The next regular meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada on Thursday, April 25 at 7 pm CST.
Our speakers this month are Ross Robinson and Dan Payne. Ross is well known in the local aviation community as the owner of a Harvard and a B-26 Invader, which is now parked at the aviation museum. Dan was formerly the chief flying instructor at the Winnipeg Flying Club and a Transport Canada inspector but now is primarily a musician. Their bios are below. Ross and Dan will speak about their 1985 transatlantic flight in a piston single engine Rockwell 112 Commander, for the New York to Paris Air Rally.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. Donuts and coffee are included!
The next regular meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada on Thursday, March 7 at 7 pm CST.
We are pleased to have as our main speaker John Crook. He will speak about de Havilland’s elegant DH-84 Dragon and DH-89 Dragon Rapide cabin biplanes. More information and John’s bio is below. John will be joined, virtually, by Nathan Delorme-Crabb, who will give us a tour of the DH-90 Dragonfly that he flies on behalf of a private collection. You can get a taste of his talk in this thirteen-minute video. Nathan will join us live from Britain.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. Donuts and coffee are included!
The next regular meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada and by Zoom on Thursday 25 January at 7 pm CST.
Our speaker is retired University of Manitoba professor of engineering Ostap Hawaleshka. Ostap was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001 for his work in founding the Science and Technology Centre in Ukraine. He will speak about the Soviet / Ukrainian Antonov Design Bureau and their extensive line of transport aircraft, which include the AN-124 Condor and the AN-225 Mriya. The Mriya was the heaviest airplane ever to fly, with a maximum take-off weight of 1.4 million pounds. He previously spoke to the chapter in April 2011.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. Donuts and coffee are included!
The next chapter meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, 2088 Wellington Avenue, and by Zoom on Thursday, November 30 at 7:00 pm.
speaker this month is John Peden, who will speak about his father. Murray Peden was a Second World War RCAF bomber pilot. A Thousand Shall Fall, his autobiography, covered his enrolment, training in the BCATP, operational service flying Stirlings and Flying Fortresses with a Royal Air Force squadron, and his homecoming. It has been called “one of the finest war memoirs ever written”.
John was born in 1955, and is the eldest of Murray Peden’s three children (another brother who passed away in 2013 as well as a sister, who retired from her career as an M.D.). Winnipeg is his lifelong home. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba in 1979, and articled that year with the Manitoba Department of Justice. He went on to enjoy a long career with them as a Crown Attorney, only retiring in 2022. He is married with two grown children (and two young grandchildren). He has had a lifelong love of music, playing the piano, the trombone, and the bagpipes. He still plays the pipes with his son in the St. Andrew’s Pipe Band of Winnipeg and dabbles in writing pipe music and teaching the pipes with the Lord Selkirk Robert Fraser Memorial Pipe Band.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. Donuts and coffee are included!
The next chapter meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, 2088 Wellington Avenue, and by Zoom on Thursday, October 26 at 7:00 pm.
The speaker this month is Hedley Auld, a local aviation history enthusiast who has researched the early history of the RCAF in Manitoba, in particular the Victoria Beach air station.
Hedley Auld, born and schooled in Winnipeg, has degrees from University of Manitoba (Mechanical Engineering) and University of Oxford (Philosophy, Politics, Economics). He comes from a prominent family connection to aviation as his father, W. Murray Auld (1916–2015), was an RCAF Inspector in the Second World War and later joined MacDonald Brothers, rising to the role of General Manager of Bristol Aerospace Ltd. in Winnipeg.
Hedley retired in 2016 after a 37-year career with CN at its Montreal Headquarters in Economics, Financial Planning, and Marketing Planning, and in Winnipeg in the Grain Marketing business unit.
His keen interest in history has included membership in the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada and research on early aviation in Manitoba and the West. He has extensively researched the story of the Victoria Beach Air Station.
