Fectau Transport was a minefinders airline

It would be hard to put numbers on it, but bush pilots and the air services a lot of them have launched across Canada have played a tremendously vital role in the finding and development of this country’s mineral resources.

One such aviation and mining pioneer was Arthur Fecteau, a relatively obscure French Canadian, who for the busy years in the 1950s and ’60s when copper was king in the area, ran an air service in northwestern Quebec described by prospectors, geologists and mining executives who used it as a standard by which they measured all other air services across Canada.

They compare Fecteau’s operation to the flying service started by Max Ward now known as Wardair, at Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, in the years just after World War II when, as Ward tells The Northern Miner, “mining was our life blood,” and Yellowknife was strictly a mining town.

Fecteau died just before Christmas last year, at the age of 77, at a health clinic in Alabama, where he had gone for treatment of a heart defect.

Some 20 years before his death he sold his air service, known as A. Fecteau Transport Aerien, to Quebec Air, but not before that service had grown from a 1-airplane operation in 1936 to a major service using more than 24 aircraft, and dozens of pilots, flying out of bases at Senneterre and Chibougamau — rich copper and precious metal country.

Fecteau Transport in fact became known as “the mine finders’ airline,” and was in on the action on many exploration and development projects in the area, leading to such base metal successes as that of Opemiska Copper Mines an d Lake Dufault Mines (later incorporated into Corporation Falconbridge Copper).

Fecteau, a native of Ste. Marye, southeast of Quebec City, actually started his business with one airplane (a Travelair) and nothing but a few Indian trappers and the fur trade to sustain him.

But after World War II, as activity intensified in exploration and mining development in the district, the bulk of his flying traffic came from prospectors, geologists and other mining men and their supplies.

J. T. Flanagan, president of Muscocho Explorations, remembers Fecteau well.

Flanagan flew many times with Fecteau Transport, and considered the operation second to none. “We used to measure all air service by Fecteau, ” he said, a view seconded by John McAdam, president of McAdam Resources, who, along with other McAdam personnel, flew hundreds of times with Fecteau and other Fecteau pilots.

McAdam says a valuable characteristic of Fecteau and most of his pilots in the 50s and 60s was that they had bush sense, an attribute he doubts many pilots have today.

“Fecteau was the best bush operator in Canada, bar none,” says Leo Lejeune, a former pilot with Fecteau, and now chief pilot, water bombing division, of the Quebec government air service.

Though not a well-educated or even very literate man, Fecteau was an excellent pilot, a good organizer and a sound businessman, who insisted on the best flying equipment, the best pilots, and the best in maintenance, for his operation.

“Arthur was a real entrepreneur, an excellent businessman,” says Ward. Ward especially remembers Fecteau’s coup in acquiring the first civilian-operated single-engine Otter aircraft from de Havilland of Canada, just hours before Ward himself was able to take delivery of a similar aircraft for his mining air service at Yellowknife.

When Fecteau sold his company to Quebec Air in 1967, he continued to work with the new owner as a consultant, but by 1969 he had permanently retired and began spending about six months of each year in Hawaii, (home then, and still, of another well-known Canadian bush pilot who served the mining industry, W. (Babe) Woollett).

A regular visitor to the Prospectors and Developers Association annual meetings, Fecteau, it is said, probably knew as many as 30% of the attendees at those meetings.

He’ll be missed there, this year.