Gary McLeod: Going with the flow

Gary McLeod provides quite a contrast to his fellow pilots at Harbour Air. The soft-spoken company veteran was never driven by a youthful fascination with aviation, or the all-consuming desire to defy gravity in a precision engineered, man-made bird. As he puts it, he wasn’t “one of those fanatics who sits at the end of a runaway saying, ‘There goes the Concorde!’”

For McLeod, it’s a sense of family that inspired him to finally enter the cockpit. His father flew jetliners for Canadian Gary McLeod has been flying with Harbour
Air for 17 years (Christy Waisman)Airlines, and his brother also took to the skies piloting big commercial carriers. Gary inherited a slightly different take on the family tradition at first. His initial interest was in the more earthbound discipline of aircraft maintenance, and he worked as ground crew until redundancy cost him his job in 1987. Recalls McLeod with a chuckle, “So I ended up going skiing for the winter. And my dad gave me the old helping hand, and said, ‘Well, why don’t you take up flying? Go get your private licence. See what you think.’”

And voila, McLeod went and did exactly that; a tale that he delivers with a minimum of fuss and fanfare. But then, as he points out, “For me, it was routine. My dad flew Beavers, and he had his own plane, so it was kind of nonchalant. I just went along with the flow.”

A stint with Athabasca Air in the northern Saskatchewan bush followed, until the Ladner native felt the tug of family and community yet again, not to mention the wear-and-tear on his wallet. Explains Gary, “So many of my friends were getting married that I couldn’t afford to keep going back and forth, so I ended up knocking on Harbour Air’s door, and I’ve been there ever since.”

That was seventeen years ago. Remarkably, Gary isn’t even the longest-standing employee at Harbour Air, which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this year, though he’s naturally seen a lot of folks come and go.

“Some guys want to pick up and get onto something bigger, and faster, but that’s not for me,” he says. “I know what the commercial airlines are like, and that’s not the kind of flying I want. I’ve got more freedom out in the Beaver than I would flying a jet. I’ve seen it from my brother, and my dad’s point of view, and I used to fly with my dad sitting in the jump seat going to Sandspit, Winnipeg, Toronto.”

With the burble of a busy homelife audible in the background as he speaks, Gary appends a predictably comforting motive to his career choice. Says the forty-two-year-old, who counts photography, woodworking, hockey, and coaching his eleven-year-old son’s soccer team among his outside interests, “With my job, I’m home every night. I think it’s a lot better for my family.”