The proposals varied widely from company to company. Some of the highest bids were ten times that of the lowest. Other submissions were presented on a single sheet with only the bottom-line figure attached. The Department of Defence tossed them all out, but recognized the sensible cost breakdown in the Dominion Skyways bid.
“He called us back in and explained they were not satisfied, but would we sit down with Leonard Apedaile, who was financial adviser to the minister, and thrash this thing out . . . [so] the operators could handle the scheme without making a colossal profit . . . [nor] go belly up.” Woollett and Troup were asked to form a subsidiary company, Dominion Skyways Training Ltd., to operate the first Air Observer School on a non-profit basis.
They opened No. 1 AOS at Malton, Ontario, on May 27, 1940. It became the template for the nine AOSs that followed, and in Woollett’s view “one of the most important factors in the success of the whole cooperative effort between the RCAF and the civilian operators.” By New Year’s Day 1941, the Troup/Woollett-managed Dominion Skyways Training school (and three others up and running in Edmonton, Regina, and London) had graduated 115 air observers, who, unlike Woollett on his first solo, could guide an aircraft home.
Scores of other civilian flyers were contacted by the minister of national defence. Johnny Fauquier left a charter operation on the lower St. Lawrence to teach instructors at Trenton and then became one of the RCAF’s leading bomber pilots. Matt Berry left bush flying to run the No. 7 Air Observer School at Portage La Prairie. Moss Burbidge was called out of retirement after 15,000 flying hours to become chief flying instructor at No. 16 EFTS in Edmonton. Stu Graham went from pilot testing to designing BCATP aerodromes. Don Watson left Canadian Airways to assist technical training. Dennis Yorath, a pilot with the Calgary Flying Club, took up duties as manager of No. 5 EFTS Lethbridge. Fred McCall helped organize Canadian flying clubs to support the EFTS system. Harry Kennedy left Trans-Canada Airlines to teach instrument and night flying. Arthur Wilson brought his skills as a flying club instructor to several Service Flying Training Schools. R.S. Grandy left commercial flying in Newfoundland to instruct pilots at Camp Borden. Jock Palmer stopped flying explosives into the north to instruct pilots in the BCATP. Romeo Vachon, who had pioneered air services along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, organized aircraft overhauls. And Grant McConachie, who had pioneered air mail and passenger service from Edmonton to Whitehorse, later became responsible for managing Canadian Pacific Airlines’ western operations, including four Air Observer Schools.
That summer, one of Grant McConachie’s part-time pilots at Yukon Southern Air Transport was nineteen-year-old Russ Bannock from Edmonton. He’d grown up within cycling distance of Edmonton’s Blatchford Field, where he’d witnessed the early comings and goings of the best bush pilots in the North—Punch Dickins flying his Fokker Super Universal, Leigh Brintnell aboard his tri-motored Fokker, and Wop May and his Junkers W34. And he’d been dazzled by the aviation celebrities who had passed through Blatchford, men such as movie actor Wallace Beery flying his Bellanca Skyrocket, Wiley Post on his around-the-world solo flight, or American speed pilot Frank Hawks arriving at the 1930 Air Show with his Travel Air Mystery Ship, the Texaco 13. He’d seen the fleet of ten Martin B-10 bombers en route to Alaska, the Ford Reliability Tour, and the Pitcairn Autogiro.
Although he loved flying, Bannock had his sights set on a job in mining, and he settled down to a routine of school in the winter months and summer jobs to earn the money for tuition. In 1937 he landed a summer job as a bar steward aboard a Hudson’s Bay Company steamer heading north down the Mackenzie River. The Distributor made two trips each summer, pushing a cluster of barges loaded with supplies for the communities along the river. On the second trip, he heard that a company in Yellowknife, Consolidated Mining & Smelting, was recruiting workers for mineral exploration work. So he jumped ship in Fort Smith and looked for a way to Yellowknife.
