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Calm Air carries with it the chance for adventure

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This article was published 10/03/2026 (207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By the time Kris Young Tenn joined Calm Air International LP in 1995, she was already well travelled. She’d been a flight attendant for five years in her native Jamaica. But Calm Air, a Winnipeg-based regional airline serving northern Manitoba and Nunavut, “was very different than what I was used to flying before,” she says. The camaraderie was extraordinary. “Everybody knew everybody. It was just a really close, relationship-based company.”

The founder and owner at the time, Arnold Morberg, would greet and kiss the hands of the flight attendants every time he boarded a plane. He also made sure the carrier was deeply embedded in the remote communities for which Calm Air serves as a lifeline to the outside world.

It was a revelation for Young Tenn to go to places far off the beaten path and to experience the meaning of community there. One Christmas, she volunteered to help serve a company-sponsored feast in Sanikiluaq, an island village in Hudson Bay.

“It was very humbling but at the same time enjoyable. What was most enjoyable was that they all recognized me from being on my flights, including the kids. It was so nice to see everybody and visit with them in a less professional environment,” she says.

Having that face-to-face connection with northern communities is a unique bonus of working with Calm Air, agrees Bridget Anderson, the airline’s director of customer service. She’s attended everything from Calm Air-sponsored sports tournaments to demonstrations of igloo building. “The community-mindedness is sometimes very different than at some of our southern locations,” she says.

The chance for adventure working with Calm Air comes along with a competitive suite of benefits, including pension plan, employee share ownership plan (with parent company Exchange Income Corp.), parental leave top-up pay, $1,000 per year in mental health practitioner funding and an employee family assistance program.

As with most airlines, flight benefits are a popular perk; Calm Air offers free and discounted standby and confirmed flights for employees and their families — not only on its own routes but also with around 50 aviation partners across Canada and worldwide. The benefits extend to freight shipments too. Some employees use it to send fresh groceries to their families up north.

With over 600 employees and a wide variety of teams from reservations and customer service to mechanical and in-flight crews, Calm Air can offer completely new opportunities to long-time employees and backs it up with job shadowing experiences and paid training. The company even has a Pilot Pathway program for aspiring aviators: “It’s a pretty huge moment when we have a team member who started in our reservations department and one day is one of our pilots operating one of our scheduled flights,” Anderson says.

The company takes the position that it’s better to offer employees new challenges than to see them grow stale and leave.

“It’s a huge win for the organization if we can keep their knowledge and expertise,” Anderson says. That helps explain the long tenures of many employees. “We celebrate not just five- and 10-year anniversaries but 15-, 20-, 25-year anniversaries more often than most organizations, I think.”

Young Tenn, a 30-year employee, says the cheery, helpful, community-minded culture that Morberg instilled in Calm Air has been deliberately maintained since Exchange Income took over in 2009. “It doesn’t just happen within us,” she says. “It trickles down from the top.”