[Only The Lonely..]

Airport to be named James A. Richardson In honour of airline pioneer

By Paul Samyn | Winnipeg Free Press | Sun Dec 10 2006


WINNIPEG International Airport will be given a new name today in a ceremony that will honour one of the country's earliest flying pioneers from one of the city's most prominent families. Justice Minister Vic Toews will announce this morning that the airport now being expanded will take the name of James A. Richardson.

A well-placed source said the name change is being made to honour the vision of the Winnipegger who established Western Canada Airways (WCA) in 1926, the first commercial airline in Canada.

A news conference has been arranged for 9:45 a.m. today at the airport.

The Winnipeg Airports Authority has spent $572 million on building a new terminal and its supporting infrastructure since plans to redo the facility were announced in 2000.

The new terminal will be open in 2009, said a Winnipeg Airports Authority spokeswoman Saturday.
Richardson was already president in the 1920s of the largest private company in Canada specializing in the grain industry -- James Richardson & Sons. The company had the name he shared with his grandfather and father.

He put up an initial $200,000 investment to launch the airline, and by 1927, his company's planes made regular trips to Churchill, Prince Albert, Berens River, Norway House, Moose Factory and Minneapolis.

"My father was very interested in the airline. He thought it was the best way to advance the North," said his son, George Richardson, in an interview with the Free Press about his father's airline in 2003. "My father was far-sighted and visionary and saw the potential and that was it."

Richardson said his father dreamed of a national airline, but in 1937, an air mail contract for WCA was cancelled, and the company later to become Air Canada was launched. In 1939, James A. Richardson unexpectedly died and WCA was purchased by Canadian Pacific.

"(Western Canada Airways) was the first company in Canada set up in a business-like way to open up and develop the North by airplane," Shirley Render told the Free Press in 2003.

Render is executive director of Winnipeg's Western Canada Aviation Museum and author of the 1999 book Double Cross, which details the history of Richardson's airline, as well as its battles with the federal government.

"He was a grain man who saw beyond the grain industry," she said.

Part of Richardson's proud air legacy is still making headlines. This July, the engine and propeller of a 1928 Fokker Standard Universal aircraft was debuted at the Western Canadian Aviation Museum after it was salvaged from a deep northern lake where it sank 75 years ago.

It was the first type of airplane Richardson purchased for his company, to complete bush flights to remote northern locations. The one displayed in Winnipeg now is believed to be the only such Fokker left in existence.

James A. Richardson passed away in 1939, and was inducted into Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame in 1976.


-- With files from Gabrielle Giroday and Kevin Rollason