McLeod mastered the Link, but never gave up the pen; his cockeyed poetry continued to appear in the RCAF Wings magazine. Later, when he became a flying instructor himself, his observations of the air force and its massive training scheme became the subject of a book called Dat H’ampire H’air Train Plan.
“At the end of the flight,” Dick Tarshis summed up, “I would go over what [the student] did right and wrong. You had a chart that had recorded all his moves. We tried to impress upon them that this was going to help them greatly in their flying, that they’d be a hell of a lot better flyer. But students were not that excited about flying the Link trainer. What they wanted was to really fly.”
After four weeks of facts and figures, lectures and Link flights, meteorology and Morse code, fitness and hygiene, studying and saluting, or, as Fred Lundell put it, “learning your A-B-C’s and minding your P’s and Q’s,” an airman’s future in the RCAF depended on an interview on his last day at ITS. LAC Fred Lundell, from Revelstoke, British Columbia, figured he was ready. His father had flown in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and Lundell had devoured his stories as well as books about air aces Billy Bishop, Ray Collishaw, and Don MacLaren. When war came again in 1939, most of Lundell’s graduating class at Revelstoke High School joined the services; he enlisted in the RCAF. Manning Depot set him back with scarlet fever and the measles. Finally, he seemed to be getting airborne at ITS. But all his ambitions to be a military pilot like his father and his storybook heroes depended on how he fared at his “Selection Day” interview. There, in a few short minutes before a panel of instructors, officers, and the CO, his fate would be decided. Would he go on to become an observer? A gunner? Or, best of all, a pilot?
“Hours were spent polishing shoes, adjusting ties, and achieving an appropriate cap angle,” Lundell remembered. “Then the solid oak doors opened. There sat the panel—grey-haired, bald-headed, more ribbons and wings than one could imagine—and somewhere a voice announced: ‘LAC Lundell, Frederick W.’
“Good God, I thought. If I were able, I should cross myself. It’s like Brandon’s funeral parlour, on which we painted ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.’ I smiled and stopped shaking.
“There were stern faces. Searching questions. ‘Did quite well in your courses, Lundell.’
“‘I think I was second or third in the course.’
“‘Want to be a pilot?’
“‘Everyone wants to be a pilot.’
“‘What special abilities do you have for a pilot, Lundell? Can you drive a car?’
“‘No, sir.’
“‘Why not?’
“‘We didn’t have a car, sir.’
“‘Hmmm. No proven abilities.’
“‘Oh, but sir, I can hit the front door of a house with the Vancouver Province from fifty feet, riding my bicycle, no hands.’
“A couple of suppressed grins . . . I saluted smartly and was dismissed . . . [I stood] outside those massive doors for what seemed the proverbial eternity, trying to kick myself—‘riding a bicycle, no hands’ . . . you made a real ass of yourself.
“Suddenly the doors opened.
“‘LAC Lundell. . . . We don’t think you will make pilot, or navigator, but perhaps bomb-aimer . . .’
“I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned hitting a door at fifty feet . . . “‘. . . but we have decided to give you a go at pilot training anyway.’”
LAC Fred Lundell, like the thousands before and after him, collected his ITS rewards—his navigation, mathematics, and aerodynamics marks, as well as his RCAF-issue two-piece fire-resistant flying suit, flying gloves, fleece-lined flying boots, goggles, and helmet— and then “began the repetitive ritual of completing another giant step towards gaining my wings and an eventual ops posting, and of saying goodbye to friends acquired during this phase of training.”
* Washing out was officially known as CT or “ceased training.”
ON JUNE 5, 1940, the Canadian aviation fraternity—flyers and administrators from the air force, commercial aviation, and private flying clubs—gathered in Ottawa for a special meeting. The highlight of the Wednesday luncheon was the annual presentation of the McKee (or Trans-Canada) Trophy. The three-foot-high trophy in the form of a winged figure flying over the globe had been created to honour Captain James Dalzell McKee, who had completed the first seaplane flight across Canada in 1926. Each year following that flight, the trophy was awarded to the person “rendering the most meritorious service in the advancement of aviation in Canada.” At the 1940 luncheon, the minister of national defence, Charles Gavan “Chubby” Power, rose to address the gathering and to announce the winner—Murton A. Seymour, the president of the Canadian Flying Clubs Association.
Murton Seymour’s lifelong association with Canadian aviation began in 1915, when he helped organize Canada’s first flying club, the Aero Club of British Columbia, near his home in Vancouver. That summer he took flying lessons by sitting on the wing of an OX-powered Curtiss pusher airplane while his instructor, William Stark, conducted ground demonstration runs. Seymour then practised by taxiing along the ground and making short hops of three or four feet off the ground. In September he successfully soloed in the Curtiss, and in November he graduated.
By this time the First World War was a year old, and the Royal Flying Corps came to Canada to set up a training program. The Aero Club of British Columbia became a training school, and Seymour was recommended for a commission in the Special Reserve of the Royal Flying Corps. He proceeded to Central Flying School at Upavon, England, in 1916, flew single-seater fighters for No. 41 Royal Flying Corps Squadron, stationed at Abeele, Belgium, until early 1917, then returned to Canada and became major in charge of all flying and technical training for the RAF in Canada.
After the war he completed his studies in law and was admitted to the bar in both British Columbia and Ontario in 1919. He established his law practice in St. Catharines, Ontario, and helped the local flying enthusiasts set up the St. Catharines Flying Club in 1928. He was its first president.
This was a critical time for civilian flying in Canada. It was clear that air transport—private, commercial, and military—would be of increasing economic importance, and that trained pilots would be needed for peacetime aviation as well as a vital resource should any military need arise. To begin filling the need for trained pilots at the end of the 1920s, the Canadian government, following the British example, launched the Light Aeroplane Club Scheme. This scheme had three goals: to establish aerodromes across Canada, to create an awareness of air transport among Canadians, and to create a reserve of partially trained pilots for defence in the event of war.
Each aero club had to provide a flying field, hire an instructor, have ten qualified pilots in its membership, and find thirty members prepared to qualify as pilots. In return, the government would provide two airplanes and a $100 grant to each club for each member who qualified as an ab initio pilot. (It was this arrangement that had enticed Al Stirton to sign up at the Moose Jaw Flying Club in 1938.)
The combination of his wartime posting with the Royal Flying Corps, his postwar direction of flight training, and his experience in organizing civilian aero clubs put Murton Seymour at the centre of the scheme. By fall 1929, Seymour had helped to organize sixteen aero clubs across the country into the Canadian Flying Clubs Association. The association advertised for potential pilots and organized the Trans-Canada Air Pageant, involving twenty aircraft and a picked air crew from the RCAF, which staged twenty-six aviation performances from the Maritimes to Vancouver.
In the late 1930s, when hostilities were looming in Europe, Seymour, as the CFCA president, lobbied the