The only quick route north across Great Slave Lake to Yellowknife was by air. Bannock bought a ticket and went to the seaplane dock on the Slave River, where he found Stan McMillan loading his Fairchild 71 for the next leg of his freighting trip to Yellowknife. McMillan was another of the flying legends of the North. Although he began flying in the officers training corps and earned his military wings with the fledgling RCAF in the mid-1920s, Stan really cut his teeth in aviation by flying mail, men, and supplies to Hudson Bay and the Arctic. In late 1929 he had flown one of two aircraft for Colonel C. MacAlpine of the Dominion Explorer Company. The north-bound expedition planned to survey 12,500 square miles of uncharted territory from Churchill on Hudson Bay to Aklavik at the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Along the way, weather forced the eight-man expedition down, and it took them fifty-four days to trek out of the frigid Arctic wilderness to Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island. (McMillan would later join the BCATP to manage several Air Observer Schools.)
Bannock watched McMillan packing the Fairchild and wondered whether there’d be room enough for a passenger.
“I thought I was supposed to go on this flight,” he said to the pilot.
“You are,” McMillan said.
“Where am I going to sit, then?”
McMillan pointed at the freight compartment, where there was just enough space for a man to lie flat between the pile of freight and the roof of the airplane. “Just climb on top of the load,” he said.
All Bannock can remember of his first plane ride was the cramped space and the rough ninety-minute ride to Yellowknife. “The weather was bad, so we flew across Great Slave Lake and never got above a hundred feet. I’ll never forget it.”
Bannock made it to Yellowknife and joined Consolidated for the summer. That fall, back in Edmonton, he told his father he was going to become a flying geologist, and he took lessons at the Northern Alberta Aero Club for his pilot’s licence. By the summer of 1939 he had earned his commercial pilot’s licence. Then Grant McConachie asked him to join Yukon Southern Air Transport. Bannock accepted and that summer he flew as co-pilot and mechanic for McConachie between Edmonton and Whitehorse. He earned little but learned a lot. When he heard that the Calgary Auxiliary Squadron was flying Westland Wapiti bombers, he applied there. But before he could be accepted, his telegram arrived from the minister of national defence.
Even though the full extent of his flying experience was two summers in the bush—one in mineral exploration, the other as a co-pilot flying mail for Grant McConachie—Bannock was prime material for the Royal Canadian Air Force, a force desperate for trained pilots. At the outbreak of war, the RCAF total strength was 298 officers and 2,750 airmen, with an auxiliary force of 1,013. Its flying arsenal consisted of 270 aircraft.
As well as an obvious shortfall in aircraft and trained airmen, when the war began the RCAF had only five operating aerodromes and half a dozen under construction, and there were only two construction engineers in its employ. With a scheme of such mammoth proportions before them, the air force called on the experience of private industry for help.* The RCAF formed the Directorate of Works and Buildings and appointed R.R. Collard (the vice-president and general manager of a Winnipeg construction firm) as its first commander.
Despite the impossible deadlines, congested working conditions, and a shortage of staff, Collard’s group produced more than three-quarters of a million blueprints and 33,000 drawings, which were used to build 8,300 hangars, drill halls, and barracks blocks. From fall 1939 through to spring 1940, an army of engineers, teamsters, carpenters, plumbers, and thousands of other tradespeople excavated and graded sites, dug wells for water, erected and framed buildings, and poured enough cement to have made a twenty-foot wide highway from Ottawa to Vancouver. So rapid and massive was the BCATP site construction that communities such as Rivers, Manitoba (where a navigation school was built) compared the arrival of the BCATP to the arrival of the railway at the turn of the century.
However, at the end of 1939, the master scheme—the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan—that would deliver a force of professional military air crew to the war effort was still just a piece of paper.
It would be another six months before the organization could start processing BCATP trainees at its seventeen recruiting centres. It would be just as long before raw recruits arrived by the thousands at three Manning