Hawkair

Hawkair is a commercial airline in British Columbia offering scheduled domestic and continental services. It is the largest of the carriers focussed on serving the North.

= History = Hawkair was established in 1960 in Terrace, with the hopes of exploiting the recently-launched government initiative to develop northern British Columbia known as the New Towns programme, soon becoming a significant player in the North, and by the 1970s finding itself in intense competition with Air BC, Pacific Western, Inter-Dominion, CP Air, Thunderbird Airways, and Northern Air for the northern market; the latter two merged in 1979 to form Northern Thunderbird Air.

In response to Northern Thunderbird's acquisition Inter-Dominion's (relatively small) northern operations in 1981, Hawkair acquired CP Air's Mackenzie operations in 1982. 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 =