2014convention

CANADA'S AVIATION HISTORY:

THE VIEW FROM THE WEST

This AGM also saw the passage of CAHS Bylaw No 8, with a vote of thanks to Mat Joost for his work on this project.

In discussion of CAHS business, member Bill Zuk agreed to study whether support can be provided to chapters to assist the executive members in their duties and Gordon McNulty took on an assignment to explore updating the CAHS Silver Dart logo. As well, chapters were encouraged to undertake local memorial projects to mark significant aviation events and locations. Finally, it was announced that the next CAHS national convention is planned for Hamilton in June 2015.

Directors’ reports appear in full on the CAHS website at http://www.cahs.ca/about-us/agm/reports

Following adjournment, the directors present met to elect executive officers. The following officers were elected: Gary Williams, president; Richard Goethe, vice president; Rachel Lea Heide, treasurer; Jim Bell, secretary; John Chalmers, membership secretary.

Two days of aviation history lectures began on the morning of Friday, June 6 – auspiciously, the 70^th anniversary of D Day – with a presentation on Saskatchewan’s aviation history by Tim Munro of the Saskatchewan Aviation Historical Society. He used this opportunity to announce this society is moving forward with plans to create a new aviation museum at the Saskatoon airport. Construction is scheduled to start next year on a 45,000-square-foot facility at the Saskatoon International Airport.

Presentations at the convention had a heavy BCATP flavor, beginning with John Higenbottam’s talk on the plan’s use of relief airfields, which he called “a largely overlooked and, to a certain extent, forgotten” element of the BCATP story.

These fields were used for emergency landings and, especially, for training in a less-congested flying environment – no small matter in a world where an training stations could have many aircraft “buzzing around, some of them at different speeds” and with flying control generally done by light signals, not radio.

These fields fell into two classes: R1s, which were often “quite substantial” and generally had paved runways in the familiar wartime triangle pattern, plus a single landplane hangar with a control tower, an “H” hut for accommodation, plus outbuildings and a guardhouse. R2s were more modest and generally associated with elementary flying training schools and had grass runways. Chater, near Brandon’s 12 SFTS, had entire classes living and training at it. 38 SFTS at Estevan seemed to have had three relief fields: Outram (an R1) plus Chandler and Shand (R2s).

As the war went on, a new role was found for the R2s at SFTSs. With the allied bomber offensive ramping up – and with low visibility a challenge over British airfields -- the RAF and RCAF began using a new system (using, ironically, technology developed by a German firm, Lorenz) called the “standard beam approach”.

It used a visual and audio display to help a pilot land safely. Reduced to its basics, SBA incorporated a localizer (telling a pilot whether he was to the left or right of the runway) and a glide slope “that you fly down to a decision height where, if you see the ground, you continue and land – and if you don’t see the ground, then you go around,” Higenbottam said.

Postwar, a wide variety of fates awaited relief airfields. Buttress, just south of Moose Jaw, continued was a relief field for RCAF Station Moose Jaw and was home to substantial flying for one summer when the main station’s runways were being rebuilt for jet operations in the early 1960s. Douglas, MB, has been used by an aerial applicator and its counterpart Chater saw some of the filming for the 1993 feature film For The Moment, Grand Bend, a wartime relief field for Centralia, was used to train air traffic controllers.

Whatever their current use, they were, Higenbottam said, “a very, very important part in the success of the plan.”

Another look at the BCATP came via Joel From’s portrait of a typical station: 33 Elementary Flying Training School at Caron, just west of Moose Jaw, which was not one of the schools originally envisaged by planners. Instead, it was created because Britain’s RAF was worried by the practical difficulties of trying to conduct flying training in 1940, amid German raid and intruders. As the Battle of Britain ended, the Air Ministry decided to send primary flying training to Canada and several colonies.

In this country, the Department of Transport was asked to help find new sites and, after looking at Boharm, site of a relief airfield for Moose Jaw’s 32 SFTS, found nearby Caron.

