IT WAS A CRISP WINTER’S MORNING when the power-brokers who had negotiated and signed the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan agreement assembled for a photograph on the steps of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Lord Riverdale, chief negotiator for the United Kingdom, stood with J.V. Fairbairn, Australian minister for air, Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his key cabinet ministers—including J.L. Ralston, Norman Rogers, and C.D. Howe—and representatives from the Royal Australian, Royal New Zealand, Royal Canadian, and Royal Air Forces. Bundled up in heavy winter coats, gloves, and fedoras, this assembly of politicians, bureaucrats, and military brass turned to smile at the camera.
Even though Prime Minister King basked in the limelight as the individual most responsible for launching the plan, the BCATP did not owe its success to the negotiating sessions in London and Ottawa in 1938 and 1939, nor to the politicians and military strategists who signed it. The credit for the success of this massive scheme belonged to thousands of anonymous men and women who, like Charlie Konvalinka, shared the love of flying.
In that sense, the plan originated in 1927, when a lanky, soft-spoken aviator landed his Ryan NYP monoplane, the “Spirit of St. Louis,” at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, after a 3,600-mile non-stop flight from New York. Inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s achievement, a young architecture student from Auburn, New York, abandoned his education to pursue a flying career. Maury Dillingham was one of many Americans who joined the RCAF before Pearl Harbor and who served as a flying instructor in the BCATP.
An innovator of another sort captured the imagination of Argentine-born Ted Arnold. The summer of the Lindbergh flight, when he was on vacation from his British public school, Ted got an invitation to visit an airfield just outside Southampton on the south coast of England. He’ll never forget seeing “this aeroplane with a great revolving wing on top.
“The pilot was an amiable Spaniard. The aircraft had a regular motor and propeller on the front. But just before he began to move forward along the ground, they pulled a rope to get this big wing on top revolving. And it helped lift the plane into the air. I had the feeling I had just seen the future.”
Young Ted Arnold was right. The aviator was Spanish aeronautical engineer Juan de la Cierva. The crash of his trimotor plane in 1919 had led Cierva to develop the autogiro, a more stable form of aircraft. The prototype that Ted had seen in 1927 gained wide use in France, Germany, Japan, and the United States before the Second World War and was the forerunner of the helicopter. Although Cierva was killed in an airliner crash at Croydon aerodrome near London in 1936, Ted was not dissuaded from flying; he went back to Argentina, later joined the RCAF, and instructed scores of pilots in the BCATP.
The passion for flying affected youngsters even in remote regions. Ren Henderson spent his childhood on the island of Samarai, at the eastern end of Papua New Guinea, where his father was the magistrate, dispensing Australian justice. In the 1920s there were few roads and no cars, so there were really only two ways to get around—on foot and by air. The first aircraft Ren ever saw was “a weird-looking contraption that belonged to the Australian Air Force, with the engine and propeller pointing backwards. It had two wings and all these damn wires. You could have let a cockatoo go in there, and it would never have found its way out through all those wires.
“I remember a native standing there watching this thing land on the water and taxi up to the beach,” Henderson said. “He turned to someone beside him and said, ‘It’s the motor car that belongs to Jesus Christ.’”
Ren Henderson was among about 10,000 Royal Australian Air Force air crew shipped to Canada for BCATP training. Like nearly all of his mates from home, Henderson was itching for an overseas combat posting. Instead, he was one of the first three RAAF pilots to become a BCATP instructor. Ren finally got a crack at flying fighter sorties in mid-1944, and there, in the skies over Dieppe, “it was what I learned as an instructor that saved my life.”
For Jack Meadows, flying was like “a germ spreading” through his life. As a boy in England his favourite books included a 1910 history of the Daily Mail London-to-Manchester air race, stories about the aircraft in the Great War, and biographies of such flyers as Mc Cudden, Mannock, Ball, Bishop, Boelcke, Immelmann, and Richthofen. When he was about ten he attended Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus and invested his month’s allowance—five shillings—for a “joy ride” in the rear cockpit of an Avro 504K. He studied aviation periodicals, and one—The Aeroplane—published his account of an air display at Ipswich Airport.
The “germ” grew at prep school when he was riveted by the sight of a close formation of Bristol Bulldog fighters flying overhead, and at college when he participated in anti-aircraft drills, firing blanks from a .303 Enfield rifle at an attacking Hawker Audax. Flying became “a full-blown fever” in 1937, when he invested his life’s savings—£35— in flying lessons at the Ipswich Aero Club. Meadows had set his sights on an RAF career, carrying on the military aviation traditions of his bookshelf heroes. Instead, he would log 1,600 hours instructing Allied pilots on thirty aircraft types across England and Canada before he eventually went day-fighting in Spitfires in 1943 and later night-fighting in Beaufighters and Mosquitoes.
For Gene Vollick, who lived in Hamilton, Ontario, a summer morning when he was nine years old changed his whole life. Somewhere between six and eight o’clock on the morning of August 11, 1930, the British dirigible R100 motored overhead en route from Toronto to Niagara Falls as part of its North American publicity tour to promote commercial airship flights. Gene was thunderstruck. From that moment on, he abandoned his old hobby of collecting baseball cards and began to collect aviation cards. When the war began, he enrolled in an aero-engineering course at the Galt Aircraft School, but later remustered into air crew and trained RCAF pilots at the Service Flying level until the war ended.
The R100’s trip over southern Ontario affected many others who saw it. The night before, August 10, the dirigible passed over Ottawa, and as she reached the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill six powerful searchlights illuminated her silver shape, creating an unforgettable sight. American millionaire Howard Hughes was rumoured to have offered $100,000 to have the R100 do a fly-past over New York. Toronto motorists got a free look as they stopped their cars in the streets to watch her circle the city.
One of the best spots for dirigible viewing was a house in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto. As the R100 circled the city, thirteen-year-old Allister Rutherford scrambled to the rooftop of his Winchester Street house and gazed at it until it was a speck in the distance. Rutherford lived with his bicycle at the ready; whenever there was the slightest indication of air traffic at the Leaside Aerodrome, he and his friends were off like a shot, pedalling uptown to watch what they called “the flying circus.” His fascination for flying as well as mathematics led him into navigation instruction for the wartime RCAF; he served the Air Training Plan from coast to coast, from Chatham, New Brunswick, to Comox, British Columbia.
The Roaring Twenties and the Dirty Thirties—the best and worst of times—provided youngsters with plenty of opportunity to fall in love with flying. Wing-walkers, barnstormers, transoceanic daredevils, former First World War aces, aerobatic teams, and flying circuses of every shape and size gave demonstrations and shows all across Canada. On June 5, 1928, Amelia Earhart stopped in Halifax en route from Boston to Wales; on June 17, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Ford Trimotor airplanes conducted National Air Tours that stopped at centres all across North America in the 1920s. In April 1930, the RCAF inaugurated a demonstration flight of Siskin fighters; they were Canada’s first touring aerobatic team. In July 1933, Charles Lindbergh made short stopovers in Halifax and St. John’s on his way to Greenland, and Edmonton’s Blatchford Field welcomed Wiley Post and his Lockheed Vega “Winnie