Wendy Tayler at an airstrip outside Whitehorse (that’s a Twin Otter in the background)Chris MacArthur
The planes never stop coming and going outside Wendy Tayler's window. Spend an hour in her office at Whitehorse's Erik Nielsen International Airport, and you'll see everything from a Cessna two-seater to a Boeing 737 rolling by en route to takeoff or shedding speed after landing. And no, says Tayler, it doesn't matter how long you stay in that office: She's never stopped being transfixed by the planes.
Tayler is the 41-year-old president and majority owner of Whitehorse-based Alkan Air, a 12-plane operation that has become the Yukon's pre-eminent charter service. She's worked in plenty of industries besides aviation: She's run a cable company and a radio station, owned a hotel, and worked in real estate and retail. She owns the local Ford dealership. But aviation, Tayler says, is "by far my first love.…It really does get in your blood, and without a blood transfusion you can't get rid of it."
She got her first taste of the industry in 1994, arriving at Alkan as a young mother schooled in accounting. The company was founded by a trio of Yukoners with a few planes in 1977—"the three of them sat around with the phone in the middle of the desk and waited for it to ring," Tayler says, citing company lore—and grew through the late 1980s, expanding from charters to medevac contracts and scheduled passenger flights from Whitehorse to the Yukon's far-flung smaller communities.
By the time Tayler signed on, the scheduled service was fading out—mine closures and reduced traffic meant that regular flights to villages like Faro or Mayo made less and less sense. That's when Alkan Air took on its current, specialized form, as an air charter service devoted to serving the mining and exploration industries, and government.
After starting out in accounts receivable, Tayler spent seven years working her way through the company, making herself useful and learning about all aspects of the business. "I built our first website, I worked in operations, I did all of the accounting," she says. "When a company's that small, you get an opportunity to do a little bit of everything." In 2001, she moved on to the Hougen Group of Companies, a family-owned hydra of Yukon businesses whose roots reach back to the 1940s. It was at Hougen that she learned the ropes of radio, cable, retail, real estate and automotive sales.
By 2007, one of Alkan's original owners was looking to sell his shares and retire. Together with long-time Alkan pilot and minority partner Hugh Kitchen, Tayler bought in. She was back in the flying business.
Tayler returned to the charter business at a wild time. Gold prices spiked in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, and from 2009 to 2011 the Yukon found itself in the grip of a massive mining exploration boom. Alkan's flight hours increased 40% in 2011 alone, Tayler says—"which you can appreciate is a challenge when you've got a set number of aircraft to work with."
That challenge—matching aircraft to demand—remains the biggest one Tayler faces each year. "At the start of the year, we need to look in our crystal ball and try to predict how much flying all the different exploration properties are going to do, what the price of gold is going to be, and how much traffic we're likely to see—and then we have to plan our fleet around that," she says. "So if we think it's going to be busier than our current fleet is, we have to go out and invest in a million, million-and-a-half-dollar aircraft, get the aircrew for it, get them trained, get everybody online. Then everybody's here and the aircraft's parked here and you're waiting to see if you were right.…You are forced to make decisions that are capital-intensive well before you know for sure what the market will do."
Alkan's long-standing medevac contract makes it easier for Tayler to make those million-dollar gambles. Since 1986, the company has provided air ambulance services to Yukoners, flying them from the territory's remote communities into Whitehorse General Hospital—and, when necessary, from the hospital south to Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton. The contract forms between 40% and 50% of Alkan's business. The company has three planes and dedicated aircrew on standby 24 hours a day; Tayler estimates that they fly 40 to 45 medevacs each month.
On both sides of the business, Tayler focuses on providing seamless, trouble-free service to the client. For instance, the company installed several large freezers and fridges alongside its hangars, so that groceries won't spoil before they're flown out to crews in the field. And on the medevac side, Alkan is having a "bariatric door" installed in one of its air ambulance planes, at its own expense—as Tayler explains delicately, an increasing number of North American patients don't easily fit through the standard door of a small aircraft.
Not long after she returned to Alkan, Tayler got her private pilot's licence. She did it, she says, both for personal and professional reasons. Flying had its hooks in her, but also, she wanted to understand what her employees were up against. ("Fuelling an airplane at minus 40? It's awful," she says, laughing.)
That obsessive attention to detail is something Hugh Kitchen has been marvelling at ever since Tayler's earliest days in accounts receivable. "She's a quick study," he says. "Give her a few days, and she'll have it figured out."