It had many virtues: flat terrain, supplies of water, sand and gravel nearby; also close were a major highway, an electrical line and a rail line. The official request to build a station came from the RAF near the end of spring 1941 -- and by August work was under way. It was finished by the end of the year – a dizzying rate of speed hard to comprehend today.

Once created, 33 EFTS expanded exponentially, from just 48 students to 90, to 120 and to 180 and finally to 240. Facilities were expanded too, notably hangar space and accommodation.

33 EFTS was staffed initially by RAF personnel, who showed remarkable adaptability in finding ways to occupy their time off-duty on the Canadian prairie. They enthusiastically participated in over a dozen sports with varying degrees of success (soccer moreso than hockey) and even had a riding club with a stable on the home quarter of the farmer whose land had been used for 33 EFTS.

There was a diner called Smokey Joe’s outside the main gate, offering steak dinners for 40 cents -- and apparently prostitution, too, before being declared out of bounds.

In time, the station’s Tiger Moths were replaced by Cornells and its British administrative and support personnel – in motor transport, messing and maintenance -- by Canadian civilians, many transferred from a school at Boundary Bay, BC, that had closed when that base was converted to use as an operational training unit. That met with the approval of an RAF officer named Vernon Peters, whose many letters from the station now reside in the Saskatchewan Archives. He quipped, “we no longer have those bus drivers from the RAF cooking!”

Another notable personality was the civilian manager of the revised operation, Leslie Martin, who was credited with saving the Dominion government $5 million. He received of the Order of the British Empire for his skilled management, but, sadly, died of a heart attack in the fall of 1943. So hard had he worked that eulogies suggested he be considered a war casualty.

Postwar, the 33 EFTS site lost many of its buildings to communities around it. The ground instruction and headquarters buildings were hauled off to become part of a nursing school in Moose Jaw; a hangar was dismantled and used by an oilseed processor. The site and remaining buildings soon became the home of Briercrest Bible College, now Briercrest College, where several buildings and even some infrastructure remain in use, including the flagpole at its main entrance. Said From: “In top condition too!”

One of the people watching the BCATP and its aircraft was a teenager named Bill Cameron, whose family hailed from Mankota in southwest Saskatchewan, but came to Regina, where Cameron’s father, a long-time army reservist, had been assigned as a quartermaster sergeant early in the war. At Scott Collegiate, Cameron (whose presentation was entitled “An Air Cadet’s War” and illustrated how much a perceptive teen can absorb of the military training around him) joined 34 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Cadets. This got him and his squadron mates into the building used by the RCAF’s 2 Initial Training School and, in the summer of 1944, to an air cadet camp at 7 SFTS at Fort McLeod, AB – around which Bill noticed a German PoWs toiling in fields.

In Moose Jaw, to which his father was posted as a recruiting sergeant late in the war, Cameron often visited 32 SFTS (now 15 Wing Moose Jaw) and noted the occasional flights by two RCAF Hurricanes based there to hunt for Japanese balloon bombs.

The summer of 1945 found him at summer camp at Yorkton, by then the home of 23 EFTS, then learning about the two atomic bombs that brought the end of the war.

Over the next few months, he watched RCAF Lancasters being ferried through Regina to a storage site at Pearce, near Lethbridge.

A determined lad, Bill learned Morse code and gained his radio operator’s licence, and also stayed in air cadets, which took him to the 1946 summer camp at 7 Bombing & Gunnery School at Paulson, Man. There, his NCO status and radio training allowed him to knowledgeably hang around the radio section, collecting free parts. On his return to Regina, he found he was one of a dozen air cadets who’d received 25-hour flying scholarships at the Regina Flying Club. He soloed after 10 hours.

Working as a postal clerk in the town of Morse, between Moose Jaw and Swift Current, he spent his off-hours studying radio and was able to use his father’s veteran’s benefits to take a course in this. Thus did he earn a second-class radio licence in June 1948. And when Canadian Pacific Airlines advertised for a relief radio operator that summer, he was hired – starting a 38-year career with the firm that took him from airline bases in northern Manitoba to management posts in places like Montreal, Rome, Tokyo, Madrid and Mexico City. All because of his air cadet days.