Victoria Beach, today a rural municipality noted for its cottage lifestyle, is located on a Lake Winnipeg shoreline, an ideal location to establish one of Canada’s first air bases. The Air Board of Canada (1919-1923), and, later, the Royal Canadian Air Force, operated flying boats from the Victoria Beach air Station, including Canadian-made Vickers Vedettes used for surveying, forest inventory and fire patrols.
In May 1921, 18 workers arrived at the new beach townsite to begin building the base on what is now the municipality’s sports field. Up to 60 personnel worked at the air station from May to October, including squadron leaders, pilots, photographers, and support staff. In 1926, the base was moved to Lac du Bonnet to continue the RCAF role in the region.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. Donuts and coffee included!
Our next chapter meeting will take place at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, 2088 Wellington Avenue, and by Zoom on Thursday 28 September 2023 at 7 pm CDT. Our speaker this month is Mike McAllister, whose topic is Supersonic Scandal: the Soviet spy ring at Avro Canada. Mike is a retired Millwright and a certified rescue diver with a keen interest in history. He has written for Discovery Channel, Eye Spy, Diver Magazine, and several other publications. He was a volunteer for the Toronto Aerospace Museum for ten years and has been interviewed on radio & TV on the Avro Arrow and about searches for lost aircraft He is a member of the Canadian Harvard Aircraft Association Dive Recovery Team. Mike will join us by Zoom, but it will be an in-person meeting at the aviation museum.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB. Our meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. We provide the coffee and doughnuts. The meeting Zoom link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Our meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. The meeting link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Special Air Mission (SAM) 970 is the moniker used for the first presidential jet plane, a Boeing 707-153. It could also be used to describe Crisanto (Cris) Aquino’s recent trip down to The Museum of Flight as part of the Detail Mafia team.
Cris owns Dr. Shine PHD, an automotive detailing shop in Winnipeg. He also works part-time at Cadorath Aerospace as a machinist. His journey to becoming part of the Detail Mafia started in 2017 when he went down to Big Bear, California to train under master-level detailer Renny Doyle.
Doyle is the owner of Detailing Success and the founder of the Detail Mafia. In 2002, Doyle received a call from the White House asking him to put together a detailing team. Their mission? Cleaning and restoring the deteriorating paint and aluminum on a number of historical aircraft at the Seattle Museum of Flight. After Cris completed his training in 2017, Doyle hand-selected him to join the team heading to Seattle the following year.
That first year, Cris was assigned “rookie work” as he calls it. This consisted of wiping down aircraft, light sanding, and cleaning equipment for the veteran detailers. During his next trip down in 2019, he was assigned to SAM 970, the aircraft used by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon and known as Air Force One when it was carrying these heads of state.
COVID-19 put a stop to Cris’ trips to Seattle until this year. He was again assigned to SAM 970 and for one week in July he and other detailers spent 12 hours a day polishing it to a “mirror finish.” Cris worked primarily on the Boeing 707’s four, JT3D-3 Pratt and Whitney jet engines, each one taking him an entire day to detail. (If you come by our museum, take a look at our CF-104 Starfighter for an example of Cris’ work. He helped with its cleaning and polishing before it came to our museum.)
This year, there were 35 detailers making up the Detail Mafia team. Seven of them joined Cris on SAM 970 and the others were assigned to the Concorde jet G-BOAG, the first Boeing 727 and Boeing 747 aircraft ever produced, the Boeing Bee B-17, and the museum’s B-29 Superfortress.
Perhaps one of the most memorable parts of his week was when Cris met veteran Captain Dick Nelms, a B-17 pilot on 35 missions during WWII and an active volunteer at the Museum of Flight. He also had the chance to explore this aircraft and the B-29, two of the planes that are off-limits to the public unless you’re a veteran or in the armed forces. For the Star Wars fans out there, the cockpit of this aircraft was the inspiration for the Millennium Falcon, so it’s an understatement when Cris says this was a “pretty cool” experience.
