Part Ten
The family of Mah Bon Quen
In 1949 Al Mah came home. It had been five long years since he went to China a pilot of the China National Aviation Corporation. He had seen many friends lost, had seen China torn apart through the years of Japanese occupation—and then, as a CATC. pilot. during the bitter Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists. Now he returned to a Canada changed by both the Second World War and the Cold War that followed.
Mah was no stranger to forming airlines. because he was flying at a pioneering lime when airlines were springing up. and often folding, in every part of the world. In 1945 he had been a founding partner of the National Skyways Freight Corporation—later the Flying Tiger Line, and now owned by Federal Express). In 1950. he and fellow C.N.A.C. veteran Tommy Wong started up on their own in Montreal, They owned the airplanes at the Curtis Reid Company, doing charters, In 1951 he went back to Taiwan for part of the year. working for the Flying Tiger Line—we carried animals and so on for Disney , and things like that”
Al Mah is coy about much of his post-China career. Take, for example. a two year stint in continental Europe beginning in 1962. 1 was getting some things done. he says I was at the military bases, and running around. The guys wanted me to do something. I can’t really say what I was doing.
One incident that made headlines in 1955 was his attempt to create a mercenary airforce similar to the old Flying Tigers, based in Formosa and flying F 86 Sabre jets and prop-driven planes against the spread of communism in southeast Asia. This was the Canadian version of an initiative spearheaded by Genera] Claire Chennault of Flying Tiger fame. Mah was vice-president of the China National Aviation Association. which had backed Chennault’s plan. Nothing came of the scheme, and Mah turned to the Arctic. “ I flew on the DEW
Line when we were starting it. Mah says. I was in Hollywood, and Herb Jones-he started Maritime Central in New Brunswick, he and Carl Burton--and Jonesy says, ‘Come up here, we’re starting the DEW Line.’ So I came tip March of ‘55. stayed through much of the year before I went back to Hollywood in the autumn. When we went up there, geez. the surveyors were freezing their hands. so we’d bring them back, landing on the ice. you know. There was nothing there. Later In March. back in Churchill. I was in my underwear, it was so hot. And then It would get freezing at night. I was the only one doing the lateral trips between the sites, in an amphibian PBY-5A. They wanted me to go back up. but it was a rough kind of living—although the flying was the same as anywhere.”
“I was doing business around then.” Mah says. “I was buying apartment blocks, and this and that, and flying a little bit. After Dien bien Phu, Earthquake McGoon and all my friends started going down there, and Moon Chin says. ‘Al. come back, now.’ I’d phoned him from Montreal. He says. ‘Art Hing. we’re paying him two thousand dollars per trip down there’ So he wanted me to buy him an airplane and send it. but in the end I said no to him. I didn’t want to go back to the Vietnam War because I’d been through three wars already—the Korean War, the Communist Civil War before that, and the Second World War right from start to finish almost.”
The company he had formed with Tommy Wong moved ‘out of Montreal. across the way to the military base, and we were training guys from Zambia and places like that for the federal govern. ment. for the military over there.” Mah also trained NATO pilots from a base north of Winnipeg. “I flew on and off.” Mah remembers. “I flew awhile in the bush as a favour for a friend. From 1971
to 1979 I kept going up north as pilot, to help him with his organization in Tamarac Air Service. We were flying executives of Hydro Quebec up there when they were building all those hydroelectric projects.”
Mah continued to fly—he didn’t retire from commercial flying until the 1980-but his interests began to expand. He began a program in the late 1960s which saw him complete a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Concordia University in 1979. He has been a director of the Sir George Williams Alumni Association at Concordia since 1980. active in the Chinese National Aviation Corporation Association and annual reunions, and has even begun a novel.
In 1995 the United States Air Force finally recognized the service of Captain Al Mah, and belatedly awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal In recognition of meritorious service while participating in the Assam China airlifts. Captain Mah also holds the Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon. World War II Victory Medal, and the Asiatic Campaign Medal with Bronze Service Stars. It is fitting for this aviation pioneer. The Chinese by from Prince Rupert, who trained in open cockpit airplanes with flying helmut and goggles in the 1930’s still flew into Canada’s North when space shuttles were in the news. He has seen many changes around the world: and. in a surprising number of cases, was near the centre of those changes.
“The whole’ world has c hanged since we were kids.’ he says. ‘Not too many people flew. At Los Angeles in 1938 we had movie actors saying that it was too expensive to fly. Nowadays the janitor in the apartmentbuilding I own here flies home to El Salvador at least. once a year. Aviation has taken on a whole new face
NEXT ISSUE: Captain Cedric Mah returned from China in 1945 and entered a distinguished career as a bush pilot in northern Canada. includtnq flying into Kemano during the construction era. One of his most amazing exploits came in
1967. when, with a geologist aboard, he’ crash’landed in the Arctic. and survived 10 days before being rescued.