One of many graduates of the BCATP was Maurice Falloon, whose story was told by his daughter, Linda Kort. “Moe” was a good-natured farmboy from Foxwarren, in west-central Manitoba, who entered the RCAF in the autumn of 1942, passing through manning depot at Brandon, 2 Initial Training School in Regina, then 23 EFTS at Davidson, where he wrote that airmen over six feet tall were assigned to learn to fly in Fairchild Cornells, rather than more cramped DHC Tiger Moths. Once graduated, he moved on to 18 SFTS at Gimli and the twin-engine Avro Anson. By July 1944, Moe was on his way to England.

Based on his multiengine training at Gimli, Moe suspected he was headed for bombers, but it was around that time the RCAF decided to form three new transport squadrons. One of them, No. 437, stayed in Britain. But the personnel for the other two, 435 and 436, were sent to India and eventually received new, dark green/grey Dakotas and began training for their work in resupplying the British-Indian 14^th Army. That meant learning how to tow gliders and drop parachutists and supplies. Between the two squadrons, 35 aircraft were available.

On operations, the two Canadian squadrons flew everything from mule feed to huge quantities of gasoline. About half the time, their Dakotas flew into improvised airfields; the other half saw them parachuting supplies to army units that had marked out drop zones (DZs).

A detailed system had been evolved: as the aircraft approached the DZ, a red light inside the cabin went on as a warning. As the aircraft flew over the zone, winds and terrain taken into consideration, then a green light went on, telling the “kickers” in the cabin to send some – but not all -- of the equipment out the door. The pilots and navigator were watching where the parachutes had landed, so they’d bank the aircraft, line up again on the DZ, allow for what they’d learned about the wind, then drop more equipment and supplies. It could take up to 10 circuits to get all of the 3½ tons of supplies out of a Dakota. Pushing the cargo out of the aircraft were volunteers “kickers” who took time from their other squadron ground duties to do this unusual work.

Unarmed, the Dakotas generally flew low over the jungle in order to avoid the attention of Japanese fighters. Even more dangerous was the weather over Burma, which began turning ugly as 1945 went on and the 14^th Army advanced south and east across the country.

By June, it was raining all the time – some 200 inches annually, with 60 inches of that in August alone. Clean water, though, was always in short supply and Moe remembered airmen bathing in the warm monsoons. The threat from malaria meant airmen habitually slept behind mosquito netting. In the middle of that summer, the squadron moved to Ramree Island, where Allied ships could unload supplies close to the airfield. But the weather was getting even worse. Frequently, crews would be confronted by huge, dark cumulous clouds and high winds, downdrafts and updrafts that meant even a loaded Dak was tossed around “like a toy in the hand of a giant”, wrote Moe. He added that every Allied supply pilot in Burma had a story about a close call. Moe had a friend who entered a layer of cloud, endured three furious bursts of rain and tried turning to starboard -- when a downdraft from a cumulo-nimbus cloud hit the aircraft, then put it into a dive. Airspeed was in the range of 300 mph – frighteningly fast – and it was losing altitude at the astonishing rate of 6,000 feet per minute. Moe’s buddy finally pulled out of the dive – only to find the Dakota climbing at 6,000 feet per minute.

Next thing he knew, the aircraft was on its back. To get out of his, he half-rolled and found himself in another dive – eventually coming into a patch of clear sky, from which the crew was able to pick its way to a larger clear area over the Indian Ocean. A close call! No wonder the Canadian crews joked about “10/10 cloud with intermingled mountaintops.” It took, as Moe wrote later, all a pilot’s skill and intelligence to keep his aircraft in the air.

In all, Moe logged 189 sorties, most of which required about three hours of flying. A typical tour for pilots at that time was 700 flying hours, ending his tour just one day before the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima ended the Second World War. Dakotas from the two squadrons were alerted to the presence of some Canadian prisoners of war in Hong Kong and began making their way toward the city when news arrived that a Canadian warship was already there.

