IR Open Mic - 26-04 - Full Interview with Craig Richmond (Season 1, Episode 7)

Welcome to Open Mic, the airport- and aviation-focused podcast hosted by Curtis Grad, Chief Executive and Founding Partner of Modalis Infrastructure Partners. Each episode features in-depth conversations with global aviation leaders—airport executives, investors, innovators, and policy experts—exploring the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the airport and aviation landscape.

In this episode, Curtis speaks with Craig Richmond, former President and CEO of Vancouver Airport Authority and one of Canada’s most respected airport leaders. Together, Curtis and Craig reflect on Craig’s remarkable aviation journey—from Vancouver to the Bahamas, the UK, Cyprus and beyond—and explore the leadership principles, culture and resilience required to build world-class airport organizations.

They dive into:
✈️ Craig’s return to Vancouver Airport Authority after seven years abroad—and the challenge of leading an airport already recognized as one of the world’s best.
 🌎 Lessons learned from international airport leadership roles in the Bahamas, the UK, Cyprus, and beyond.
 🤝 Why airport culture, teamwork, and customer service are foundational to long-term success.
 🏗️ Building resilient airport organizations by empowering teams, encouraging innovation, and preparing the next generation of leaders.
 🛫 The unforgettable moments that define aviation careers—from 9/11 diversions to airline launches, Olympic operations and even a "rumble" with Jackie Chan.

Timestamps:
1:27  Returning to Vancouver Airport Authority as CEO
3:32  Building airport culture and defining organizational values
5:56  Customer service, leadership and operational excellence
13:30  Starting up Nassau Airport Development Company
19:33  Crazy aviation stories: 9/11 and managing airport crises
26:29  Transition to the UK
37:34  The future of aviation, space exploration and Artemis II
39:44  Magic Mirror: Rapid-fire questions with Craig

🎧 Tune in for insider perspectives from airport and aviation thought leaders.
 🔔 Subscribe for future episodes.
 💬 Like and Comment: What leadership qualities are most important in building resilient airport organizations?
 🌐 Visit https://airportir.com/open-mic to hear more episodes and stay informed about the global aviation developments that matter to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Open Mic from Modales Infrastructure Partners, where aviation talks and the world listens. From global airport and aviation developments to disruptive technology, airport investment, and much more, we unpack the trends, technologies, challenges, and opportunities shaping the global aviation industry. Now here's your host, Curtis Grad.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

I'm very pleased to introduce today's guest, Craig Richman, best known here on the West Coast of Canada as past president and CEO of Vancouver Airport Authority. In addition to a range of other pursuits, which we'll get into in a bit, he's currently sitting on the board of Calgary Airport Authority and serves as a strategic advisor to the Board for Security Guard. Craig, many thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

And we'll start with where things kicked off with you in YVR with your airport career. You were leading that airport operations as VP of ops for I guess roughly seven years. And then you got the call to uh to look at a project abroad. But the interesting thing was, seven years later, you find yourself back in Vancouver as president and CEO. They say you can never look back, but that's exactly what you did. So very interested to hear what kind of adjustment you had coming back and what it was like to sit back in the in the big chair.

SPEAKER_03 1:25

Oh, that's a very good question. Thank you. I would like to go back to about 2005, and I was asked to tour around the airport a group from Nassau in the Bahamas. And a good mutual friend of ours, Lori Chambers and I, were there, and we ended up in a boardroom and they threw a little brochure across to us. They said, You were gonna we're gonna, you know, privatize the airport. And we both looked at each other and said, No way. And uh and about a year later, George from Vantage came and said, You wanna do you want to go and be the CEO in the Bahamas? It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying Vancouver at all. As you say, I'd been there 11 years, eight as the VP, but you know, the chance to be a CEO, new new build of a new terminal, all that. So yeah, that was great. That's what peeled me away. So here's an interesting thing that I think people don't realize. When you leave, you don't you're too busy in your new role. Like you didn't think of Abbotsford and Anaimo when you were in Cyprus. You're busy, right? Like so you don't sit there, but I so you know, I went to to uh various airports, and then then in you know, three years later, they they said we're there's a competition. Do you want to put your hat in for Vancouver? So it actually wasn't three years later, it was seven years later. Seven years later. Uh uh, and you go, I don't, I haven't even thought about Vancouver, except you know, friends and that kind of thing. So you feel at a bit of a disadvantage trying to get ready for the CEO competition overseas, because you know, it it I mean, I don't know the org chart, I don't know anything. So it it's not like it's not like you sit there and you think I'm going back. It was a beautiful happenstance in my family. We call it the fortunate event. And so you come back, and and I I remember coming back, and one of the very first days I was on the Bill Good Show in Vancouver, which dates me because that's no longer around. But he said, What did you think about coming back? And I said, You know, when you come back to a place like Vancouver that already was winning SkyTracks awards, you go, This is not a turnaround, you know, this is not this is not a place that needs a new terminal, needs new management, whatever. So you you really feel I felt like boy, you know, how not to screw it up? It's like coming into a winning sports team, you know, like so uh yeah, yeah, but then you know what you realize is there's always a new slant on things, you can always try and pick things up. And having worked in a variety of other airports in different cultures, I think it helped. I said, you know, I just started asking questions. I said, okay, I think we can do that a little better, I think we can think about this. But it really was building on the shoulders of giants and all the people that had done great work before. So there were there were moments where there was new stuff, but but as in most airports, I suspect, and with most cultures, you build on what's really working, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

And I think the interesting part is you said earlier, well, it's not the same org chart. Some of the same names may be in that org chart, but also I find that when you leave and you come back, your brain just kind of gets locked in what people were doing the seven years before you when you left. Well, those people have moved up, moved on, grown, and and developed some some skills along the way and some experience. And I'm sure you had a few experiences where people you didn't really know that well are suddenly in senior roles, right?

