Ex-airline pilot now steers people down the aisles of Home Depot
Toronto Star May. 11, 2002.
by Susan Pigg, business reporter
Just six months ago, Neil Sharp was captain of an Airbus A310, piloting hundreds of passengers to exotic destinations like Paris, Lisbon and the Caribbean.
Today, he steers customers through the electrical department at Oakville's Home Depot store.
Sharp is one of at least four pilots who have been honing skills of another kind at the home-renovation chain since their airline, Canada 3000, was unexpectedly grounded Nov. 9 and declared bankrupt six months ago today.
"It's a great company to work for, but it doesn't beat flying," says Sharp. "I'm there part-time and I'm grateful for the opportunity to supplement my unemployment insurance. But I'd do anything to get back into a flying job again."
It seems that just a few hundred of Canada 3000's 4,800 employees have managed to find jobs in the industry since being suddenly grounded during the worst aviation downturn in history. Sharp estimates that 150 or so of the carrier's 577 pilots are back in the cockpit — some 110 at booming Toronto-based charter service Skyservice Airlines, which has doubled in size since November.
A handful of others have moved to the Middle East to join growing airlines there that are capitalizing on the glut of highly trained, unemployed pilots. Others have abandoned flying — at least for now — and are training to be long-distance truck drivers as a backup during the cyclical downturns that have plagued the aviation industry for decades. Some are selling real estate or are financial planners.
Sharp sees hopeful signs on the horizon. Air Canada has started hiring pilots again for the first time in more than a year. Asia's Cathay Pacific dropped its hiring freeze last week. And just this week he had an e-mail saying A310 pilots are needed in Australia.
But Sharp is realistic about his own future. He hopes to be working for Skyservice in the fall, but at considerably less than the $100,000 plus he earned at Canada 3000.
"I'm coming up to 50 years old. I'm not going to be able to command the same sort of salary and level of responsibility that I was used to just months ago. I'm probably not going to be a captain again. I'm going to be earning half of what I was earning before. Even if I get back into flying as a first officer, I will need something else (a second job.) And most of my colleagues are in much the same boat."
Nearly 300 flight attendants have been hired by Skyservice on contract, some working so few hours or making so much less that they are topped up by employment insurance.
But almost all of them are haunted by the ghost of Canada 3000 and the years they spent as "family," helping the charter airline grow over almost 13 years from a two-plane operation winging vacationers to the Caribbean and Florida into a major scheduled airline.
"Do you ever get over a death in the family? That's what this is like," said Patricia Marzec, now a flight attendant with Skyservice, who worked for Canada 3000 for 12 years. "All of it happened so quickly, we didn't have time to mourn."
What made it even harder to move on were the around-the-clock efforts by co-founder and president Angus Kinnear to get Canada 3000's 38 planes airborne again.
"We could not bury the dead," said former Canada 3000 spokesperson Angela Saclamacis, who is about to start a sales job with Hard Rock Café Ltd. "We had to just keep holding on and holding on because there were signs of life."
Many employees remain so fiercely loyal to Kinnear that they've held candlelight vigils and turned down jobs at Skyservice and fast-growing WestJet Airlines, convinced still that he will resurrect Canada 3000.
"That project is closed," said Kinnear in a telephone interview this week from Pennsylvania where he is now president of upstart charter service USA3000 Airlines. "The assets have been dispersed. There is nothing there to put together. The body has been dismembered."
Next Tuesday and Wednesday, bankruptcy trustee PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. will hold creditors' meetings in Toronto and Vancouver to discuss details of the complicated bankruptcy that affected more than 200,000 passengers — some 50,000 of whom were stranded around the world when the airline was grounded — and resulted in $66 million in claims by passengers alone. More than $16 million is still owed in severance and vacation pay to employees of the airline, its vacation arm Canada 3000 Holidays, and its other divisions.
Some pilots were so keen to get back in the cockpit that they've put up $30,000 each to former Royal Aviation chief executive Michel Leblanc. He plans to launch a smaller version of Royal, which was bought by Canada 3000, along with Halifax-based CanJet Airlines, last spring.
The money is a training bond to help cover the $50,000 it can cost to revalidate or upgrade a pilot on specific aircraft types and will be repaid to the pilots over the next two years.
Others are banking on jobs with a new CanJet, which former founder Ken Rowe hopes to launch out of Halifax this summer.
Even industry veterans shake their heads remembering how just over a year ago, Skyservice was advertising in newspapers for pilots to start up its short-lived scheduled service, Roots Air, and having trouble finding takers.
But the aviation industry is full of grizzled veterans.
"We're sort of nomadic. It's not that we like that lifestyle, it's that we accept that lifestyle as part of the job that we like. We would love to work for somebody where there was going to be security, you knew there was going to be safety for the rest of your career and you could really put down roots and get settled. But always in the back of your mind is: What if?"
Sharp has worked for three now-defunct airlines — Air Toronto, Royal and Canada 3000 — since immigrating to Canada in 1987.
"I've never left one. Every one of them has left me," he says. "What else can I do? I have a passion for flying — it is really a passion. It's an addiction."
For now, Sharp takes simple joy in talking to customers and helping them find the parts they need. He's impressed by Home Depot, which employs a number of Olympic athletes.
"They pay them for 40-odd hours a week but they only have to work 20 hours a week and they get the rest to do their training. Hopefully, they'll be doing that for pilots before long," he says with a laugh.