Kort noted that postwar research determined that about 8,000 Canadians served, in various capacities over the years from 1942 to 1945, in Burma, with about 500 killed. One RCAF Dakota crashed and was not found for 50 years – at which time 25 veterans of 435 and 436 Squadrons went to Burma to bury their fallen comrades.

Of his time in the air force, Moe later told his daughter, “We shared an experience you can’t explain.”

From BCATP history to a fictional depiction of it: we’re talking here of the 1993 feature film For The Moment. Presenter Bill Zuk said its concept originated with noted Manitoba filmmaker Aaron Kim Johnston, whose late father had served in the wartime RAF. Johnston had received from his mother a package of material about a reunion of his father’s bomber squadron – mere days away. Intrigued, he impulsively flew to Britain, found the tavern in which it was being held and simply watched the proceedings -- until one squadron veteran spied him and said, “You’re Jack’s son!” That broke the ice and Johnson became intrigued with the story of airmen from around the British Commonwealth who’d trained in Canada during the Second World War. He produced a script and found backers.

Signed as the “bankable” female lead was Swiss actor Christianne Hirt, who’d received excellent reviews for her role in the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove. Johnston got Canadian actors Peter Outerbridge and Wanda Cannon, with whom he’d worked earlier, in supporting roles. But what about the crucial male lead role of Lachlan Curry, the Australian trainee? Johnson considered several Australian actors, including Guy Pearce, but eventually settled on a “failed rock singer” from New Zealand named Russell Crowe – who immediately impressed the cast and crew with his intensity and focus.

For The Moment was shot in the late summer of 1992 at a number of sites in southern Manitoba including the CATP Museum in Brandon, and the former relief airfield at Chater. The museum’s co-operation meant that aircraft from its collection could be used in the film: a Crane and Harvard, for example -- though most of the flying shots used four “British” Tiger Moths without the distinctive Canadian coupe tops that permitted flying in cold weather but also obscured the faces of actors from the camera in the helicopter filming them.

Also worked into the film were antique cars and trucks, a Brandon swing band, many amateur actors from the area and even an A-26 Invader.

Zuk said For The Moment opened at the Vancouver Film Festival to good reviews. It was released in Canada in 1993 and in the U.S. in 1996; Crowe went on to great fame, though he regarded For The Moment as a big break and has kept in touch with Johnston, even casting his daughter in a subsequent films.

Somewhat unusually among this conference’s list of subjects, Walter Williams did not wear a uniform. The owner-manager of a farm equipment dealership in the west-central Saskatchewan town of Kerrobert learned to fly for a very different reason: he wanted a quick way of traveling to see his young son several hundred miles to the north. Flying was the best use of his time.

Williams trained postwar at Saskatoon’s Mitchinson Flying Service and eventually acquired Aeronca Chief CF-EBO, with which he undertook a dizzying arraying of paid and unpaid mercy flights and passenger charters until the early 1960s. Though generous with the time and flying skill, he was not a patient man, for he thumbed his nose at Department of Transport rules – though Deana said one DoT staffer who consulted with the Kerrobert RCMP about disciplining Williams, supposedly was told by a Mountie to “Send him home – we need him!”

But Williams, whose flying covered the period from about 1946-63, also enjoyed “selling” aviation to people unfamiliar with it, though he admitted (in a collection of short autobiographical essays that Driver massaged into a book called Prairie Pilot -- Lady Luck Was On My Side) admitted to many brushes with death. A pair of compassionate flights to Calgary almost brought disaster and Driver’s account of Williams’ role in a drunken coyote hunt around 1960 had the audience, ah, howling with laughter.

Driver said the process of whipping Williams’ recollections into a book on his flying adventures involved so many remarkable coincidences that it “was as if this story was meant to be told”.

John Chalmers’ presentation focused on an “ally” of the CAHS: Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, which annually honours several individuals and aviation corporations or groups for their contribution to aviation.

