There’s no such thing as ‘too much education,’ says Tracy Medve, CEO of KF Aerospace

Growing up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Tracy Medve, MBA 08, often flew over nearby lakes and boreal forests in a Cessna 150 with her father, an amateur pilot.

Today, she’s the president and CEO of KF Aerospace, Canada’s largest provider of maintenance, repair and overhaul services for aircraft. Its customers include Boeing, Air Canada, WestJet and Icelandair.

KF Aerospace also offers passenger charters, dispatch services, aircraft leasing and cargo flights, and provides pilot training for the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“Having a diversified but interconnected portfolio of businesses really helps in this notoriously challenging sector,” says Medve. “Because when one type of business is down then often another one is up.

“That got us through COVID, for example, when a lot of our customers were grounded and had no money coming in. We wanted to keep our employees, and we were able have them work on some of our own airplanes during that time.”

Medve originally trained in law, but she’s been riding the turbulence of the aviation industry since 1985, when she joined a small commercial air service based in Saskatoon.

She already had a lot of experience under her belt when she enrolled in the John Molson School of Business in 2006.

“I didn’t really need another degree for my career — but the Global Aviation MBA offered then by Concordia was for me,” Medve explains. “I believe you can never have too much education. It gives you a chance to reflect on topics, and that gets ingrained in your thinking as you move forward.”

Concordia now offers several specialized aviation-management programs through the John Molson Executive Centre. Two of them were created in partnership with the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency headquartered in Montreal.

About halfway through her studies, Medve was offered a position as the president of Canadian North airlines. Previously, as a consultant together with her business partner in C.T. AeroProjects, she’d helped a pair of Inuit business-development companies acquire it so that northern communities could gain more control over their own transportation.

“Once I accepted that job, I said to Isabelle Dostaler, who was the head of the MBA program, ‘I’ve got to take a break — I’ll come back and finish this later,’” she recalls.

Dostaler encouraged Medve to complete her few remaining courses right away, suspecting that the executive and parent of two wouldn’t find the time in the years ahead.

Medve took Dostaler’s advice and pushed through, juggling studies with her family responsibilities and full-time employment. “It was hard, but I’m glad I did it,” she says.

During that period, Medve travelled between Calgary (operations headquarters for Canadian North), Yellowknife, where Canadian North was headquartered, and Montreal, the hub where aviation-management students from all over Canada and the globe would convene for a few weeks each semester.

“It was good to get to know my classmates in person, because we were always doing group projects together,” she says. “That’s how the industry works, too. It’s global and you can’t get things done in isolation.”

Discover how you can support future Concordia scholars from the rest of Canada.