The Royal Aero Club served as a model for the Aero Club of Canada, formed when 26 Torontonians with “an amateur interest in aviation” met in 1912. Rules and bylaws were copied from the British club, and like its counterpart, the Aero Club of Canada joined with various newspapers to lobby the government to regulate aviation before members of the public, let alone pilots, were killed. But except for young Tom Wensley’s accidental death in 1888 (the first aerial casualty in Canada, he had been clinging to a balloon’s rope in Ottawa, was carried aloft, and fell to his death) and despite years of exhibition flying in the dominion, there hadn’t been a single aviation fatality among bystanders.
The singular instance in which the bureaucracy in Ottawa did acknowledge there might be some use to aviation was in the imposition of tariff duties on aircraft. With few exceptions all flying machines were built outside Canada, either in Europe or the United States. Even J.A.D. McCurdy had set up a plant in the United States to do so. This led the Canadian commissioner of customs to announce in July 1912 that imported flying machines would come under Tariff Item #453 and the following rates would apply: a 15 percent British preferential duty, with Americans and all others subjected to a 27 percent duty.
That was about all the federal government could do, since sports/amusements and the licensing of vehicle operators were provincial matters. Critics must have pointed out that no Canadian province required a driver to be certified (or tested) to operate an automobile and that many more drivers and pedestrians were killed on the roads than pilots in the air. The federal government’s attitude seemed to be that as long as deaths at aerial circuses were confined to foolhardy pilots who were Americans, it wouldn’t get involved. But the shape of things to come was hinted at the Saint John, New Brunswick, air show on September 2, 1912, in which the teenage American birdman Cecil Peoli carried two intrepid passengers aloft. While there were no casualties that day, it was only a matter of time before someone was killed.
On June 27, 1914, a month before the First World War began, Montrealers gathered at Maisonneuve Park to watch Lincoln Beachey “loop the loop” — the first time this had ever been done in Canada. Twenty-two pilots had died trying to fly inverted (this was before symmetrical wings with the same curvature on the top and bottom were invented), and it looked as if Beachey would make it one more. Promoters could always count on sellout crowds when “The Demon of the Sky” performed, especially as he did his closing trick: putting his plane into a steep dive and then, after throwing his hands up in the air to show the crowd, grabbing the controls to level out, it seemed, almost inches from the ground.[11]
Applauding him as he successfully performed the inverted routine somehow without losing his fuel and oil, no one in the audience could have guessed that it was the last month of peace or the end of aviation’s adolescence.
2
Knights of the Air and the Great War
As short-sighted as the Laurier government’s interest in Baddeck No. 1 had been in 1909, it was still years before the British Army took aviation seriously. As early as 1905, the Wright brothers had unsuccessfully tried to interest the British War Office in their Flyer. It was worse when they toured France with it and were denounced as hoaxers and liars. Since they weren’t French, how could they be aviators?[1] Not until 1912 would the British government purchase 25 flying machines for the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers, the battalion to be renamed the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). Soon after, Lieutenant Edward Hotchkiss and Lieutenant C.A. Bettington became the first RFC officers to die in an aircraft accident when their Bristol-Coanda monoplane crashed on takeoff on September 12, 1912. The British secretary of state for war then banned all military flights of monoplanes, stating that two wings were safer than one.
When the First World War began in the summer of 1914, governments considered aircraft to be a “fringe” weapon — at most the “eyes” of the army. Balloons and especially dirigibles held greater promise for gathering military intelligence and, in the case of German Zeppelins, for bombing the British fleet at anchor. But elevated in the eyes of the public from circus performers, pilots were now romanticized as eagle-eyed “spies in the sky.” In Canada, as in Britain, civilian flying was prohibited and foreign aircraft forbidden to overfly the country.
Other than the Canadian Aviation Corps and its ill-fated Burgess-Dunne aircraft (both owing their short existences to the influence of Colonel Sam Hughes, the erratic minister of militia and defence), the Canadian government showed no interest in creating its own air corps until late in the war. Besides, Prime Minister Robert Borden had enough to contend with: the firing of his minister of militia (the same Hughes), wartime profiteering, and dwindling enlistment in the army. It took the full weight of the British War Office leaning on the Canadian government for help in enlisting candidates for the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS).
Initially, only trained aviators were accepted in the RFC and RNAS. In Britain applicants had to have Royal Aero Club aviator certificates (the “ticket”) acquired at their own expense. Canadians who wanted to fly for the RFC trained at the Curtiss aviation school in Toronto before going overseas. Run by the ubiquitous J.A.D. McCurdy, the school operated seaplanes at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto Island, and land planes at the city’s suburb of Long Branch, site of Canada’s first airport.[2]
In the absence of any governmental authority concerning selection and training, the Aero Club of Canada stepped in to fulfill a role similar to that of its British cousin. The club’s president, Adam Penton, and secretary, Norman C. Pearce, were appointed to the examining board for students obtaining their pilots’ licences. Once awarded their Aero Club licences, the pilots then had to pay their own way to England to join the RFC.
Some Canadians went directly to Britain to be trained there. Flight Sub-Lieutenant Redford Henry Mulock (Certificate No. 1103), the first Canadian to qualify for a British pilot’s licence, was to become the RNAS’s first air ace. Another was Lieutenant William F.N. Sharpe of Prescott, Ontario, the first Canadian wartime air casualty when he was killed on February 4, 1915, in a training accident.[3] Then there was Lester B. Pearson, the only Canadian prime minister to serve in the air force, fly, and crash a plane. While in training in England, Pearson crash-landed his aircraft, a Graham White box kite, suffering only cuts and bruises.[4] The future prime minister enjoyed flying and hoped to continue it, but fate intervened soon after when he was hit by a London bus and sent home.
Because of the war, aviation, and consequently safety, matured almost overnight. If aircraft were built in bicycle sheds and garages before 1914, the war meant that the entire economies of nations were mobilized into creating aviation industries. Governments that had previously treated aircraft manufacturers with condescension were now intent on inflicting harm on the enemy and ordered machines by the thousand. Custom-made in 1914, four years later, aircraft were being mass-produced like Ford’s Model T cars.
The conflict also consumed so many aircraft so quickly — through usage, the weather, and enemy action (a British fighter aircraft had on average a “shelf life” of six months) — that new designs went from drawing board to prototype in three months and to a front-line squadron six months after that. The most famous instance of this was the birth of the Liberty engine that eventually powered so many aircraft well into the 1920s. Designed in a hotel room on May 29, 1917, it was assembled by Packard Motors and shipped to the U.S. government on July 3, with the first Liberty-powered aircraft flying on August 29 that year. By the Armistice, the Americans alone were turning out 500 aircraft per week. Because of the war, the “flying observation platforms” evolved into specialized machines — fighters, bombers, naval seaplanes, torpedo bombers, and even aircraft with folding wings to be launched off ships.
The struggle of air superiority over the front lines grew with each year and meant better aircraft designs, more efficient engines, higher speeds, and heavier payloads. The first and only instrument a pilot had was his wristwatch to measure flight times for navigation and fuel consumption.[5] But by 1915 other instruments started to appear in the cockpit: the airspeed indicator, compass, tachometer, altimeter, fuel and oil pressure gauges, and, on an experimental basis, radio. Similarly, the earliest safety research