There’s a lot of pride in Cris’ voice as he talks about the experience, and rightly so. He was the only Canadian on the team and the first Canadian to work on Air Force One in the past twenty years.
Cris hopes to join the team again next year but notes that it will be dependent on sponsorships. All members of the Detail Mafia team are volunteers who pay their own way to Seattle. They’re also responsible for their own accommodations and meals. The museum pays for supplies but team members bring their own tools and equipment with them.
If you’re interested in learning more about Cris’ experience, you can contact him here.
Our next chapter meeting will take place by Zoom only on Thursday 31 August 2023 at 7 pm CDT. Our speaker this month is Roger Gunn, author of Masters of the Air: The Great War Pilots McLeod, McKeever, and MacLaren. His biography is below. Roger will speak on the lives of Andrew McKeever and Donald MacLaren, two of the three pilots described in his book Masters of the Air. McKeever was the king of the two-seaters in the Great War. He was also a squadron leader in the fledgling Canadian Air Force in 1918 and 1919. MacLaren on the other hand accounted for 54 victories in World War One and was Canada’s third highest scoring ace, next to Bishop and Collishaw. MacLaren was instrumental in the founding of Trans-Canada Air Lines in the late 1930s. Both McKeever and MacLaren led very interesting lives, lives which Roger will bring to life in his presentation. Roger spoke to our chapter about the third subject of his book, Alan McLeod, VC, in January 2022.
Registration for this meeting is required at CAHS-MB.
Our meetings are free and open to CAHS members and everyone interested in Canadian aviation history. The meeting link will be provided around two hours before the meeting. Please register early enough to receive the link.
Roger’s book is available via the CAHS website. The chapter also has a few copies for sale, for $25 each. I will provide free local delivery in Winnipeg. Please reply to this email if you’re interested in purchasing a copy.
Recreation of Buffalo 461, unveiled at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum on August 9, 2009
In 1974, Canadian peacekeeping troops were posted to the Golan Heights—an area between Syria and Israel—to aid United Nations troops.
Tensions were high in the Middle East. A year prior, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Syria and Egypt attempted to regain control of territory that Israel had captured in 1967. Included in this area was the Golan Heights.
Canada’s primary role was to provide logistical support for the UN troops. This included scheduled daily transport flights between Ismailia, Egypt and Damascus, Syria, six times a week.
These flights had to take a convoluted route to avoid flying over Israeli airspace. The routing took pilots out over the Mediterranean, 50 nautical miles (nm) offshore, then back inland just south of Beirut to cross the Syrian border 25 nm east of Damascus.
On August 9, 1974, a Syrian missile attack shot down a Canadian Armed Forces plane during one of these transport flights. The aircraft that fell was de Havilland Canada (DHC) Buffalo, 115461. Nine Canadian peacekeepers dubbed the Buffalo Nine, were killed.
The nine victims of Buffalo 461
The nine victims of the missile attack were Captain George G. Foster, First Officer Captain Keith B. Mirau, Corporal H. T. Kennington, Corporal Michael W. Simpson, Master Warrant Officer (MWO) Gaston Landry, acting MWO Cyril B. Korejwo, Master Corporal Ronald C. Spencer (flight engineer), Corporal Bruce K. Stringer (loadmaster), and Captain Robert B. Wicks (navigator).
In 2008, the Government of Canada chose August 9 to mark National Peacekeepers’ Day.
National Aviation Day was established to commemorate the past, celebrate the present and advance the future of aviation in Canada. It’s recognized every year on February 23, the day in 1909 when J.A.D. McCurdy piloted the first flight in Canada. McCurdy flew the Silver Dart nearly 800 metres in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
The Silver Dart
Canada has one of the safest air transportation systems in the world and we also have one of the largest aviation and aerospace industries in the world. Winnipeg is the largest centre in western Canada and the third largest in the country in terms of exports.