SPEAKER_03 4:28

Oh, yeah. You know, and and that's great. You know, you want to see that movement. There were also people that could have had an entire career that came in after me and left before me, you know, like six years there, and we worked at the same airport, but never but never at the same time. So, you know, and and I really think that the best organizations and the best airports, everybody should realize you're gonna pass the baton, every organization, right? This is you're gonna be passing the baton, so you you just run as fast as you can and and and as much as you can while you're there. But and then when you have a great team, you're okay. Now I think we can really, really do great things. You know, I I'll I'll just tell one story. I I walked around and I said, What are our values? And frankly, there were too many. And this is a common thing. You know, I I figure if you can't recite the values, if you can't recite the vision, then really they're just they're just words, exactly. So you really got to tighten them up.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

It's a plaque, it's a plaque on the wall, right?

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Yeah, you know, uh, but so we tightened them up till the till there was just four, and everybody started to really realize it. And then we used it for everything from promotions to bonuses to how you get marked, how you're doing against those four. And of course, within four, there's many subcategories, but you know, there's no getting around safety and teamwork and uh accountability and innovation. Those were the four, and you know, we just kept saying them and saying them, and then people they could repeat them and they could live them. And I saw meetings where somebody said, You're not being that's not team play, you know, and so you know that then you know that it's really working. And in customer service, right? So uh the toughest thing about customer service is that it's the same thing day in, day out. The number one question asked of our customer information counters and of our volunteers was where's the nearest washroom? Because people come into this big building, they need to use a washroom and they don't know where. So you, as a customer service person, you have to realize this is the 800,000th time I've answered this question, but it's the first time that person has asked it. You have to continuously every day realize, like you know, learning from Disney, the show is new every day, and it has to be the same for every person. You know, when when you get that going, and we had that um in everybody, you know, from cleaners to the RCMP to our police security, everybody, airlines that just want to pitch in and help, you can't lose. You know, honestly, at that point, you stand back and you go, we can't lose. And if you don't have that, you're never gonna win. If you don't have that buy-in, you know.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Well, and we we've all had that flight attendant that's made that that onboard announcement one too many times, and it it sounds a little, a little flat, and it's the same thing in the terminal. Now, you you talked a little bit earlier about this aspect of uh passing the baton. And uh, I've always been a firm believer that the first day that you're on the job, you have to start thinking about how you're preparing this organization for the day you leave, whether it's three years, five years, seven years down the road. But I've always found that um anybody that's too protective of their role when they go into it and isn't thinking about how they're gonna leave it in a better condition than they found it and how they're gonna prepare the organization for the future. You know, you you've kind of failed before you've started if you don't think in that in that sort of mindset, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Yeah, exactly. And you know, especially when you go overseas and you're an expat, the the whole focus and the goal is to turn it over to the country that you're that you're there. It should be anyway, uh, many of the places that we went, you know, and and so that's uh that's probably you know what instilled it in me hugely. But also realizing that people move on. The airport industry is is really you can call it that now. You know, in its nascent stages back in the 80s and 90s, it was more of there were boutique airports. Now it's a full industry, and you know full well with the way modales works, people move around and they're looking for new opportunities, you know. And so it the the organization's gonna change. And I try to tell people, you know, the succession plan is great, but it's not gonna stick. I've always believed in this, and I think it's Eisenhower's quote: the plan is nothing, planning is everything. Keep planning, but don't but don't think that your succession plan is going to turn out the way that you think it will.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

And it's not a succession plan, it's succession options because something's gonna happen that if you've got a a rock solid plan, it's gonna crumble within the first six months because somebody's gonna move on, or somebody new is gonna come on the horizon you hadn't thought of before that's gonna be a better fit, or the circumstances change, right?

SPEAKER_03 8:42

So exactly. And so, yeah, just but you should be continuously thinking about is that person ready? Will they be ready in a couple of years? What do we need to do? I I firmly believe also um pushing people, um, saying, look, you should try this. Just I know I know you're not from ops, I know you're not from marketing, whatever. Give it a shot and uh and see how see how they do. And many, many people say, Yeah, I'm happy to try that.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

Yeah, that that's what I really loved about the the projects we worked on abroad is they're smaller organizations and you can experiment a little bit and get people doing multiple roles or throw them into something they'd never done before, like turning a firefighter into a duty manager and things like that. But those are fun things to watch, right?

SPEAKER_03 9:24

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Now, just just on the theme of Vancouver in in those early years uh when you came back as CEO, again, you had inherited a pretty well-run ship, and as you said, winning lots of um lots of awards, best in class and all that. But how did you how did you manage to continue anchoring that reputation? And you know, I was always a keen onlooker watching all this, and and it looked like you had a hell of a lot of fun along the way, too. Like it was you you see a lot of airports where it looks like drudgery, people are just going through the motions, but you guys looked like you had a lot of fun, and I think you had a a few uh interesting memories from that time, and uh some of those new airline launches were pretty epic as well. But what are some of the favorites that come to mind?

SPEAKER_03 10:06

Well, let me just talk about airline launches. So I learned a lesson because when I first got back, got to YVR, it was uh heyday, you know, a brand new terminal, and there were two or three new launches, it seemed like every three or four months. And you get a bit blasé about them, and and oh, go down to the gate and be part of this launch. And I was like, oh, not another one. Then I went for seven years of I don't think I got a f a new, a new flight ever. And so when I came back, I said, I am gonna try and go on every launch. We tried for 15 years to get Air France, and finally we get Air France, and so I went to Paris on the very first flight. You know, that's fantastic. I I was uh I was in Toulouse in like 1999 when it was the A3XX. We finally put in a we put a pad for the A380, and I got to fly in the very first A380 commercial flight out of Vancouver. So that you know, those are kind of neat things because you planned for a long time, and I think that was a uh BA flight around 2016. So that is like you know, 17 years later, you're on you're on the airplane. One of the funniest ones, and you're gonna talk about having fun, was uh we had Hong Kong Airlines uh launch, and they said they're gonna bring Jackie Chan. So you can imagine the uh comms team comes in and says, We want you to fight Jackie Chan. I said, You what? Um, but uh a lot of fun with that video. It really kind of went viral. Me, me pretending you're ready to fight Jackie Chan. And then, you know, one of those moments that happens, he's a he's a force of nature, this guy. You know, he does people may not he does Chinese opera, you can buy Jackie Chan pajamas, you know, like this guy's a and so he had he had bodyguards and he had a like he had a whole retinue. And then I got up in the middle of the night on the way, we you know, we met each other, he was pretty funny, and I and he gave me the lovely book and all kinds of stuff. I got up to have a coffee, whatever. He's standing there and he's editing a film in the galley. And uh I had a half an hour to talk to Jackie Chan without anybody around, and all of a sudden then all his people woke up and hustled me away. But you know, he was a real gentleman and and really interesting to just sit and talk to. So yeah, I mean when these opportunities come along, you might say, No, I don't want to uh I don't want to put myself out there and pretend to be a karate expert against Jackie Chan. Or you or you can say, I think this could be fun, you know. And uh that was a good memory.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

