to go after a series of designs that Bombardier had acquired from the bankrupt de Havilland in the early 1990s. In 2005 Bombardier sold Viking Air the exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute parts for seven de Havilland models. The following year, Curtis announced Viking’s plans to manufacture a new edition of the Twin Otter. By mid-2008, Viking Air had 41 confirmed orders for the plane and an international client list that includes Air Seychelles, Trans Maldivian Airways, the U.S. Army and Zimex Aviation Ltd. Curtis says Viking hopes to produce seven planes this year and up to a dozen next year. He’s also lobbying the federal government to replace its CC-115 Buffalo search-and-rescue fleet with reissued Buffalo aircraft built by Viking Air.
With so much change afoot, the worn asphalt access road leading to Viking Air’s headquarters has become a symbolic dividing line between the past and future. On one side, there’s the company’s current nerve centre: a low-ceilinged mish-mash of Second World War-era office spaces attached to a shambling wooden hangar at the end of a runway. Hulking in the thick fog across the road is its modern counterpart: a $15-million building with sparkling new offices and 85,000 square feet of modern manufacturing space.
Curtis points out a series of classic brick columns adorning the new building’s exterior, a design frill mimicking the original de Havilland factory in Downsview, Ontario. For Curtis it’s a subtle nod to the fabled history of the sturdy Twin Otter that will soon be produced en masse in his new factory. But they’re also a reminder that romance and nostalgia run deep among those who live the dream of flying. “Every aviation project has a lot of emotion in it,” Curtis says. “That’s just part of the aviation bug."
