INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT By Mark Cardwell
Turbulent times
Rigid laws, rules, and regulations can make it impossible to enter into life-saving mergers or find financing to survive in the highly competitive and vulnerable aviation industry.
Rob Donald was in private practice as a corporate litigator and partner in a Montreal law firm when he was hired by a British company in 1992 to help it retrieve a big Boeing jet it had leased to a Canadian firm in a deal gone south. "It was the first time I'd ever dealt with aviation law," he recalls. "But the complexity of the case was extraordin- ary — trying to seize an aircraft that was flying around the world. It really hooked me."
After getting himself hired as gen-
eral counsel of the International Air Transport Association, an industry organization that represents more than 200 airlines that account for 93 per cent of scheduled international air traffic, Donald spent the next decade running the legal affairs of the Montreal- and Geneva-based organization as well as its subsidiaries in more than 80 countries. He also acted as IATA's legal adviser to international aviation conferences and
industry task forces that recommended practices and/or provided legal frame- works on everything from electronic ticketing and the use of GPS and satel- lite technology in commercial aircraft to international competition laws. "This is a large and fascinating area
of law that is truly global in scope," says Donald, now counsel in the Calgary office of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, where, among other things, he acts for a consortium of cargo carriers in
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