Pem-Air
Open-knowledge reference entry
Pem-Air (from 1970 until 2002) was an aviation company based out of the Pembroke Airport.
History
Pem-Air began flying as a Class II scheduled airline in 1970. Its first employee was John Smithman, a former RCAF pilot from Montreal, who had been flying as a captain with RoyalAir Ltd. a short-service airline based at the Montreal's Dorval airport. RoyalAir had been providing passenger services for Pembroke until it went bankrupt in 1969. John was a captain with RoyalAir and when he heard that Del O'Brien, a Pembroke Lawyer and 9 other investors wanted to build an airline to replace RoyalAir's services, he drove to Pembroke to meet with Del O'Brien. He offered to help Del and his partners obtain the appropriate licenses from Canada's Ministry of Transportation.
Within a few months, the licenses were issued and the airline began flying daily flights to and from Toronto. They purchased one Beech 18 aircraft and leased another as backup from St. Catherines' Meisner brothers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pem-Air” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.