Rubbery chicken? Soggy spaghetti? Airplane food usually gets a bad rap.
But the grocery store freezer sections of this Canadian territory’s capital tell a different story. Here, the local airline sells its in-flight meals, including lobster mac and cheese and bison shepherd’s pie.
It’s a window into the remarkable popularity of Air North.
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When is an airline more than an airline? When it’s a source of civic pride like the homegrown, partially Indigenous-owned Air North, in the Canadian territory of Yukon.
While most airlines feel the brunt of disgruntled travelers’ complaints – cramped seats they had to pay to select, and subpar food they no longer get for free – Yukon’s half Indigenous-owned, homegrown airline is the pride of the territory.
“We looove Air North,” says Sharon Riordon, who works in a tourism office on the riverfront in Whitehorse, selling scenic railway tickets to Skagway, Alaska.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
I admit I asked her about the airline, but plenty of people brought it up without prompting. When I made preparatory phone calls for a reporting trip to the Yukon, in Canada’s far northwest, interviewees, including a former premier, kept mentioning Air North. Then I stumbled upon a column in the local newspaper hailing the letters that Air North President Joseph Sparling pens to his customers in each issue of the in-flight magazine.
I had to learn more. I wrote the media department the day before I arrived; I was in Mr. Sparling’s offices next to Whitehorse International Airport the day after.
Mr. Sparling co-founded Air North in 1977 as a small charter operation. Today it employs 400 people and offers flights across the Yukon and other parts of Canada.
The airline maintains a small-company feel. On a tour of its premises, Mr. Sparling, who still pilots the occasional route, is greeted in each department with a “Hi, Joe.” He runs into a bookkeeper on her last day of work before leaving to raise her children, and tells her that she can come back when she’s ready. He asks another employee about his children’s softball game the evening before.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Air North was voted the world’s second-most-popular airline by Fortune magazine readers in 2016; Tripadvisor named it the Travellers’ Choice Best Airline in Canada in 2020.
Part of why Yukoners love it is that they’ve helped shape its growth. When the airline was expanding service to Alberta 20 years ago, they had to decide between routes to the oil capital Calgary or the administrative capital Edmonton. So they ran a survey in the local newspaper. The results were split down the middle, so the airline expanded to both cities, and still serves both equally.
When Mr. Sparling’s co-founder wanted out of the business toward the end of the 1990s, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, who reside in the community of Old Crow, invested in the company. Today their development corporation owns 49% of it.
Their interest was personal. The only “fly-in” community in the Yukon, Old Crow lies above the Arctic Circle, over 60 miles from the nearest highway. Residents depend on the airline for everything from travel to groceries to furniture delivery.
Their partnership helps keep the business accountable to the isolated community, says Mr. Sparling, and ensure it offers reliable service on less cost-effective routes alongside those southward that generate more revenue. It also points to growing Indigenous economic power in the Yukon.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
But in many ways Air North is still decidedly old-school. More than 50% of customers purchase tickets through the tiny call center instead of buying them online. Many customers drive to the airport, about 10 minutes from downtown, where the sales desk helps them buy a ticket on the website and then prints it out.
“Dynamic pricing” is not Air North’s business model. The company does not jack up the price of last-minute purchases, because Yukoners usually make them out of necessity, not on a whim. “It’s not because we are ‘nice guys.’ It’s because we live here,” says Mr. Sparling. “Otherwise I’d be getting phone calls at home.”
There are no TV screens behind the seats. But there is legroom. And flights still offer food. This reporter tried the bison’s shepherd pie on a recent leg. A signature offering is a warm chocolate chip cookie. That was Mr. Sparling’s wife’s idea, he says, because she liked the idea of cookie aroma filling the cabin.
“And you can check in two bags for no fee,” says Ms. Riordon.
Of course, this is still an airline. No air travel is fun. I tried to find naysayers. The closest I came was an Indigenous leader who griped that the route stopping near her remote community had closed after miners stopped using it during the pandemic.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
In fact, mining helps keep air prices low, Mr. Sparling explained in one of his magazine columns. It wasn’t a piece arguing for or against mining – a controversial subject in the Yukon. It simply explained to customers how the airline business works.
It’s a piece that Keith Halliday, who writes the award-winning column Yukonomist for the Yukon News, cited in his column as “first-rate economic analysis” that provides “fact-filled answers to airline questions you didn’t know you had.”
Over coffee in Whitehorse, Mr. Halliday muses, “He’s my biggest competition.”