As the CAHF historian, this long-time CAHS member sits on the hall of fame’s operations committee, while another committee reviews nominations. The annual induction ceremony roams about the country and was most recently held in Calgary.

The CAHF was created in 1973 and initially was based in Edmonton’s convention centre, but later moved to a permanent building adjacent to the Reynolds Alberta Museum in Wetaskiwin, about an hour’s drive south of the Alberta capital. As those who attended the 2011 CAHS national convention know, the RAM has an extraordinary collection of aircraft.

Those honoured by the CAHF cover a wide range; a full list is at www.cahf.ca. Mentioned in John’s presentation were legendary Canadian aviators “Punch” Dickins and “Wop: May, RAM founder Stan Reynolds (a dedicated collector of antique aircraft) and Rosella Bjornson, the first female airline captain in Canada -- who’s not only in the CAHF herself, but acts as its executive director. There’s Airspray founder and CEO Don Hamilton, CAHS Journal editor Bill Wheeler, pioneering Calgary aviator Fred McCall, Victoria Cross winter Ian Bazellgette, DHC’s John Sanford, RCAF fighter ace James “Stocky” Edwards, astronaut Dave Williams and Dick Ryan, a First World War fighter pilot who was a stalwart of the Moose Jaw Flying Club in the 1930s, then a long-time executive with Canadian Pacific Airlines.

2013 inductees were Clive Beddoe, one of the founders of WestJet, Lorna de Blicquy, an outstanding woman pilot whose 10,000 flying hours including time as a commercial, charter and instructor pilot; Bob Engle, one of the founders of Northwest Territorial Airways and Fredrick Moore, an RCAF test pilot in the 1950s who was instrumental in the development of simulators for the CF-100, Sabre and Argus and other types.

Russell Isinger’s interest in the Avro Arrow began when he was a young tour guide at the Diefenbaker Canada Centre on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon – and tumbled upon a number of files, unopened and marked “Confidential” and “Secret”.

That led to a long-time interest in the Arrow that saw him do his master’s thesis in political studies on it, as well as numerous articles. He’s collaborating with the U of S’s Donald Story on a book on this subject.

Isinger traced the Arrow’s roots to 1953 and the RCAF’s decision to seek a replacement for the CF-100 interceptor then entering service. A survey of other types under development in Britain and the U.S. found nothing that met the RCAF’s requirements: two engines, two seats, supersonic dash speed and the ability to operate independently of ground control stations. It anticipated a need for between 500 and 600 aircraft at about $1.5 million each, entering service around 1959.

By 1956, the project had grown to four distinct systems: airframe, engine, fire-control system and missile armament. But by then, the federal Liberal government, and even senior military commanders were becoming worried about its cost, Isinger said. “All the evidence I’d been indicates the Liberals were planning to cancel the project by 1957.”

Instead, the Liberals lost that year’s federal election to John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives, who let it continue – but with increasing misgivings. Their freedom of political action was constrained by their status as a minority government, worried about upsetting voters in populous southern Ontario around the Avro Canada plant.

Much of Isinger’s presentation was devoted to deflating the myths around the government’s fateful 1959 decision to cancel the entire project. He said the RCAF was by no means united on the project, with officers oriented toward NATO worried that spending on the Arrow would consume money needed to replace the RCAF’s Sabres and CF-100s, while air transport officers had their own priorities. The army wanted armoured personnel carriers and tactical nuclear weapons while the navy was in the midst of introducing a new generation of surface warships.

He noted that Diefenbaker was by no means acting alone on this issue and had the advice of senor military officers. As well, there is no evidence it was cancelled because it had originated under the Liberals or because Diefenbaker hated Avro’s CEO, Crawford Gordon – though the latter did not strengthen his case with a drunken rant to the prime minister. Nor is there any evidence there was any pressure to cancel it from the U.S. Indeed, Isinger said the U.S. government was so warmly supportive that it offered to buy some Arrows for the RCAF – a form of foreign aid that would have been political suicide for any Canadian government. “What the U.S. really wanted us to do was to build radar lines to give them sufficient warning to get their bombers off the ground,” he said.

