$30 million gift from David Bissett lets students reach for an empty cockpit
David Bissett likes to watch videos of aircraft flying with no one on board.
Some are from Ukraine, some from China, and some show machines carrying supplies into places most people will never see.
He watches them on YouTube, like many people half his age, and he’s stopped calling them drones.
To him, that word sounds like a toy.
He calls them autonomous aircraft, and he talks about them the way he once talked about undervalued stocks: something most people haven’t fully noticed yet.
Recently, he backed that belief with $30 million.
In a hangar at SAIT’s Art Smith Aero Center near the Calgary airport, Bissett shook hands with SAIT president Dr. David Ross and announced the gift that will create the Bissett Autonomous Aviation Park.
It will be a place where students learn to train, test, and certify aircraft that fly with no pilot in the cockpit.
“We can’t even dream of all of the potential applications,” he said.
Then he described one he has clearly thought about. Planes can already take off and land on their own, so why not use full-sized ones to carry freight across Canada’s North, where flying is hard and dangerous for the pilots who do it now?
Ask Bissett why he gives, and he answers without hesitation. “I want young Albertans to be building it,” he said, “not watching it happen somewhere else.”
He seemed less interested in the aircraft than in the young people who will learn to fly them. “I think the imagination of these students could well evolve into new and interesting applications.”
He has said something like this before. Almost 7 years ago, at 80, he gave SAIT $30 million, the largest private gift in its history and the largest of his own life.
It created the School for Advanced Digital Technology. He was candid about why.
“You’re looking for something to do before you go,” he said then. He could see Alberta’s economy changing, and he worried that a country that fell behind in technology could no longer afford the life its people expected.
He picked SAIT, he said, because it could quickly change course to meet industry needs.
He didn’t make that gift and move on.
Before the gift, there was $5 million in 2014 for the Bissett Bursary, which pays full tuition and fees for young people who finish high school without the money to keep going.
After it came $1 million for a seed fund for student startups.
This June, a pair of second-year software students won $100,000 from that fund for an idea that turns days of traffic planning into minutes.
Another young founder won $50,000 and remembered an instructor who once told him you can either look for a job or create jobs. Including this week’s gift, Bissett has committed at least $66 million to a single polytechnic.
And this time, $6 million is set aside again for awards, so cost doesn’t keep students out of the cockpit, even an empty one.
It’s easy to see where that comes from.
Bissett grew up in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
His father, Clarence, died when David was 12, and his mother, Alice, helped him work his way through school.
Years later, he honored her with a residency in companion-animal medicine at the University of Prince Edward Island’s veterinary college that carries her name. He studied law at Dalhousie, then left law for money management.
He worked up from trust officer in Halifax and Montreal to vice-president of investments at an insurer in London, Ontario, earning his CFA along the way.
In 1977, he and his wife, Leslie, moved to Calgary. Five years later, he started his own firm.
Bissett & Associates grew into one of the city’s great financial success stories. It helped make Calgary a place where serious money was managed, not just made.
When Franklin Templeton bought the firm in 2000, it oversaw more than $5 billion, and the Bissett name stayed on the funds.
He went on to sit on boards and wrote a book about his life in the markets, “Fully Invested.”
Mostly, though, he started giving his money away.
He chose to do it in public, believing that giving people can see encourages others to give. David and Leslie gave $8.2 million to the Calgary Foundation.
Mount Royal received $5 million and then $7 million, at the time the largest gift ever to a Canadian college, and the business school there now bears his name.
Dalhousie received a student learning center, and a high school in Halifax received a scholarship for its brightest students.
His giving also reached a hospice in Okotoks, wetlands and grasslands protected by groups like Ducks Unlimited and Western Sky Land Trust, and an institute at the University of Alberta was set up because he worried about Alberta’s farmland being broken into smaller and smaller pieces.
A keen cyclist, he gave $1 million to help connect the Trans Canada Trail across the province.
The Order of Canada and the Alberta Order of Excellence have both honored him. Asked what keeps him going, he answers with a question he still asks himself: “What can I do today that makes things better?”
Flying isn’t new to him either.
A decade ago, the sleek twin-engine helicopter he owned joined Calgary’s executive charter fleet.
The man who has looked down on the foothills from the air now wants the next generation to send machines over them alone.
He has chosen a place that has earned it. SAIT has trained people to build and fix aircraft since 1928. More than 400 students now learn maintenance, avionics, structures, and turbines in the same hangar where the announcement took place.
The school launched western Canada’s first professional drone-pilot certificate in 2023, and its first diploma in the field this fall, and its research center already works with manufacturers testing heavy-lift aircraft that fly beyond the pilot’s sight.
“We’ve long thought that unmanned systems were the next phase of the evolution of what aerospace will be,” Ross said.
Many of the first graduates, he added, had job offers before they finished
Lynda Holden, the dean who oversees the programs, explained what changes for students. They won’t just train, she said.
“They’ll be embedded in the research, and they’ll be embedded with industry,” flying beside companies that are building the business as it happens. When asked who will use these machines, she said farmers, paramedics, energy crews, and nearly everyone else. “The list is probably shorter on what industries aren’t going to use it.”
Not everything is settled.
SAIT is still choosing between pieces of land and hopes to start construction next year. Mostly, it is looking for open sky.
“These things go 200 kilometers an hour,” Ross said, “and they can go up to three or 400 kilometers away from the pilot.”
He admitted the design is still being worked out. “We’re still fussing over exactly what it’s going to look like.”
Others at the event sounded confident anyway.
Mayor Jeromy Farkas called the park “a game-changing investment.” Advanced Education Minister Myles McDougall spoke of the new kinds of hands-on learning it will make possible.
The gift is a major boost to SAIT’s $150-million Real Futures campaign, which the school says began with Bissett’s 2019 gift.
Now the donor who started it has come back with one of its largest gifts.
For Bissett, it’s another bet on something he can see coming before most people do, and on the young Albertans he wants to see in charge when it arrives.