According to Hiscocks’s picture, the Rapide’s unusual tapered wings had straight leading edges that ran at right angles from the fuselage. That was in accord with Hiscocks’s textbooks, which, in those pre-supersonic times, abhorred leading-edge sweepback. The possibility that the de Havilland designer responsible for the Dragon series, A. E. Hagg, might not have read those texts occurred to Hiscocks once the wings were assembled and trial-mated to the fuselage. They didn’t fit. The wings’ leading edges did have sweepback, after all.
Repairing the damage was all the more difficult because, before the era of bolts with self-locking nuts, the normal practice in assembling bolted machines was to hammer the ends of the bolts to scramble the threads. “It was an effective technique,” Hiscocks remembers “as we discovered when we tried to take those wings apart.”
An elaborate and fully reported ceremony was held to christen the airplane when it was finished, and its first flight was highly publicized, especially its subsequent arrival back it the Toronto waterfront on August 21, 1937.
One obvious shortcoming of wood-framed, fabric-covered airplanes was demonstrated that evening, when the flying newsroom returned from its inaugural trip and was being refuelled for the next day’s flight. One tank had been filled when a spark from the nozzle ignited fumes from the empty tank into a ball of flame.5 The flying newsroom burned too quickly to be saved, and “all that could be done was to float it away from the dock and let it burn,” recalls Fred Hotson, a DHC employee at the time. Up in smoke went the product of Dick Hiscocks’s summer labours.
Hiscocks has often wondered whether the fate of the flying newsroom that summer of 1937 was why DHC was unable to offer him work after he graduated. His visit to Hatfield in 1938, arranged by DHC managing director Philip C. Garratt, was, in its own way, equally disillusioning. De Havilland had its own way of doing things, and the company preferred to train its technicians at its own technical school. These graduates were more highly regarded within the company than engineers from Oxford or Cambridge, who were considered scientists, DH people were hands-on types, hardworking fellows who could use tools.
There were advantages to the way de Havilland operated: the production department was, above all else, flexible. Hatfield could build prototypes cheaply, for almost any market, and could produce short runs of any specific model economically by combining the wing of one type with a new fuselage and powering the result with one of the company’s reliable Gipsy engines.6
Garratt had arranged for Hiscocks to work at Hatfield on an advanced project—at least, it was advanced for the prewar de Havilland. It was the all-metal DH.95 Flamingo on which Jakimiuk had consulted with the de Havilland design team.7 Just out of engineering school, wanting to keep himself abreast of the latest developments in aviation, Hiscocks remembers requesting borrowing privileges in the company library. This was regarded as an outlandish request, for which he was paraded before Hatfield’s managing director, “no less.”
“He wanted to know what earthly use I would have for technical reports, and to his horror I said that there was a lot of good design data in reports from sources such as the Royal Aircraft Establishment. The office of every senior executive in England had a fireplace in those days, and, pointing to this, the head of the company said that government reports were given an ‘ignition test’ at de Havilland.”
From 1928 to 1939, DHC assembled aircraft using parts supplied from Britain. Here, circa 1933, a two-seater DH.60 Moth fuselage is being overhauled in the foreground while a DH.89 Dragon Rapide airliner fuselage, upper right, awaits its wings. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC
Even after the company’s leap into high-performance aircraft with the 1934 Comet racer, an ancestor of the World War II Mosquito, old habits died hard. In retrospect, Hiscocks saw in the distrust of scientific credentials and the supremacy of the shop floor at Hatfield a style of aircraft design and manufacture that would cause problems for the company’s Canadian branch when it became involved in high-volume production of Mosquitoes during the war.
Installing a 120-hp Gipsy III inverted air-cooled engine in one of the 1,553 Tiger Moth trainers assembled by DHC from 1937 to 1945. Here, Jerome McNamie (left). Ed Loveday and an unidentified worker unite a Gipsy engine with its airframe. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC
Canada’s potential to contribute aircraft to the war effort was recognized in Britain. Most of Canada’s aircraft companies were branch-plants of British armament concerns, such as Vickers. (America’s aviation industry was preoccupied with expanding by leaps and bounds to meet contracts placed by the British Purchasing Commission.) But most of Canada’s industry—and especially the branch-plants of British concerns—was hopelessly behind the times, assembling aircraft that were patently obsolete under licences from foreign manufacturers.8
Canadian Vickers, in Montreal, was building stately but slow biplane Stranraer flying-boats, which, though all-metal, were ten years out-of-date in concept. Boeing of Canada, in Vancouver, was building biplane Blackburn Shark torpedo-bombers even as its parent company in Seattle, 120 miles south, was turning out what was then the most advanced heavy bomber in the world, the B-17 Flying Fortress. A consortium of six subcontractors was organized as Canadian Associated Aircraft Ltd. to build the Handley-Page Hampden twin-engine bomber. Hardly the zenith of aircraft design at the time, it was an instructive all-metal structure, useful for bomber crew training. Associated was having trouble building them satisfactorily.
How de Havilland Canada, among the smallest and most technically outdated aircraft manufacturers in a country that was then an airplane-building backwater, became the biggest in Canada, with 7,000-odd employees who managed to build more than 1,130 400-mph Mosquito fighter-bombers, is by itself an impressive chapter in the annals of Canadian industry.
DHC’S growth in size and sophistication was one of those miracles that were routinely accomplished as part of the war effort. But if the word miracle accurately describes the overall wartime picture at Downsview, that wondrous outcome was accomplished by down-to-earth means: equal parts of hardnosed management and the heartbreak that often results from it; a gathering of talent from all over Canada, indeed the world; and exactly the right product. The Mosquito was an aircraft that DHC was uniquely qualified to produce. Among the first of those talented new additions from around the world was W. J. Jakimiuk of Warsaw, Poland.
Barely ten years after having helped found the PZL organization to advance the science of aircraft construction, Jaki Jakimiuk found himself quickly appointed chief engineer of a concern that was building flimsy Tiger Moth biplanes—a huge leap backward technologically.
DHC’s contract from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1937 for twenty-six DH.82 Tiger Moth trainers was “a rather small piece of the business in a country verging on war,” writes Fred Hotson in The de Havilland Canada Story, “but everyone at Downsview believed an additional contract would follow in due course... but by the time the last Tiger was delivered on April 12, 1939, no new order had appeared.”9 Layoffs would have occurred at this most unlikely time—on the eve of a world war—if not for an order from the British parent company for 200 Tiger Moth fuselages.
These orders kept DHC alive during the prewar hiatus between the loss of North America’s illusion of immunity from the unpleasantness brewing in Europe and the flood of orders that was about to transform the continent within months into the arsenal of democracy. However mundane, the Tiger Moth work was a tribute to the persistent salesmanship of the company’s new managing director.