The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, what one journalist of the time later called “the greatest single achievement of the Canadian people since our provinces came together in the Confederation that is Canada,” was a long way from delivering on its promise of 19,500 trained air crew a year, let alone delivering a death blow to the Luftwaffe.
In December 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan consisted of committee minutes, accounting ledgers, designer blueprints, munition requisitions, manpower quotas, and a legislative document with a deadline. What it needed was a core flying force whose experience wouldn’t be used in fighter sorties over the English Channel nor in bombing runs over Germany, but in training the air crew that would. Consequently, although it was never really announced as such, building a nucleus of military flying instructors became one of the early objectives of the wartime RCAF. There was no time to lose.
Zero Day, the day on which training under the plan was to begin, was April 29, 1940. The first fully trained graduates were scheduled to receive their wings that autumn at the earliest. In the meantime, civilian flyers from the bush, from commercial aviation, from the barnstorming circuit, and from the string of small flying clubs across the country were lining up to become military pilots and get into the fighting. They would have to fill the gap until the plan began to produce new pilots.
“Civilian pilots were the initial backbone of the training plan,” Russ Bannock said. “Most of them, like myself, had never been in the air force. The regimentation was quite strange at first. I was sent to a coastal squadron equipped with Avro Avians. But when they realized I had only forty or fifty hours of flying experience, I was seconded to the flying club in Vancouver.
“There [at the British Columbia Aviation School] I was taught basic aerobatics and instrument flying, the equivalent to the Elementary Flying Training School in the plan. We were the first wartime course; it was called the provisional pilot officer course. None of us had any uniforms. We were all in civilian clothing, but we were still called pilot officers.”
The RCAF had traditionally enrolled pilot recruits as provisional pilot officers, or PPOs, perhaps to make up for the air force’s shortage of official uniforms. But a month after Russ Bannock arrived at Trenton for officers’ school, he was in uniform. At the beginning of 1940, he was on his way to Camp Borden, near Barrie, Ontario, the only service (or advanced) flying level school in Canada at the time.
“My first instructor at Camp Borden was a sergeant pilot. He wasn’t a very good instructor. In fact, he scared himself whenever he put a Harvard into a spin. It was the same with aerobatics. One time he was trying to teach me a loop, and it must have been a bad one, because we fell into a spin. So he never attempted to teach me loops again. I had to teach myself once I went solo.”
Another PPO who came to Borden from civilian flying was a twenty-one-year-old Nova Scotian, Fred Macdonell. Both of his parents had served in the medical corps during the First World War—his father as a doctor, his mother as a nurse—and Fred was born in London, England, in May 1918. On the night of the armistice, November 11, 1918, Macdonell’s parents went to the theatre to see Peter Pan, and his father fell sick with influenza. He died four days later. Fred had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, to become a doctor. But the declaration of war in September 1939 changed his plans too. Once they signed him up, the air force sent him for basic flying instruction to the Halifax Flying Club and then on to Camp Borden early in 1940.
“I trained on Anson Is,” Macdonell explained. “They were pretty primitive. The brakes worked on air pressure, so they had to fill up tanks [with compressed air] so you had brakes when you landed. And each time you used the brakes, the pressure would go down.
“I remember I had my first solo at the island airport in Toronto. It was a really tiny runway for an airplane like an Anson. And with those funny air brakes in the Anson, I had visions of going off the end of the runway. I thought I wasn’t going to land without going into the water. It wasn’t really frightening. You were young and you sort of took it in stride. You were more on an edge then.”
Frank Montgomery was quite used to “primitive” aircraft. His family had farmed near Vanda, Saskatchewan, where he was born in 1916, but a series of crop failures forced them to move to Saskatoon. There he discovered the Saskatoon Aero Club and started flying, financing his lessons by doing odd jobs—painting houses and picking rocks from farmers’ fields. He flew a Gipsy Moth and a Waco 10. He took his flight test for his private pilot’s licence in an old Avian, while the district inspector, who’d travelled up from Winnipeg, watched from a deck chair on the Saskatoon airfield.
Montgomery was working on his commercial licence when he received his telegram from National Defence on November 3, 1939. He got on the train in Saskatoon and arrived at Camp Borden three days later.
“They put me right into a Harvard,” Montgomery said. “Now, I’d flown nothing but Gipsy Moths and that old Waco. Well, it didn’t make any difference [to them]. You were supposed to be able to fly. If I’d had more experience, I might have said, ‘Hey, what about a check flight?’ But in those days, if you could hack it, you were in. If you couldn’t, you were gone.”
Experience in the air was a rare commodity in Canada. Even a few extra hours and a slightly higher designation made all the difference to an individual’s prospects. For example, twenty-three-year-old Don Rogers had his civilian instructor’s licence from the Hamilton Aero Club, so when the RCAF contacted him in August 1939, he was offered a special course at Camp Borden. Rogers was checked out and quickly reassigned back to the Hamilton Aero Club, where “in mid-September we received the first four of a year-long series of PPOs to train to the equivalent of private pilot’s qualifications.”
Another seasoned flyer pressed into early military service was Len Trippe. Like Peter Troup and Babe Woollett (who had left the RAF in England to fly bush runs along the lower St. Lawrence and north into Quebec), Trippe left the Air Force Reserve in England, arrived in Canada, and joined the Ontario Provincial Air Service based in Sudbury. He did his first bush piloting in flying boats in 1924. In the late 1920s he began instructing at various southern Ontario flying schools. When times got tougher and flying students fewer in the 1930s he barnstormed to boost business. Trippe and his colleagues dreamed up “death-defying” acts, including parachute jumps and wing-walking, and improvised stunts such as the one they used to entertain a crowd at a Victoria Day celebration at Port Dalhousie on Lake Ontario. “We tied an inner tube to the undercarriage of the Moth,” Trippe recalled. “Then once we were in the air over the water [parachutist George Bennett] crawled out of the cockpit, hooked his legs through the inner tube and hung head down, no parachute or anything. George couldn’t even swim a stroke.”
By the late 1930s Trippe found himself at one of the busiest private airfields in southern Ontario—Barker Field, in what was then northwest Toronto. Three aviation firms ran businesses there: Patterson and Hill, Fred Gillies Flying Service, and Leavens Brothers, where Trippe found work instructing. President Clare Leavens toured the countryside with a sound truck selling flying lessons and passenger flights at a cent a pound. On any given Sunday there’d be twenty-four or more aircraft taxiing around Barker Field, taking off and landing without the aid of air traffic control. There was never an accident.
“In 1939, the government came to Leavens Brothers,” Trippe said, “and asked if Leavens could gather up all the private pilots they could possibly find that were interested in becoming instructors for the RCAF. These pilots [the provisional pilot officers] were given a living-out allowance, AC2 [Aircraftman 2nd Class] pay, and their flying free—a hundred hours with us—still in civilian clothes.
“So we gathered up a bunch of pilots, including private pilots from the States. We bought six Tiger Moths and the RCAF gave us six Fleet Finches. All we had to do was supply the gas and oil and service our