I remember that I remember that video well, and it it's well worth seeing. And actually, we'll put a link to it when we when we put this podcast up because it's well worth a watch. Uh yeah, you definitely had had some good fun there and and not not afraid to put yourself out there and and look a little a little uh crazy doing it. It was it was fun. I remember the headband and the whole bit as well, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:42

I I remember uh pulling a muscle doing a high kick, and somebody somebody said, Are you actually trained in martial arts? I said, absolutely not. And I lived for about two weeks. You know, I I always said too, you know, look, you don't want to sound frivolous. I take safety and anything related to safety, pasture safety regulations extremely seriously. You don't have to take yourself seriously. You know, you show up in if you're in a safety role and when you have to put on your safety hat, you do that, but it it doesn't mean you always have to be gruff-faced, you know. Uh absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

And uh at the end of the day, as a CEO of an airport, you're you're like the mayor of a small town or village, and uh well, sometimes not so small, 10, 15, 20,000 people. And and you've also got to be accessible and humanized as well, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:28

Yeah, yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Now we talked a little bit earlier and uh about your your entry into the international business, uh starting with NASA. And that was around the same time I left Montigo Bay. So I think we probably crossed in the skies somewhere over the Caribbean. So two two very different countries, Jamaica and Bahamas, but very similar challenges, I'm sure. You know, you've got to adapt a smaller airport, smaller organization. And I know in in the case of Montego Bay, we had to be pretty creative. You talked a little bit earlier about cross-training people, but uh would imagine you did a fair bit of that and trying to trying to basically optimize people's ambitions and and build a team, right? Uh how did you find how did you find that in in Bahamas?

SPEAKER_03 14:13

Well, you know, talk about starting small. The aforementioned Lori Chambers came into my office once and said, I've been offered uh a job in the Bahamas, this is 2006, as the VP of ops. And I said, Well, I hope you're not going there to escape me because I'm going as the CEO. So we ended up going down there, and uh, and of course, Lori and my wife and and everybody were became good friends, as you do when you're when you're overseas. But but I have a picture of Lori and I with our one asset, which was a stapler. That's our first corporate asset was a stapler. So it really was it was building a company from literally from the ground up, taking over from the government. And uh, you know, I would just say overall, the people there were ready to shine, they just hadn't been quite shown the way, you know, and and uh not to disparage the government, but governments have a different mentality. And we just said, no, uh, if it's unsafe, don't do it. If it's safety, you should come talk to us. If it's customer service, do it. One of you know, my proudest achievements is the the not the building, which is gorgeous um in in NASA, that the organization there and the people there are just top-notch, you know, and they and they have kept that that whole idea of always uh excelling and trying to do better and trying to do more with less. You know, we had to repaint the runway uh markings, and uh we had no machine, we had no budget for machine, so the guys did it by hand, centerline markings on a you know 7,000-foot runway, and they just rolled it out and did it by hand. Very nice job, you know, and and uh took took a while, but uh boy, I'll talk about attention to detail and uh got it done, you know. So you uh you work with what you have and and just give people room to do the right thing, and uh they they just responded so well, and they and they've continued to just make that airport uh an absolute gem.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

And you know, you talk about you know these government run airports, and it's at the end of the day, governments are good at governing, not necessarily good at operating things, and that's exactly where they privatize. And I remember one of the first team meetings I had in Mobay, and and I had five different departments at ops and fire, um, security, environment, maintenance. I had I had like 75% of the organization by headcounts, it was a lot of people. And the first meeting, they're looking at me like, okay, boss, what are we gonna do? Like they're waiting for me to tell them how to fix everything. He said, You know what? You probably already know it needs fixing. And and I had my assistant hand out pieces of paper to each one of them. I said, I want you to put the three things that you wished had been done that you had asked to be done over the last couple of years and put them on a piece of paper. And next week we'll come back with our priority. And they all kind of looked at me and he said, Look, the best ideas on how to improve this place while we're waiting for the new building to be built are come are coming from you because you're the experts on this airport. I'm I may be a so-called expert in airports, but you're the expert in this one. And what we ended up doing was taking the common denominators from, you know, these 15 or 20 people, they became the top five priorities. And it was something as simple as making sure that the toilets worked, right? That that we had toilet paper, you know, stuff like that. It was, you know, my my first KPI was getting a good call, a call from a good friend of mine uh from one of the hotels, and he was very excited. He uh said, Hey, I'm at the airport. And I said, Yeah, it's kind of ecuerous. Yeah, I'm in the toilet. I said, Why are you calling me? He said, Well, there's toilet paper. I said, I said, What's wrong with the toilet paper? He said, He says, No, no, no, I've been coming to this place for three years. There's never been toilet paper. You guys are awesome, right? I'm so okay, low bar, but thank you.