He refuted the notion the cancellation “killed” the Canadian aviation industry. Within five years, total employment in it had risen over 1959 levels, the proof being products like the Q400 and Bombardier range of aircraft.

Isinger also challenged the myth that Diefenbaker failed to promote foreign sales, noting other countries either had their own projects or could not afford the expensive Arrow, optimized for Canada’s unique requirements.

The “most ridiculous” element of this long-standing controversy was a brief recent campaign “by people who should know better” that the Arrow could be resurrected as a replacement for the CF-18 Hornet.

Politics and project management aside, Isinger said he remains deeply impressed by the remarkable engineering achievement of the Arrow. As Canadians, “we are right to be proud of the aircraft”.

A less-charitable greeting was in store for a slide of former defence minister Paul Hellyer when speaker Richard Mayne flashed it on the screen early in his talk on the RCAF’s long battle to find a replacement for its aging C-119 transports. The mercurial Hellyer wrote about this issue in his autobiography, suggesting that after he entered the cabinet in 1963 he discovered a hangar full of ‘119s being overhauled by an air force keen on keeping them in the air because “didn’t like being truck drivers for the army”.

Not so, said Mayne, who said the air force was instead gamely trying to keep them in the air to fulfill the duties given to it by the federal government -- while living within the budget given to it by successive ministers, including Hellyer. In fact, “the RCAF actually made a determined effort to replace it and develop an air transport capability”.

Richard said the C-119 story began in the early 1950s, when the RCAF, aware of air transport during the Second World War, bought 35 C-119s to supplement its Dakotas and North Stars. The aircraft and its crews earned particular acclaim in late 1956 for their part in getting Canadian soldiers and their equipment to the Sinai Peninsula to participate in the UN Emergency Force. Generally, it performed well on a myriad of duties, though maintenance issues emerged, revolving around the nose gear, oil coolers and propellers, with cracking because of metal fatigue. By 1961, problems were reaching worrisome proportions.

The RCAF wanted to replace the C-119s with more C-130B Hercules to supplement four then entering service. There was, Mayne said, “a feeling that things were only going to get worse and more desperate.” Worrisome indeed, given that the C-119 had only two engines.

Maintenance was not the cause. “The reason was that it was overworked and used in roles for which it wasn’t deigned,” Mayne said, adding the RCAF, “pushed the aircraft beyond what it was designed to do in order to get the job done.”

The big problem was the deafness of successive cash-strapped federal governments, which, incidentally, allocated considerable money to having Canadair build the CC-106 Yukon – which lacked the Hercules’ truck-level loading.

So the C-119s kept flying, with the air force particularly worried about the prospect of an engine failure on takeoff. It imposed strict operational restrictions and instituted more inspections of the skin. Rumours circulated that it was close to grounding the entire fleet.

Hellyer was correct in assessing them as being worn out, but wrong in his analysis otherwise. The RCAF fought back by enlisting the army as an ally and finding financial incentives to a quick order for C-130Es. The government gave in and the 1964 budget contained money for more Hercs. “After a long and painful period, the process, of replacing the C-119s had finally begun,” Mayne said.

Assessing its career in the RCAF, he quoted former pilots who said it was state of the art, perhaps unrivalled as a lifter of outsize cargo, in the 1950s and deserves “iconic” status in the RCAF. Said one pilot: “It was an honest aircraft that performed as advertised.”

At the banquet marking the end of the 2014 national convention, national President Gary Williams announced the winners of the CAHS’s annual awards

Not one, but two editions of the Douglas MacRitchie Memorial Award for outstanding service and long-time dedication to the CAHS were given: one was to Tim Dube, long-serving Ottawa chapter chairman, who has been involved with the society for over 25 years and also served as editor of the chapter newsletter, as well as national CAHS president and organizer of several CAHS national conventions.

The second went to Robert Winston, a long-time member of the Toronto CAHS chapter who, in Williams’ words, “has spent years furthering the goals of the CAHS”.

