Terry Baker is the NetLetter's historian and finds and scans photos of people and aircraft from the earlier years of aviation. He is also our resident travel expert, with great knowledge on cruises and especially London, etc. He has taken many trips since retiring and is excellent at finding good deals wherever he goes.
Terry's Bio
My career in aviation started when I left school at 15 years of age and joined K.L.M. (Royal Dutch Airlines) in London, England as an office clerk in 1948.
Before joining Trans-Canada Air Lines I was conscripted into the R.A.F. in 1951 and served most of my time in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa. On being demobilized in 1954 I joined B.E.A. (British European Airways) as a baggage tracer.
In April, 1954 I joined Trans-Canada Air Lines as an office clerk and then in 1958 transferred to the Purchases & Stores Dept, where I was heavily involved in the purchase of spares for the Viscount, Vanguard aircraft and the Dart and Conway engines. I went from office boy to Office Manager by 1962.
In 1963 I was the project leader in LHR for the incident known as the the 'Cabbage Patch' project, which involved the repairing of the DC8 which was damaged there that year.
In 1965 I transferred to Dorval, Canada and worked as a clerk maintaining the computerized inventory records. In 1968 I transferred to the computer section, first as a programmer, and ending up as a Project Leader on Inventory and Maintenance systems. Then in 1972, I had a 9 month stint in Antigua, running the computer section of L.I.A.T. (Leeward Island Air Transport), the local commuter airline serving the Caribbean. That secondment was under the auspices of CANAC, a government operated division to which both Air Canada and Canadian National Railways supplied expertise to emerging nations of the world in the transportation field.
My career with Air Canada ended in December, 1984, when I took a severance package. I was very proud to receive the "Award of Excellence" from Air Canada.
After retiring from Air Canada I went on to work the next 5 years as a consultant for, at various times, Nationair, Peoples Express, Frontier Airlines, Nordair, Alaska Airlines, Republic Airlines, Aer Lingus and Canadian Pacific Airlines. I specialized in the implementation of inventory and maintenance control software, loading data and training. You may note that many of those airlines have now gone "bust"!
I permanently retired from the work force in 1989 from Execaire in Dorval who had a fleet of some 20 executive jets operating under the Bronfman empire. They owned 14 Hawker 128 twin jets, 2 Falcon tri jets and several other aircraft types. I wrote inventory and maintenance software on the min-computers, we sold and implemented that software to 10 different companies who operated their own executive jet fleet including Dow Chemical, ARAMCO, Fletcher Challenge, Horizon Airlines, and Boise Idaho among others.
In May of 1990 I moved to Nanaimo/Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, where my wife and I worked as hobby potters, and enjoying all the good things in life. My whole career was spent in the area of recording the inventory and the maintenance of aircraft units, some 42 years.
Terry
(last updated February 2016)