SPEAKER_03 17:38

You know what? It is so funny. I got into a cab once with a guy, a young man, and he said, Uh, Craig, I need to improve my customer service numbers. He said, add cleaners in the washrooms. So I, and he said, That's simple. I said, That's simple. I saw him a year and a half later, he goes, I got like, I'm up three points on ASQs. Like it's it's basic, right? It's basic, but it is really fundamental. And you know, we found that there was such a high R-squared between cleanliness of washrooms and how people felt in terms of security at the airport. And and it, I think it comes down to this. Now, this is a supposition on my part, but if you're taking care of the washrooms, you're taking care of everything else. And the opposite is true. If this, if this is not looking good, how is everything else going? You know, so but I absolutely believe I absolutely agree with you. The people there know what to do. You one of the issues, and and again, uh I'm not uh in any way disparaging governments because they're different. We had an aborted attempt to take over Midway Airport, and I remember talking to the people there, they're part of the the city government. The city of Chicago has more firemen and policemen than the Canadian military. And so when they did it, when they were buying boots, they weren't buying, like we would at an airport buy 10 boots, they were buying 25,000 boots. So how fast do you think that procurement process went? You know, I mean that that was one of the issues. The government was so big that the airport was just one department of many, and the 30,000 firefighters and the 25,000 police were vastly, you know, huge. So it one of the one of the nice things when you when you are a small airport and you're just an entity unto yourself, whatever that is, you know, how whatever model that is, is you can make decisions so fast, you know, go and buy a drill.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Although when you're when you're working with a small team that's trying to be quick and efficient, you often find that things like specialized fire truck tires end up being tractor tires and you have to send them back. Yes, they're the right size, but they're not fit for purpose. So yeah, we we learned a few things along the way for sure. We usually like to talk at this point about a few crazy stories, and and in airports, it seems to be a place that we attract them. So you must have some pretty good ones from your various stops along the way. But what's what are the the couple of craziest ones that you've ever come across in your airport career?

SPEAKER_03 19:49

You know, there's there's crazy good and crazy bad. Um uh we take both. Yeah, well, you know, here's a little known fact about uh 9-11 in uh in North America. That day, I think it was a Tuesday, September 11th, uh 2001, was ACI in Montreal. So all the CEOs of all the airports in North America, uh of NAV Canada, FAA, senior government, everybody was in Montreal. So it was run by guys like me and uh that kind of thing. And all of a sudden, you know, it was surreal in that suddenly, you know, the head of transport locally says the US is shutting their airspace, and you can you take 34 jumbos? Yes. And now to have 8,500 people sitting on your airport going, what am I doing in Vancouver? You know, that was uh bizarre, bad, bizarre, funny. You just you go, okay, this is odd. Uh, I'm doing some consulting work in the Middle East in the middle of Ramadan, and we had a finance meeting start at 9:30 at night and end at 2 in the morning, and then we had a banquet. And I'm stuffed full of amazing good iftar food at four in the morning, going, okay, this one goes in the books. Yes, you know, that's uh, you know, I've pulled all nighters before, but rarely having a banquet. And then there's the the great customer service stories, you know, that you just go again. When you have people like this, you can't lose. One of our security people comes upon a woman crying in the in the terminal, says, Can I help you? She says, I was nervous, meeting my husband, he's coming back home. I was cleaning my wedding ring. Before you know it, I lost it somewhere out in the parking lot. And the guy said, Do you know where you were? No. He said, Tell me, you know, this is a 3,000 stall parking lot in the can you tell me anything you remember? And so he kind of tried a pinpoint where it might have been, spent three hours and found found her wedding ring. You know, it just runs the gamut, doesn't it? And I used to enjoy reading the uh the ops logs because it must be what it's like for police, because they would take this huge drama and just put it down to one sentence. You know, you'd go uh six and a half foot tall, very angry man, brandishing sword at screening point. There's a story there, there's a screenplay. But it's all in one line, you know. And I I often said I should have taken a picture of the strangest ones, you know, um everything from life and death in between. And that's you know, I think that's part of the reason that people sort of get hooked on airports, because you even though every airport has a terminal and a runway, you know, and and has people coming to it, you know, that's about where this the similarities end. And every day can be very, very different. And uh you have no idea that you'd be dealing with this crisis or that crisis. And some people like that, some people don't. I think it gets in some airport operators' blood. You ride to the sound of the guns, right? You you hear, hey, what's that? That's something odd is going on, and you uh and you want to be part of it, you want to fix it. And uh I think that's the addictive part of it. Because I, you know, when I first started, I I thought it was a six-month gig. Back in 1995, it was a six-month consulting gig, and I never left airports, I still haven't.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

So yeah, and and you also find that some of the people that are working at airports that go off onto consulting uh end up coming back because they miss the the sort of random lack of structure, right? And every day is every day is a new day. You just you never know what's coming down the pipe, right?

SPEAKER_03 23:09

Yeah, you know, uh guilty guilty as charged. I was 18 months into retirement, then I get a call. You want to be in the board of the Calgary Airport Authority? And I said, you know what? Sure. Let's go to the CEO, and you know, and and uh it's turned out to be incredibly uh interesting from the other side.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Yeah, and actually just jumping back to uh 9-11, I I was part of that story to a certain extent as well, because I got the call after you saying there's 35 airplanes coming in from Asia. If anything happens at Vancouver, basically I think the words were if Craig screws it up, they need to come to your airport. So I I knew you weren't gonna screw it up, but I I made sure that we could find some way. And my ops manager, a guy named Mike Pastro, he'd been working in Abbotsford for 25 years at that time, and he knew every square inch of pavement on that airport, uh, thanks to Airshow and everything else. And and yeah, we had a plan for 35 jumbos coming in. We got one German business jet, but it was uh it was quite an exercise. And um, yeah, we were your we were your backup plan, but it was well, you know what?

SPEAKER_03 24:07

This comes back to that planning thing I said, you know. I I I was uh up to my my uh butt in everything going on, and I just threw uh a piece of paper at Brett Patterson and I said, figure out how to park three or four airplanes. Now keep in mind we had 110 airplanes on the ground already, all the Canadian air, every gate, everything, every parking spot. So he basically took the plan for an extreme snow event and we shut down the North Runway and the Crossroad runway and just parked all these jumbos nose to tail. You've seen the pictures of Halifax and you know Vancouver. Um, but uh, but so we didn't have a plan for this, but you adopt another plan and it works. And yeah, like you said, the air show. You had enough airplanes at at Abbotsford with the air show to know how to park.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Was 10 or 15 seconds away from stepping on a bus at Vancouver South Terminal to go down for some sort of tour of Boeing Field that day. There was a big junket with BCAC, the aviation council. And and I just you know, I didn't didn't have all the details yet, but I'm like, you know what? I need to get back, I need to get back to the office. So I turned around, got back in my car, and drove to Abbotsford. And and well, the rest is history, but yeah, it was it was one of those days we'll none of us will ever forget, right?

