7988

 

7988 Gordon Burns Hamilton

 

Following graduation in civil engineering, I married Ann Clifford the day after grad parade. We have two sons – Sean and Ian. The summer of ’69 was spent in Chilliwack on the Young Officers course. My first posting in September ’69 was to the base engineering staff at 1 Division in Soest, Germany.

The day that I was flying to my posting in Germany, the government announced huge cutbacks in the Canadian military (about 30%), including the closing of the army bases in Northern Germany (5000 personnel) where I was headed. It would take more than a year to close these bases, so I was at Soest for a year before they posted me to CFB Baden in the South.

In Baden, I was in the base engineering staff, looking after maintenance, construction and airport firefighting (It was here that I became interested in airports).  Baden was a nuclear weapon base with CF104 strike aircraft.

In 1972, I was posted to teaching post at RMC and completed a master’s in engineering at Queens while teaching civil engineering at RMC.

In 1975, I left the military and took a position with Transport Canada, in airports. I worked in an area called Airport Systems. In 1976, I moved to the position of Assistant Transport Attaché Transportation in the Canadian High Commission in London. The Attaché subsequently left and I acted as Transportation Attaché. This involved looking after transportation related issues for the whole of Europe. I was Canada’s representative on two NATO committees (Planning Board for Ocean Shipping and the Civil Aviation Planning Committee).

In 1978 I returned to Canada to serve on the Task Force on Airport Management and subsequently to lead the Federal Role in Airports studies. These efforts indicated that the federal government should not be operating airports. Having worked for three years on trying to get the government out of airports, I left the government in 1981 and founded Sypher Consultants.

The concept of Sypher was new – management consultants in transportation. There was nothing like it in Canada, and not much similar worldwide. Most transportation consulting firms were engineering firms.  Sypher staff were a mix of architects, engineers, economists, statisticians, and MBAs. We were focused on offshore markets and worked in 81 countries.

By 1986, we were about 25 people and stayed around that size until I sold the firm in 2006.

I married for a second time in 1989 to Karen Mosher.

Like many entrepreneurs, I founded a number of firms in addition to Sypher:

·         MediaPlus – an Ottawa media firm. I sold it after a couple of years. The firm continues and has done well.

·         FleetTrak Systems – this had huge upside potential. It was a way of tracking vehicles (anything moving) anywhere in North America or Europe and it predated GPS. We were using another location system called Loran C and meteor burst for communications (because cell phones were still expensive to operate at that time). The system had a slot to add a GPS board as GPS came online and would integrate the GPS and Loran C signal for even more accuracy. We spent about $1million on development and were ready to take it public when the stock market unravelled – I think that was around 1991. We had product in production and sold one system (to Almira NY transit) before we eventually ran out of cash.

·         Caribbean Hovercraft – lots of fun but another failure. We planned on operating two 80 passenger hovercraft in a mixed cargo/passenger mode through the Windward and Leeward Islands. We acquired the first Hovercraft and took it to Expo 86 as a training and development operation before moving to the Caribbean. It ran between downtown Victoria and downtown Vancouver (right next to the conference centre) for the whole Expo period. It also lost a lot of money and blew up our plans to take it to the Caribbean.

I led Sypher for the entire period 1981-2010, including four years after I sold it to Jacobs Engineering Group.

After I left Sypher, I worked part-time with Aviation Strategies International (ASI), which was led by an old friend from Transport Canada.  ASI was heavily involved in training airport executives around the world, so I had great assignments training managers in Indonesia, Macau, Thailand, Ecuador and Romania.  I also undertook management consulting assignments for airports in Macau and Myanmar. While at ASI, I led or contributed to several publications, including a book, Global Megatrends and Aviation: The Path for Future-Wise Organizations in 2019 and again in 2021 (2^nd edition).  I finally retired in June 2024, after working for 55 years.

My first novel, Conflicts – a military adventure novel set in Africa, will be published in September 2024.