Meet Abe Silverman: Pilot, parts guru and adventurer

Abe Silverman was about 12 years old when a small airplane landed in a field close to his school in the Sonnenfeld Jewish Colony of Hoffer, Sask. For some reason, this stirred in him a yearning to fly.

“I wanted to become a pilot. If I had had money at the time, I would have purchased a plane ticket, flown to Israel and enlisted in the army to become a fighter pilot.”

Now aged 76, Silverman would go on to accomplish his dream of becoming a pilot, while also starting his own successful aviation business in Edmonton and buying his first plane, a Piper Cherokee 235HP. The decision to become an entrepreneur was a no-brainer for him.

“My inspiration for starting the business was two-fold: my love of flying and the fact I always needed parts for my plane, and it was tough to locate them. So, I combined my passion with a business that seemed practical and sustainable. I started Denny’s Aero in 1983 at Villeneuve Airport and changed the name in 1986 to Global Aircraft Industries Inc. In 2016, I retired and sold the business.”

Global Aircraft Industries became one of the world’s 10 largest aviation companies specializing in the salvage, recovery, storage and trading of aviation-related goods.  Aircraft sales, pilot accessories, aircraft support and aircraft parts made up the bulk of the company’s revenues.

At Global, Silverman always seemed to find himself in the midst of a new adventure–a modern-day, aviation-themed Indiana Jones, so to speak. During one daredevil trip, he flew to South Africa and met his Israeli partner. A few months earlier, a contact had invited him to Angola to possibly buy several airplanes that had been confiscated by the government.

A charter flight was arranged to fly the partners to Angola. But, after their plane was tracked by an anti-aircraft missile battery in Angolan airspace, they were met by military police and immediately taken into custody.

“They threw us in jail,” Silverman recounted. “The conditions were awful. The toilets were overflowing with excrement. I immediately came down with severe stomach problems. The heat was unbearable and the water was vile.”

He was allowed one phone call, and he dialed up a well-connected acquaintance from Calgary.

“Felix Vancol is a Canadian who was married to the daughter of a Col Bonga, a high-ranking Angolan government and military official. I met Vancol at a World Energy Conference in Calgary. I called him and he had his father-in-law rescue us almost 11 hours later.”

Silverman still can’t erase the sights of Angola. “I saw thousands of people on the street, many blind and with legs and arms blown off because of the 12 million land mines that the Cubans planted during the civil war.”

Another adventure occurred while he was flying to a crash site.

“I was flying to the airport in Bonneville, Alta., which is about 250 kilometres northeast of Edmonton. On board was an insurance adjuster. We were on our way to inspect an aircraft that had crash landed. It was a sunny March day when we left the Villeneuve airport. Having checked with aviation weather before departure, I expected an uneventful trip.

“Fifty miles out, there was a solid wall of clouds. As we moved closer, I noticed some ice developing on my windshield. I immediately did a 180 and headed back the way I came. The cloud cover had closed in around me and I could not see the ground or the sky above.

“My eyes went right to the instrument panel and never strayed from the horizontal gyro, the airspeed indicator or the vertical speed indicator. Once I felt comfortable that the aircraft was flying straight and level, I turned my attention to the radios. I switched the radio from the enroute frequency to the Cold Lake Air Force Base frequency, and gratefully received a response.

“I explained my dilemma, not knowing in which direction I should turn the airplane to fly out of this whiteout condition. The air traffic controller who had identified me on radar gave me a compass heading. Ten minutes later, we had blue skies again. During this entire event, the insurance adjuster sat next to me and said nothing. However, it was clear that she was terrified.”

From the day Silverman was born during the Holocaust, his life has always been eventful.

He painfully remembers: “My father was taken away with 3,500 other young Jewish men to a slave labour camp in Bessarabia four months before I was born in Iasi, Romania. He was one of only 700 who survived.”

Silverman’s family had to hide for survival; his mother was taken in by a friend of the family.

“The two-room house where I was born was home to 15 people,” he said. “Thirty-five thousand Jews were herded into an area of Iasi meant for 5,000 people. Many of the Jews died of starvation, typhoid, mass shootings and other diseases. I was near death on several occasions and only the kindness of the people we lived with, who gave up the little food they had, kept me alive.

“Seven years later, we arrived on Pier 21 in Halifax on Jan. 23, 1949, aboard the ship RMS Scythia because the Canadian government allowed us to immigrate. I was two months shy of my seventh birthday.”

Recently, Silverman accepted a job as the manager of public affairs in Alberta with B’nai Brith Canada.

He said his proudest achievement in life is his family. Silverman has been married for 54 years, and has four children and seven grandchildren.

He is still involved with the aviation industry and does some consulting. His biggest thrill in life was taking friends and family on plane rides. The last airplane he owned was a Hawk XP on floats, sold two years ago.

“I’ve always loved to fly because it makes me feel free and like anything is possible.”