SPEAKER_03 25:14

You know, I've often said in in the people at the airports um were lucky in one regard because I didn't even see any of the videos till the end of the day, and we had something to do. We had to get ready, we had people to look after, whereas the rest of the world was just standing there watching, and you know, that's horrifying. So we were we were lucky in that we were busy and that we hadn't uh lost anybody, of course. But and that was tough. I went out to talk to the uh the airlines. There were a bunch of people there from American Airlines, and I and they didn't know why they'd been diverted. This is prior to when they had the little machines that would send you know teletypes into the cockpit, and the guys got and they weren't picking anything up enough on on AM radio, and they were they didn't knew something had happened, but they didn't know it was their airplane. So it was that was that was emotional to get on the headset and tell them and and to not know how deep this was going.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Was it just the four airplanes? Was it was it more than that? Like how how how extensive was the plot, right? And yeah, and uh it's easier to go back now and say, well, we knew it was four airplanes, but in in the first 24 hours or the first four hours, we had no idea, right?

SPEAKER_03 26:17

It was uh yeah, like I said, like life-changing, but uh glad to have been there, glad to have helped in some small way.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

Well, uh moving on to happier times, I guess we call it, but you spent some time in the UK uh heading up Peel Airports, and that's a group of s of airports, including Liverpool, but again, quite a contrast from Canada and the Caribbean, and uh gives interesting aspects in everything, but uh must have been some unique and interesting challenges there. Both I would say both personally and professionally, must have been quite a quite an interesting experience, right?

SPEAKER_03 26:50

Oh, yeah. I mean, the when you work with good people and people that are resilient, it makes all the difference. It was tough times. Literally, almost the day I got there, uh Northern England went in, well, went into recession. So it was tough. It was also my first real exposure to working with ultra-low-cost airlines, Ryanair, EasyJet, Wizair.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

And that's it, and that's a joy on to itself, right?

SPEAKER_03 27:13

Sure, different, you know, very, very different. Liver Pudlings, lovely people. I mean, really amazing. And I loved I love the fact that that I basically went from coast to coast. I had Liverpool, and then in the middle in Yorkshire, Doncaster, and Little Durham up uh south of Newcastle. And again, the people that run those airports, fantastic, can do attitude, even in the face of decreasing numbers, which is you know what it was. Um so that's kind of what's was embedded into my my personality. I get ever get another flight, I'm getting on that flight. So when I got back to Vancouver, I think I only missed a couple. The one thing that you do need to do if you're going to those of you who are going to go to Liverpool, is you you had better be a Liverpool fan. You know, I I remember somebody asked me, are you a Liverpool or Everton fan? I said, how many fans in this city are Liverpool? 600,000. How many are Everton? 120? Liverpool.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

You go by the averages, right? So yeah. Well, we we've got the whole football world descending on us here in a couple weeks in Vancouver and Toronto and well, the up and down all of uh the major cities in North America. But I I do think I'm not sure everybody quite appreciates what's what's coming. It's spread out over three countries in 10 or 12 locations, but we had the great privilege of managing the all that general aviation and business traffic in Qatar four years ago. Uh and there's two airports side by side, but it's a tiny country, right? So everybody's coming into those two airports, either as a civilian or coming in as a as a private aircraft. And I think we handled uh it was our good friend Jennifer Dandy that we had managing that because of her experience with the Olympics in um in Vancouver back in 2010, where she did roughly the same job. And actually, Fernando, our partner in London, was uh involved in the 2012 Olympics as well. But she said, you know, over 300 aircraft showing up, private aircraft for a particular match. And you never know, it's it's like rolling dice as to who advances and and who's gonna show up on the day. But when the Saudis won that match against was it Argentina? Yeah, it was, right? And they almost, you know, the place almost went crazy. But then the next, then then the next match for for Saudi, everybody was on their airplane from Riyadh, and we had like wide body wide bodies with six people getting off, but uh yeah, 300 airplanes to handle in a in a couple hours. And I I hope that all the host cities in North America understand that you know, depending on who advances and how this all works out, they're gonna have the world at their doorstep, and you better have lots of capacity and be able to deal with contingencies because it's it's a challenge for sure.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Whole whole new definition of peaks, you know, uh these kind of events, but also an opportunity to shine, you know, and uh and uh I think what has done Vancouver uh very well over the years, things like Expo 86, where the whole world came and said, Hey, this is neat, you know, the Olympics in 2010, uh never forget some of the pictures. I was overseas at the time in in the Bahamas, but seeing the pictures, you know, going out all over the world of Vancouver, I mean, that does not hurt your tourism uh at all. I you know, I hope everybody's ready for it. Be overprepared because as you said, uh as these matches progress, there will be winners and there'll be losers, and all of a sudden everybody from the the winning countries are gonna want to want to get there. Now, a little bit different, you know, coming all the way to North America, but still peaks like you've never seen.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Yeah, it's interesting you say about profiling the city. Anything about Vancouver Expo 86, then reversion of Hong Kong in 97, then the Olympics in 2010, and now here we are 16 years later. 16, yeah, 16 years later, this periodic worldwide exposure, it it really has done a lot to to give the city profile. It also means our our real estate's a little pricey, but uh you gotta take the good. So for sure. So we were talking very briefly about Cyprus, but uh you and I actually share a pin in that map as we talked about. Uh it was a short gig because that's where you got the call to to return back to Vancouver. But you had a chance to get a bit of a taste of things in in Cyprus. And I I really enjoyed my time there, but it wasn't just the work, it was the history of the place. Like it's got thousands of years of history layered on top of it. Did you get a chance to experience much of that?