The C. Don Long Award for the best article in the CAHS Journal went “hands down” to Paddy Gardiner for “Mr. Brown’s Secret Trip”. This article (which appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of the Journal) covered the 1942 flight of a Pe-8 bomber carrying the Soviet Union’s commissar of foreign affairs to Britain and the U.S.

The Mac MacIntyre Award for a research article in the Journal went to Rachel Lea Heide for “A Jealous Regard for Reputation – Moose Jaw Civil-Military Relations After the 8^th of April 1954”, which dealt with the aftermath of the horrible mid-air collision between a Trans-Canada Airlines North Star and an RCAF Harvard.

Recipient of the Bill Wheeler Award for dedication and service to the CAHS was Gordon McNulty, a member since 1977 who has put his journalistic skills to work writing many articles on aviation for the society’s publications and other organizations.

As of June 2014, Todd Lemieux was still getting occasional emails about what had happened the previous summer.

Lemieux, who recently retired as chair of the Vintage Wings of Canada flying museum, was talking about the ambitious plan conceived and executed by Vintage Wings to take 500 Canadian air cadets into the air aboard its vintage aircraft and, get them thinking about Canada’s aviation history, and also about studying science, engineering and math in preparation for careers in aviation.

Based in Gatineau, Quebec, Vintage Wings is structured as a not-for-profit foundation that owns and flies a number of civilian and military aircraft with special places in Canada’s aviation history, Lemieux told the conference’s closing banquet. These include a Vickers Spitfire, Mustang, DH Fox Moth, Beaver and two (a Hurricane and Lysander) obtained from the late Harry Whereatt, legendary collector of aircraft. And then there’s the F-86 Sabre in the colors of the RCAF Golden Hawks air demonstration team that’s performed across the country, historian and Snowbirds veteran Dan Dempsey at the controls.

It’s the kind of place, the expat Saskatchewanian told the banquet, where pilot “fuel your own airplane and you clean your own airplane – and you really clean airplanes.”

The “500 Flights” concept originated from “Yellow Wings: Vintage Wings’ 2011 deployment of its Second World War training aircraft across the country to salute the 70^th anniversary of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Out of that, he said, came an acknowledgment that young Canadians are not entering the scientific and engineering schools that someday will take them into aviation. Within mere months, a plan to catch air cadets’ attention was conceived and executied, with money raised, connections made to the air cadet movement, pilots trained and aircraft ferried to sites across Canada.

The results were heartening. Moving Vintage Wings’ Stearman trainer, for example, found Lemeiux in Swift Current, where not one, but three wedding parties wanted to pose with the big yellow biplane. Lemieux agreed – but on condition that the party members listen to this story about a young man who learned to flying Stearman 70 something years ago: Harry Hannah. He flew in combat, was shot down became a PoW, dodged death – and emigrated to Canada where he studied engineering and became a vice-president of Ford Canada.

Another inspirational story: the Vintage Wings tiger Moth bears the name of Bill MacRae, who almost washed out of elementary fling training school at Portage la Prairie before getting a last-chance flight with the school CFI, on which he performed flawlessly. That got him graduated and eventually onto Spitfires overseas.

The message for air cadets was that reaching their dreams “is going to be hard; you have to go to school and maybe become an engineer”, Lemeiux said.

Enlisted to help this campaign was ex-air cadet Chris Hadfield, who broadcast an inspirational message from the International Space Station, where he was commander at the time, and veterans and aviation industry executives. There was also a place for aviation history, like the story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Said Lemieux: “It’s ‘paying it forward’. It’s not about you and your flight suit. It’s not about your logbook. It’s about long, hard hours on the tarmac telling kid about your airplanes and answering questions a thousand times over

“‘Paying it forward’ is what the whole organization is designed around.

All of which he got the grateful emails – like the one, which arrived just before the CAHS convention, in which an air cadet said he planned to get a medical degree, then a pilot’s licence so he could help the people the Third World with the medical problems. “I would do it all again,” said Lemeiux, “for one kid who was inspired like that.”