It takes steady nerves to be a pilot, and this is one of the reasons why: if your airplane stalls, the only way to regain your momentum is to point the nose down and plunge toward the earth in mid-air.

by Andy Pedersen

It’s an aggressive manoeuvre; you have to swallow your fear and hope you can regain control before slamming into the ground.

Six years ago, Mike Doiron’s company had stalled. “Literally,” says Doiron. “It was a week-by-week exercise just to keep our head above water.” Doiron is the head of the Moncton Flight College, among the oldest and most successful flight schools in Canada. And like everybody else in the western world’s aviation industry, the school had been caught in the turmoil wrought by 9/11. Air travel plummeted, taking the market for new pilots down with it. Almost overnight, Doiron watched his enrollment fall by half, from almost 150 students a year to less than 70. “Within a matter of months,” he says, “we were going to have to start selling off our infrastructure.”

Before taking the reigns of the college in 1998, Doiron had been a pilot inspector with Transport Canada. He knew how to handle a stall; he knew he had to be aggressive. With the help of Saint John–based CanLink Global, a company that brokers deals between Canadians and the tantalizing but labyrinthine Chinese market, he arranged for an audience with the dean of a major flight school in Beijing. “Our timing couldn’t have been better,” says Doiron. “He was desperately looking for subcontractors to supply him with flight training.”

It was a potential bonanza—possibly worth tens of millions of dollars—but not without risks. The Chinese needed pilots who were ready to learn to fly commercial jets. At the time, the Moncton Flight College was only training pilots to fly single-engine props. To seal the deal, Doiron would have to invest in more advanced training planes. “These aircraft don’t come cheap,” says Doiron with a hearty laugh. “We bought a twin-engine King Air 90 for $900,000. And that was just one plane. We had to buy a bunch more as well; the cheapest was $140,000. When you start buying aircraft, the costs add up quick.”

It was a stomach-dropping investment that not only saved the Moncton Flight College but also made it the largest and most successful flight school in Canada. Today Doiron has deals with five Chinese airlines, and his staff trains more than 300 pilots a year, two-thirds of them from China. He has gone from a fleet of 13 planes to 40, most of which are in the air 24 hoursa day. He has quadrupled the size of his staff to 160 and almost tripledhis annual revenue, from less than$3 million to more than $8 million.

To house the school and its aircraft, Doiron signed a deal with a developer to build a 120-bed residence beside the college. They cut the ribbon in January, and it’s already full. A second 180-bed residence in Fredericton was completed in the spring, and Doiron expects it to be full by the end of summer. He has also expanded his operations to the Fredericton airport and is in the process of choosing a location for a third campus somewhere in the Maritimes.

In the near future he hopes to start franchising his school’s curriculum and techniques across North America and Europe. “It’s been rapid growth,” he says, “and it’s been a hell of a job to keep it under control.”

Like many other Atlantic Canadian companies, Doiron’s biggest challenge is finding qualified employees; he needs more instructors. In fact, the college is now offering courses specifically for teachers. “If and when we get a call from another large operator, somebody looking for us to take another 100 students, we want to be able to say, maybe we can’t do it this month,” he pauses, then adds, “but we think we know how we can do it next month.”