SPEAKER_03 31:17

A little bit. You know, uh, I was only there for six months. It was bittersweet, you know, because I really liked the place. I love the people, the history. You know, not to mention Cyprus is so uniquely located. My wife and I managed to grab a uh an Emirates flight to Malta. And Malta is one of those places sort of hard to get to, but um, we had a great time there. And and of course, as you say, I mean, uh history goes back, I don't know, eight, nine thousand years, and the Roman uh ruins, everything, we we really loved it. And uh the people were uh exceptionally uh welcoming and and lovely. And frankly, the food, still the best grilled meats in the entire world, are in Cyprus. I'm sorry for anybody here who objects to that, but you can have anything, it's perfectly done, and you can have a salad, and you can have a glass of wine, and it'll cost you like nine euros. And boy, I miss that.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

Yeah, and did you learn the hard way to pace yourself at a mese? Like you nobody tells you that there's an endless plate of small food coming that you better save yourself, right?

SPEAKER_03 32:19

Yeah, it's like going to a banquet in in Japan, and you get a little tiny bowl of rice, you go, I'm gonna starve. And 26 dishes later, you go, Oh my god, my stomach's expanding. But I was there for uh I'll probably mispronounce this for Sidopemte, I think it is. And and the IT guys at Cyprus had this huge barbecue there roasting all the chicken and the lamb and the beef, and it was wafting into the building. And I think they did it on a purpose because all the windows are open, and then they kept the thing kept coming out. It'll be 15 more minutes, 10 more minutes, 20 more minutes, and people are give me that food.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

And there's these uh homemade barbecues, they're made out of checker plate, and they've got rotisserie and they hook them up to a battery, and it's it's like a whole production. And I brought one back, and every once in a while you'll take it out to the beach, and people are walking by, like, where do I buy that? Well, hop on an airplane and and go down a back alley in Atlanta.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

So yeah, I know a guy in Paphos, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

The other thing I I do recall quite vividly is arriving there. I'd left left Jamaica on a Friday with my wife, and and the dog was meant to come with us, but she couldn't couldn't get on the airplane, do a paperwork. She came about a week later, but we arrive, and 10 days later, we take over two airports, and three weeks later, I get this weird call from the station manager of Middle East Airlines. He was my neighbor, got to know him early on, and his name is Nabil. He calls me and says, Do you have room to park an A330 and A321s? And I said, Yeah, I can talk to Miltos, our guy, my ops guy, but you know, what's going on? He goes, Well, I can't tell you, but check the check the news in the morning and you'll understand. So I call Miltos, I tell him the same thing. He asks the same questions, why and for how long? And I finally uh I said, Well, this is what he told me. Uh, check your news in the morning. I check the news in the morning, and Israel has bombed Lebanon. It was the start of the war in 2006, right? So I call him, I said, Nabil, okay, now I understand why we've we parked these airplanes, but you're the station manager of of Middle East Airlines owned by Beirut and by Lebanon. How did you get a heads up that there was going to be military action the next day? He says, Very simple, my friend. Our airplanes are insured by an Israeli insurer.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

Yeah, it's it's interesting. You see you get a better appreciation for how the world works when you're when you're out and about and and doing things that that you never thought you'd be doing when you're working in places like Abbotsford or Nanaimo for sure.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

So and I and I I would say to any young person listening to this, if you get an opportunity to work overseas, uh if you can all swing it, do it. When you come back to your original country, and it may not come come back as a CEO, but you may come to a different airport, whatever. But getting that perspective, that international perspective, even understanding different accounting rules, understanding the different EASA versus uh FAA versus Transport Canada versus you know uh Ministry of Transport in the U UK every time is a little bit different, and it just helps expand your your knowledge base and and it's fun. You know, let's face it, it's fun to to uh live overseas.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Well, you just get you get to experience the place as the people, not as not as a tourist. And the three tours abroad that we did together over that eight and a half years, though, you know, those are the the most challenging but the most rewarding times in our life. And and the people that you meet, like it's like casting seeds in the wind. That now anybody that was working in those three projects is living somewhere else, working somewhere else. And so almost everywhere we travel, and I'm sure you find the same, you end up knowing somebody somewhere, and and then that that echo is there because then you're getting to experience another place through the eyes of of the friends that are living there now. So it's not easy, it's not for everybody, but I I wouldn't trade it for the world.

SPEAKER_03 36:13

I think it's career-making and it gives you a uh a sense of resilience, you know. Uh that that uh if you only stayed at the same place, you know, uh in the same airport, you you wouldn't, you it doesn't mean you're not resilient, but you wouldn't have the same sense of of okay, I I can do I can do this, I can do almost anything because I've seen some pretty crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

And there's the resilience part, but there's also the appreciating uh your country as well. Like I came back much more appreciative of of being uh uh a red-blooded Canadian. Yeah, but but we also won't complain about the first world problems that we have. Like I'll never complain about a pothole or that the police didn't come in 30 seconds, or or I lost my cable or my my internet for 30 minutes. You learn how to adapt and and you see people, you know, uh Jamaicans are better at responding to a uh hurricane than anybody I've ever seen because they've lived through not just hurricanes, but just you know, a nor normal course of the day, losing water, losing power, and and you adapt and and you learn that resilience uh and sort of day-to-day living as well. So we're we're getting close to the end here, and I was interested to hear your view getting a little extraterrestrial at the end. You're an ex-Canadian Air Force pilot and lots of interest in in military and space, but I thought you might you might have some thoughts on this Artemis II mission and what you think it means. It's you know, it's been 50 years since we've been back there, but be kind of interested to hear what you have to say.

