Northern Thunderbird Air

Northern Thunderbird Air is a commercial airline in British Columbia offering scheduled domestic and continental services.

= History = In 1959, a group of businessmen in Prince Rupert established Thunderbird Airways, with a view to improving connections between communities in northern BC, the North Coast, and the northern territories of Canada. After a successful beginning and spurred by the growth of the New Towns, Thunderbird Airways sought to expand too quickly, resulting in financial difficulties in the late 1960s.

Stikine Airlines had been established in 1955 in Cassiar to serve the northwesternmost part of BC, whilst Upper Fraser Airways was formed in 1952 in Mackenzie, initially linking Mackenzie with Dawson Creek, Valemount, and Prince George. Feeling threatened by the expansion of Thunderbird Airways, Stikine Airlines and UFA decided the best way to face the challenge was a merger, and in 1966 the two companies were fused into Northern Air.

Through the 1970s, the two companies competed stiffly for traffic in the North, which was once again experiencing a growth spurt thanks to the Dominion government's Liveable North Programme inaugurated in 1976. However, the "Holy Trinity" (Air BC, Pacific Western, and Inter-Dominion), CP Air, and Hawkair each also had a presence in the North, and seven carriers was proving too much for the region to support in the general economic difficulties of the late 1970s, meaning something had to give.

Realising that neither had the financial foundation needed to continue fighting head-on against BC's four biggest airlines - two of which were at least partly Crown-owned - Thunderbird Airways and Northern Air began negotiating a merger as early as 1974, but it was only in 1979 that it was consummated and Northern Thunderbird Air emerged. One of the larger and more financially stable new airline's first actions was to buy Inter-Dominion's routes between Cassiar and Mackenzie and Canada in 1981.

Next to flinch after Inter-Dominion was CP Air, which in 1982 sold its routes from Mackenzie to Canada and to Vancouver and Victoria to Hawkair. By the middle of the 1980s, the two northern-based airlines, Northern Thunderbird and Hawkair, had somewhat miraculously forced two of the "big four" out of the North, leaving only Air BC and Pacific Western to compete with. Although intense rivals, Northern Thunderbird and Hawkair decided in 1980 to jointly lobby the Dominion government to withdraw Pacific Western from the North, claiming that as a Crown corporation it had an unfair advantage in having access to the "limitless resources of the Exchequer". In 1985 the government finally acquiesced, announcing that Pacific Western would withdraw from most - but not all - of its routes in northern BC; Dawson Creek, due to its importance to Albertan interests as well, would be kept as Pacific Western's northern centre of operations, but the other routes were auctioned off.

A majority of the Pacific Western routes ended up going to Hawkair, but the withdrawal of IDAL, CP, and the concentration of Pacific Western in Dawson Creek led to a rationalisation of airline operations in the North, which strengthened the position of the two northern-based airlines as the major players "north of the Grand Trunk" (a common BC expression used to refer to the northern part of the country).

= Routes =