You don’t need to drive all the way to the Nanaimo airport to fly to Vancouver anymore. Starting the week of August 16, you can fly from Qualicum to Vancouver on Iskwew Air. So skip the ferry and hop on their PA31 Piper Navajo Chieftain twin-engine aircraft.
Iskwew, pronounced ISS-KWAY-YO, is the country’s first Indigenous-owned airline, and it’s now flying between the two airports four days a week.
Photo from Flight Global.
Not only is it Canada’s first Indigenous-owned airline, but it’s also the first one owned by a woman. And Teara Fraser, the badass Métis lady who owns Iskwew, is a pilot.
Iskwew Air has been flying since 2018. They have mostly been a charter service and do a lot of flying to northern BC. But Fraser has had her eye on Qualicum for a while.
“It’s a small community,” she told CHEK News. “It’s been without service for quite some time, and it is just right for our little airplane. The strip is too small for some of the bigger airlines to fly into and just right for us.”
“Iskwew” is the Cree word for woman. And there are lots of them on the team. In fact, most of the airline’s staff are women: even Alisha Sohpaul, the head of aircraft maintenance.
It’s important to Fraser to employ women, and especially women of colour.
“Only 2.3% of aircraft maintenance engineers are women,” she told CHEK. “So we are super, super proud and excited to have our maintenance division led by an incredible woman.”
Credit: Google maps
Iskwew Air has also pledged to become entirely carbon neutral. That’s important in an industry that uses so much fossil fuel. Planes are really polluting.
“We see ourselves as a bit of a bridge between traditional air transportation and the sustainable transportation of the future. So, we’re very invested in what does that future looks like; where we can walk more softly on Mother Earth?”
The mighty little airline is also looking to the future in the context of COVID. “Starting an airline and then being faced with a global pandemic is next level impossible,” Fraser told CHEK.
“We’ve got an industry that is in shambles right now; we can either just rebuild it the same way we did it before…or we can re-envision what that looks like.”
So why not take a quick flight from Qualicum? Hopping on a plane never felt so good.