SPEAKER_03 37:43

Oh, it's just fascinating. You know, uh there's an amazing graphic put out, it showed uh the trajectory of how to go to the moon. It's not like driving, you know, in a straight line. These these bodies are orbiting around each other, and it's a bunch of loops as these things are happening. As Gretzky said, you know, you don't go to where the puck is, you go to where it's going to be. If the moon's over there over there, you fight you you fire yourself over there so you can intercept it. So the math is incredible. The celestial mechanics. Uh, I would say this, I mean, it really gives you an appreciation for the Apollo missions that did it with like eight kilobit computers, you know, and and uh and without a lot of backup compared to what they have now.

SPEAKER_02 38:20

Our cell phones have more computing power than whatever they have on those moon landers. It's it's insane, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:26

Yeah, so we have a lot high higher technology, but uh still you're a long ways from home. You know, you're 240,000, 250,000 miles from home. There's no hope of rescue at this point if you if something screws up. So a lot of you know, a lot of uh respect for the astronauts, and of course, the whole point of this is to actually uh establish a base on the moon, which would be amazing, and about 50 years late compared to what I thought it would be, you know. Uh, but uh but I think it'll it'll it'll happen, and it'll happen with any luck in our lifetime. I think obviously that's what they were doing. They're getting ready, you know, to to to do that. And uh anyway, shout out to to our uh Canadian F-18 pilot that uh was on that uh on that mission. So pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

Yeah, yeah, he's he's done us all proud. And uh if you get a chance and anybody that's listening and you're interested in in space, there's a series called For All Mankind, and it starts in the it starts in the 60s, and the premise is effectively what if the space race had never ended and it kept on going and things would look very differently, and it it tracks some of the history, but then it diverts, and it's really worth the listen. So I'd encourage everybody to, you know, you got to invest uh a few a few months of your time to get through it all, but it but it's good stuff. Okay, um, we're now down to the the final segment, Craig. And this is what we call the magic mirror. It's peering into the the the heart of your being, for lack of a better word. It's 15 very carefully selected scientific, pseudoscientific uh questions. Start with one that I well, especially for you, I'd love to hear the answer. Favorite aircraft, civilian or military, current or historical?

SPEAKER_03 40:08

Uh well, the aircraft is a uh is a uh plural. So I would say personally, although the F-18 was amazing, and I love the F-18. You uh Hemenway said you know, you you can only lose your heart once to an airplane uh and it was a star fighter. So it was uh the F-104. I flew, it was uh one of the last courses on the Canadian F-104, second last. And uh when you lose your heart to an airplane like that, it was amazing for its day. The F-18 was amazing. Historically, and again as a fighter pilot, the Hawker Hurricane, the super the uh Spitfire, Supermarine Spitfire gets all the glory, but the Hawker Hurricane was there in in uh numbers uh when it was needed, and I've always wanted to fly that airplane. So there's there's three.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

Well, I'll I'll give you my three. The Mustang, the Spitfire, and I never got to never got to ride on the Concorde.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

So yeah. I had a ticket once and it got yanked and I got put on uh 747 and I was pretty disappointed.

SPEAKER_02 41:11

Well, I I hope we live to see the moon base, and I also hope to see a return of supersonic commercial flight again, but uh let's see, right? Lots of lots of advances and all that, so uh all we can do is be hopeful. So how about apples or oranges? Oranges coffee or tea? Coffee and flat or sparkling. Flat Okay, so the Europeans didn't have too much influence on you. That's good. Uh preference cats or dogs.

SPEAKER_03 41:43

Dogs.

SPEAKER_02 41:49

And for good reason, especially when they're hungry. Favorite classic car. Yes. Particular model or just in general? James Bond. Of course. Of course.

SPEAKER_03 42:02

I don't know what the model number is, but I wonder if you have a seat.

SPEAKER_02 42:05

Yeah, yeah. Famous, well, here's a good one. Famous person, living or dead, you'd like to have dinner with.

SPEAKER_03 42:12

Oh, that's a good one. Jacqueline Cochran. A lot of people don't know of her. Female test pilot, should have been an astronaut, but you know, just wasn't possible due to uh the the time she was living in. But uh I've always thought she would have been a fascinating to talk to.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

Well, I think they might have used her and in that program uh where they were training female astronauts back in the 60s in this for all mankind, because they eventually do send them and it changes everything, right? So I won't give away the rest of that plot. How about greatest fear?

SPEAKER_03 42:45

Oh, that's a good one. You know, um I fear the voice in me that sometimes counsels surrender. But you know, that sometimes that little voice says, No, you can't do this, give up, you know. That's I I I don't want to, but every once in a while everybody has that little voice saying, you know, should back off, shouldn't do that. So that's probably it. I don't I'm not really afraid of any uh I mean I have I have a healthy respect for rattlesnakes, bears where I live on a mountain in the Soyuz, you know, I have a healthy respect for them, but I'm not afraid of them, and and I don't get icked out by by spiders. I I would say the closest thing, maybe and you've you've uh been in the tropics, centipedes, not my favorite.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We they call them 40 leggers in Jamaica, the crimson red, and oh man. So yeah. But that little voice you were talking about, that it it the problem is it gets louder as you get older, too, right?

SPEAKER_03 43:40

But yeah, well that's because you're smarter, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:43

Yeah, you start to learn a few things along the way, thank God.

SPEAKER_03 43:46

You can't do this, old man. Oh yeah? That's always a dangerous combination when you're skiing or something. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

Favorite dessert?

SPEAKER_03 43:56

Oh, I certainly do like a good rum cake. That would be a Bahamian. Uh thing, but also key lime pie.

SPEAKER_02 44:03

Oh, yes. Two very good choices. I'll take you up on the next dinner together. Earliest memory.

SPEAKER_03 44:09

Oh, that's a good one. You mean today or in general? I think in general was the intent. This is gonna sound funny uh or odd, I guess, given that I love dogs, but I do have a memory of a dog biting me when I was about four. So there you go.

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Well, um that that would stick in your mind.

SPEAKER_03 44:27

You can get past these things.

SPEAKER_02 44:30

Absolutely. Most used app on your phone, excluding WhatsApp or Outlook.