Canada’s Aviation History
So, what are some key events in Canada’s aviation history? After J.A.D. McCurdy’s ground-breaking flight in 1909, things really started to—ahem—take off. Here are a few highlights between then and now:
1915 – The first production of aircraft in Canada, the Curtiss JN-3 airplane, begins in Toronto.
1919 – The first direct trans-Atlantic flight is made from St. John’s Newfoundland to Clifden, Ireland by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in a twin-engine Vickers Vimy bomber.
1924 – The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is formed.
1930s – Canada moves more freight by air than the rest of the world combined. Air traffic control, flight plans, fixed routes, designated levels, radio contact, soundproof cabins, and flight attendants are introduced.
1934 – Jessica Jarvis becomes the first woman in Canada to earn her commercial pilot’s licence.
1937 – The government creates Trans-Canada Airlines (which became Air Canada in 1964) to meet Canada’s need for transcontinental service.
1938 – The first coast-to-coast passenger service begins on March 6.
1938-1945 – During the Second World War, aircraft manufacturing and training aircrew are one of Canada’s contributions to the wartime effort. By 1945, the aviation industry employs 120,000 people, including 25,000 women.
1944 – The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is founded with the signing of the Convention on International Civil Aviation. Canada is one of the original 52 member states, and the organization is headquartered in Montreal.
1999 – Canada leads the world by being the first country to implement safety management systems (SMS) as a new way to eliminate safety risks in civil aviation.
2002 – Canadian Air Transportation Security Authority (CATSA) is created to focus on air transportation security—from passenger and baggage screening to screening airport workers.
2008 – Canada’s Bombardier, Inc, the world’s third-largest civil aircraft maker, unveils its ‘green’ C Series family of fuel-efficient jets.
2014 – The first test ranges for drones and safety regulations are approved.
2015 – The Bombardier C Series CS100 aircraft is certified.
2018 – Canada introduces new safety measures to protect Canadians from laser attacks on aircraft.
2018 – Canada publishes new fatigue regulations that respect modern fatigue science and international standards to limit the amount of time a crew member can be on the job, making air travel safer for all Canadians
2019 – Canada introduces new regulations for remotely piloted aircraft systems (drones)
2022 – The new Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada opens in Winnipeg (I put this one in here to make sure you’re still reading.)
Canadian innovations
The infamous Avro Arrow was mentioned above, but there are other Canadian aviation innovations worth noting.
The anti-gravity “G-suit”, designed by Wilbur Franks, enabled military pilots to safely fly at altitudes that tested them physically and psychologically. This pressure suit allowed pilots to carry out manoeuvres without losing consciousness. Modern-day astronauts’ suits are based on Franks’ design.
RCAF pilots geared up in G-suits
We all know how frustrating it is to be sitting on the tarmac, waiting for your plane to be de-iced, but this safety measure is worth the wait. You can thank the National Research Council of Canada for coming up with this innovative procedure.
Aviation connects Canadians in large and small communities with one another, contributes to the health of the economy, and creates jobs. For example, annual sales of Canadian aerospace products and services total more than $25 billion, with exports of aerospace goods and services approaching $17 billion.
Right now, the future of our aerospace industry is in jeopardy, as Canada is facing a projected shortage of 55,000 skilled workers within the next few years. At the Royal Aviation Museum, we’re working hard to address this through STEM-based educational programming. We’re also partnering with local aviation companies and educational institutions to bring awareness to career paths in the industry.
One of those partners is Boeing Canada. They’ll be joining us for National Aviation Day on February 23 with a booth that highlights career opportunities—and they’re running a paper plane contest!
We’ve got a few other activities lined up for February 23 including a “fireside chat” with a couple of our museum’s founders, special tours, and a presentation by some of our volunteers about the restoration of our Bellanca Aircruiser. And if you’re a photographer, come back in the evening for Photography Night at the Museum.
Admission is 50% off all day on National Aviation Day and parking fees will be waived.
