The airline was established in 1966 as
Vic Turner Ltd which operated a single
de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter providing air support for oil exploration activities in the
Canadian Arctic. Renamed Kenn Borek Air after being purchased by Borek Construction in 1971, the company acquired the
Aklavik Flying Services which was founded in April 1947 by Michael Zubko operating a single
Aeronca Champion at that time. In 1975 Kenn Borek acquired
Kenting Atlas Aviation. Kenting Atlas Aviation had been formed in 1972 with the purchase of Weldy Phipps's Atlas Aviation (established in 1962) by Kenting Aviation. This was the second iteration of the Atlas Aviation name, the first evolving out of the renaming of McGuire Flying School at Uplands Airport, Ottawa, Ontario formed in 1946 by Hugh McGuire. The company has been operating in
Antarctica since 1985. On 26 April 2001, Kenn Borek Air used a DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft to rescue Dr.
Ronald Shemenski from the
Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. This was the first ever rescue from the
South Pole during the southern winter. To achieve the range necessary for this flight, the Twin Otter was equipped with a special
ferry tank. In 2009, the company was commissioned to recover a crashed aircraft in the Antarctic, and employees spent 25 days in a makeshift camp to complete the project. The crew, captain Wally Dobchuk, first officer Sebastian Trudel and maintenance engineer Michael McCrae were honoured for their heroism by
Aviation Week. In 2020 one of the airline's converted DC-3s was used by
NASA to drop probes along
Greenland's Atlantic coast, as part of the NASA's annual
Oceans Melting Greenland project. The project is intended to monitor the rate at which Greenland's ice cap melts into the sea. ==Operations==