SPEAKER_03 44:34

It's a uh weather app called Windy. And I find it it's really good. It combines a lot of things, and because I live not in a town, I live up on a mountain, it combines a lot of different things to give you a really good forecast, um, which is not easy to forecast weather. You know, I'm at like uh what 1200 meters. So um, you know, people around here say it's foggy. I'm going, that's not fog, that's cloud.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

So in the clouds, absolutely. Yeah, there's another one that I've been using a fair bit. It's a star tracker map, and it there's a couple different ones out there, but yeah, they're really good.

SPEAKER_03 45:09

Yeah, you should see the stars up here at 1200 meters with no light noise, you know, from the city, and a clear on a clear night. It is uh I've never seen the Milky Way like this.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

Absolutely. No, it's uh when you get away from the city and all that light pollution, it's it's got to be amazing. So favorite movie of all time Blade Runner. That's come up before with with one of my other guests, and it's it's one of the ones my wife and I, it's it's something we go back to every three or four years. It's brilliant and it's really well done.

SPEAKER_03 45:42

And you know, the sequel was really good. You know, that you you worry about sequels, and just like Dune 1 and 2, I was not disappointed. Uh, I was not disappointed by the Blade Runner sequel, and uh hats off to Ryan Gosling. He did a great job.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Now, here's the difficult one. You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life. What is it?

SPEAKER_03 46:04

You know what? Probably uh it's gotta be classical, but I would say a new classic would be Rhapsody and Blue by Gershwin.

SPEAKER_02 46:13

Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah, that uh that would work. Now, the impossible question. I'm thinking of a number between one and one hundred, and it has some relevance to what we talked about today.

SPEAKER_03 46:24

Oh boy. Six.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

Oh, you were so close. It was seven.

unknown 46:29

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

Because because you had two runs in and out of of Vancouver of seven years, right?

SPEAKER_03 46:36

Oh, there you go. I was thinking of you and I both had it off in 06. You just guess as well.

SPEAKER_02 46:41

But um, yeah, but yeah, a couple people guessed it right so far. Elizabeth Brown being the first. She guessed 67 because that happens to be the same year we were both born. So that was that was a pretty good shot in the dark.

SPEAKER_03 46:52

Uh, you know what? Uh I'll have to uh give her a heck about it next time I see her. Thanks for making it look bad.

SPEAKER_02 46:58

Okay, second to last question favorite place you've ever visited, and the top bucket list destination you'd like to see.

SPEAKER_03 47:05

The I'll do the bucket list first. Wendy and I are gonna go to Japan for a good long holiday. I've always I've been there many times on business, but not enough time to really enjoy it. And uh so probably gonna do a three-week my brother and my son ski up in in Hokkaido. You've never seen snow like that. I've never seen snow like that. So I I'm really keen to uh to explore Japan. You know, um so many favorite places, uh and it it's like it's like seeing a favorite food because you know it's so good. But I have to say, one of the most stunningly beautiful places I've ever been. It's like uh Okanagan Lake, for those of you who understand Canada, but in in Italy, Lake Como. Lake Como is just gorgeous. You know, I was there with uh seven other people, we were renting a villa, and we get up in the morning with a coffee, sitting about a hundred meters up from the you know, from the the water, and everybody sit there with a coffee, and nobody would say anything, just staring at this beautiful lake with the villas and the little you know the little villages dotted along the lake and the Alps in the background. Oh man, it uh it's just literally you can see why for thousands of years the Roman emperors would go there just to chill out.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Literally, literally awestruck, right? Yeah, uh I have not made it there, but uh that should be on the list. Although Hokkaido will be heading there in October for Gad Asia. So um fantastic. Let's meet up in Hokkaido. Okay, so uh final question: your personal mantra in 10 words or less.

SPEAKER_03 48:38

Uh La Das, La Das, toujours la das. Audacity, audacity, always audacity. Uh, I think that was Charlemagne's uh uh motto.

SPEAKER_02 48:48

Okay, well, I I do not have that history committed to memory, but I'll take your word for it. But it's you know, you need a good dose of that to get through life, so I I think it served you well.

SPEAKER_03 49:00

Yeah, you know, it's amazing what you can do if you don't hold yourself back and you're not looking to take the credit. And uh and that's uh it's been an amazing career, and it's not over. You know, I'm still uh enjoying doing all kinds of work. Uh and uh and the nice thing about you know, when you get to be my age is you can pick and choose. So for those of you starting out in aviation, and there are tough times and we've we've all gone through them, but what an amazing career. Uh, you know, for a skinny kid from Kamloops, uh, look that up on a map for those of you who are overseas, you know, who've done the things that I've done. It I feel pretty uh pretty privileged and and lucky and proud. You know, uh luck's part of it. You gotta have good luck. But you know, when somebody comes to you and you already have a fantastic job, some might say the best VP job in the world, and somebody says, Do you want to go to the Bahamas and start up a company and build a terminal?

SPEAKER_02 49:49

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure, absolutely. Well, when the audience is looking up where Kamloops is, which is maybe the size of a silver dollar, I'll ask them to look for Vybank Saskatchewan, which is the size of a penny. Uh a tiny little place in in southern Saskatchewan. But yeah, it's like sometimes you pinch yourself, like, how did you end up here from from some farm kid in Saskatchewan? Well, you just take one step at a time and and you you don't know what you don't know, so you just keep on going, right?

SPEAKER_03 50:18

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

Well, Craig, it's it's been a pleasure. Great catching up with you here, and I'm sure we'll catch up live soon enough somewhere, but it remains to be seen exactly where, but I look forward to it.

SPEAKER_03 50:28

You bet. Great talking to you. Thanks, and uh look forward to uh to all of these. Uh they're great. It's great listening to people. Uh I like I'm glad that you're doing this.

SPEAKER_02 50:37

So appreciate it, and it's it's really been a joy. So uh we'll keep it coming.

SPEAKER_03 50:42

You bet.

SPEAKER_02 50:43

Talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 50:49

Thanks for joining us on Open Mic. If today's conversation sparked ideas or questions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit airportIR.com forward slash open mic to listen to more episodes, connect with our team, and stay informed about the global aviation developments that matter to you.