Olaf Skjenna at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. Photo courtesy Ingenium Foundation.
Olaf Skjenna, '67 MD, is an expert in aviation medicine and occupational health with a career spanning more than 40 years. Over the course of his life he has also served and found success as a pilot and paratrooper with the Royal Canadian Air Force, an aircraft accident investigator, Air Canada's Chief Medical Officer, an author, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. Skjenna can now be found volunteering on weekends at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, sharing stories of flight and medicine with aviation enthusiasts of all ages.
You have had a fascinating career. Were you always interested in both medicine and aviation?
My first airplane ride was when I was five years old. I decided at that time that I wanted to become a pilot. Years later, when I finished high school, I went to the RCAF recruiting officer who happened to be in Medicine Hat and they said I needed to have a university degree. So I said, 'Okay, I can't afford to do that. How do I get one of those?' They told me to join the Regular Officers Training Plan in the military and that I had to go to Calgary to register. I hitchhiked to Calgary the very next day, but was a day too late. So I decided to work and save money for university and I happened to get a job apprenticing in a medical lab, where I became very interested in medicine.
What are some of the highlights of your career since you left the U of A?
I graduated from the U of A 51 years ago. I was sponsored by the military and after I finished my schooling I owed a certain number of years of service. In my case it was three years but I stayed in a bit longer because it was really enjoyable. In the military I trained in different areas, including occupational health and military medicine. I also became a paratrooper and a pilot-for both fixed wing and helicopters.
Once my time ended in the military I studied at the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine in England, then spent several years with the Department of Transport in Civil Aviation Medicine. I became deeply involved in aircraft accident investigation and ended up writing a book about helicopter accidents that became a textbook at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. When the professor at USC retired, I took over and became an adjunct professor in what they called Flight Medicine at the time. I held that position for 20 years.
In 1982, I was hired by Air Canada where I became the Chief Medical Officer and was responsible for both air crew and ground crew health and safety. At that time Air Canada was expanding throughout the world, and my department was tasked to insure that facilities and supplies were safe and that the airline met international and Canadian standards. If there was an ill or injured passenger we had to make sure that they were fit to fly. We liked to have the same number of passengers when we landed as when we took off. (laughs)
What is aviation medicine?
It embodies many medical disciplines and other human factors. That's one of the things that I liked about it, that it was a more holistic approach. We had to know about ophthalmology, cardiology, physiology, pathology, psychology, tropical medicine, international spread of disease and a whole lot of other things pertaining to human beings in that environment. And then we had to be able to deal with long-haul flights, circadian rhythm disruptions and the human factors in the cockpit in the aircraft. The aviation environment can be fairly hostile without knowledge and protection.
What are your favourite accomplishments over the course of your career?
I was the one who first advocated for non-smoking flights. Air Canada was the very first airline to do it and it was my team that got it going. It's pretty well worldwide now.
You know it was very difficult to put through because marketing was quite concerned about it. Many cultures smoked heavily and the airline was concerned that it might lose customers if smoking was prohibited. We persuaded them to begin with one flight a day in the golden triangle, which was Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa. That flight became very popular and soon it was two flights a day, and then flights under two hours, progressing to flights across Canada and then international flights. Eventually it was applied to all flights. Pretty soon other airlines started catching on as the non-smoking flights became very popular. We cut down on passenger complaints about smoking and we never really got any pushback from people who did smoke.
One other thing I'm proud of was that in teaching aviation and accident-investigation courses over the years, investigators have adopted some of the techniques that I taught.
Just as one small example, I came up with a system for photographing and evidence gathering at an accident scene. At one time you would go to an accident scene and you'd see people in there kicking tin-pulling instruments out and so on-and in some cases they were destroying evidence just because they were keen to get at it as quickly as possible. So I developed approaches for photography, gathering information and the forensic evaluation. Over the past number of years I've seen more and more over application of some of the things that I've taught. That has been satisfying.
You managed to make a career of combining your love of both aviation and medicine. What advice do you have for others looking to forge their own career path by combining their interests?
Learn as much as you can. Also remember that people aren't just a walking gallbladder or heart. In order to really practice medicine properly, you need to keep learning as much as you can about everything. That's my feeling. Specialties are becoming narrower and narrower and I think that people can miss the forest for the trees sometimes, because they are zeroed in on their narrow sub-specialty and maybe not looking carefully at the other aspects. That's the impression I'm getting right now in medicine.
I think at one time medicine was maybe 20 per cent science and 80 per cent art and we are forgetting about the art of medicine. Physicians are just ordering a whole bunch of lab tests and then trying to figure out what they're dealing with, rather than performing clinical type assessments.
What was most memorable about your time at the U of A?
How damn cold it was! I loved the U of A. It was great but it was also cold (laughs). In those days I couldn't afford a decent parka.
I think the quality of the professors was a big thing. Walter Mackenzie was the dean of medicine at that time and we had really good professors. These were people who were mentally stimulating. I especially admired those who also knew about the arts.
I went for my interview for acceptance into medical school and Walter Mackenzie interviewed me. Well, we hadn't gone four minutes until he found out that I was a jazz trumpeter and led a "big band." He was a jazz drummer. The rest of the interview was about music. He was impressed with that fact that there was something inside other than just a claim to science.
You are currently volunteering at the Canada Aviation Space Museum. Why is that important to you?
I just enjoy it. I enjoy meeting people who are interested in or who are experienced in aviation. And they get really involved. Sometimes the wives are bored out of their trees and then I'll start talking about the stories behind these airplanes and things that happened, and they become interested because there are human sides to these airplanes. Who ever thought of flying? How did they go about it? What happened to this particular airplane and crew? There are all kinds of stories. Every single airplane in there has a story.
Many of the airplanes are one-offs. It's one of the ten best aviation collections in the world. There are a number of airplanes there that don't exist anywhere else, and there are some types that I flew. There is a Chipmunk that I actually flew when I was training many years ago. It's kind of weird when you walk into a museum and see something that you once used and is now considered to be old. (laughs)