With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
40 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2019 TANYA GOEHRING By all accounts, it looked a lot differ- ent from today's edition of the business. Harbour Air now has about 70 full-time employees (plus more than 450 workers during peak season) and serves half a mil- lion annual passengers with its fleet of just over 40 planes. It also became North America's first fully carbon-neutral airline in 2007 through the use of offsets. That last point is where McDougall sees Harbour Air continuing to grow. There are no rock-solid plans to expand the compa- ny's route map; the downtown Vancouver- to-Seattle track, launched in early 2018, has been packed full of late. But in a pink dress shirt and beige slacks, McDougall talks calmly and lucidly about a much bigger move—to an all- electric fleet, the first of its kind anywhere. There's a long road ahead until that becomes a reality. But McDougall, who as a young child dreamed of becoming a pilot while watching planes from his fam- ily's home on Nelson Island at the western edge of the Sunshine Coast, will fly the first prototype this month. "It's part of the process, and any fail- ure is part of that process," he says of the complex journey before him. "There will be some glitches along the way, but I don't think we'll fail." THE SPARK OF AN IDEA McDougall says Harbour Air first started talking about the possibility of going elec- tric three or four years ago. "It became a matter of, OK, how do we execute it?" he recalls. "There was a lot of talk about He was a pilot back then, working for a couple of companies travel- ling up and down the B.C. coast, mostly on service routes for forestry workers. McDougall and fellow pilot Cliff Oakley leased two planes from a land development company they flew for and started putting together the business plan in earnest. They did the flying, the sched- uling, everything.