Flying Canucks II

Pioneers of Canadian Aviation

Peter Pigott

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781459717756
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Aviación

Among the many technological advances of this century that have shrunk our country, few have had as great an impact as aviation. Technologies evolve and national priorities change, but the qualities necessary to design aircraft, fly them in war and peace, and manage airlines remain constant. In this, his second book about pioneers of Canadian aviation, Peter Pigott brings a richness and understanding of the individuals themselves to the reader. Flying Canucks II takes us into Air Canada's boardroom with Claude I. Taylor, to the Avro Arrow design office with Jim Floyd, inside the incredible career of Aviation Hall of Fame pilot Herb Seagram, on C.D. Howe's historic dawn-to-dusk flight, and with Len Birchall in a Stranraer seaplane before he became, in Churchill's phrase, "The Saviour of Ceylon." It includes the story of how Scottish immigrant J.A. Wilson engineered a chain of airports across the country, how bush pilot Bob Randall explored the polar regions, and the ordeal of Erroll Boyd, the first Canadian to fly the Atlantic. The lives of "Buck" McNair and "Bus" Davey, half a century after the Second World War, are placed in the perspective of the entire national experience in those years. Whenever possible, Mr. Pigott has interviewed the players themselves, and drawing on his experience and contacts within the aviation community, has created a multi-faceted study of the business, politics, and technology that influenced the ten lives explored in depth in this book. C.D. Howe, wartime Canada's absolute government czar used to say that running the country's airline was all he really wanted to do. With a rich aviation heritage such as this, Flying Canucks II depicts the elements and the enemy at their worst and the pioneers of Canadian aviation at their best.

C.D. HOWE

MISTER TRANS-CANADA AIRLINES

For his creation of Trans-Canada Airlines, CD. Howe was the first Canadian to be awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Aviation Medal. Previous recipients included the great aviatots like Orville Wright. Although he was not a pilot and had no knowledge of aerodynamics, Howe’s pragmatism and hard-nosed philosophy affected airline growth in this country for four decades.

Clarence Decatur Howe was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on 15 January, 1886, the son of a house builder. Not well-off themselves, the Howes were members of a prominent New England clan that had some Canadian connections. Clarence’s ancestors numbered Julia Ward Howe who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Elias Howe who invented the sewing machine, and in Canada, Joseph Howe, one of Nova Scotia’s leading politicians. Clarence’s high school motto was Deeds not Words. It would go a long way in explaining him in later years when he encountered the red tape in Ottawa’s infamous bureaucracy. Howe was not a brilliant student but managed to attain a passing grade to get into engineering at Boston Tech as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was then more commonly called. When he graduated in 1908, at the age of twenty-two, he accepted a teaching position at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His annual salary of $2,000 was more than his father had ever made building houses, but more importantly for Howe, the teaching position carried with it an academic prestige that his mother, a former teacher herself, must have rejoiced in.

His entry onto the Canadian political scene began by chance in 1912. Robert Borden, the local member of Parliament was elected prime minister and through his influence, Howe found himself in Fort William, Ontario, building grain elevator terminals for the government. Canada at the turn of the century had become the breadbasket of the British Empire and industrialised Europe and wheat grown on the prairies was consolidated in elevators at Fort William, Ontario to await shipment overseas. So delighted was the young man with the new job and his adopted country, that he immediately applied to become a British citizen, as all Canadians then were.

But when it came to looking for a bride, Clarence Howe returned to his hometown of Waltham, Mass. He proposed to one of his sister’s friends, Alice Worcester, and they were married in 1916, honeymooning at Lake Louise in the Rockies.

H.J. Symington, president of TCA, left and C.D. Howe, right with the first North Star behind them in 1946

Air Canada Archives

Once the elevators had been built, Howe started his own elevator construction company to take advantage of the bumper wheat crops of the late 1920s. His reputation for decisiveness and innate political cunning made the CD. Howe Company moderately prosperous. When the Depression caused the wheat market to collapse, Howe like hundreds of others, lost his company but was still well-off. In 1934, he entered another profession — politics. He won the Port Arthur seat for the Liberals in the 1935 election and was invited by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to become the Minister of Marine and Railways.

Howe and aviation had come of age together. When he was a young teacher in Nova Scotia, J.A.D. McCurdy had flown the Silver Dart, the first aircraft in Canada. After the First World War, commercial aviation in Canada was seriously neglected by the only institutions that could have nurtured it: the federal government and the railways. Ottawa made it very clear to returning Royal Flying Corps veterans who started their own companies that commercial air operations had to be self-sustaining. As a result by 1930, there were too many small operators vying for too little business.

The government subsidised a few flying clubs, handed out some airmail contracts, and began carving a number of airfields out of the bush in 1929 as part of the Trans-Canada Airway, but this was the extent of its participation.

Ottawa’s penny-pinching was in direct contrast to governments in Europe and the United States who viewed airlines and aircraft manufacturing companies as instruments of national prestige and social engineering. Aviation was financially subsidised for flying the flag as Imperial Airways and Air France did, or keeping aircraft builders solvent for their military potential as in National Socialist Germany. The most air minded nation was the United States, where in 1934, government encouragement made possible the advent of the first modern airliner, the Boeing 247, which could fly from coast-to-coast in nineteen hours.

While in opposition, the Mackenzie King Liberals warned that if nothing was done soon to encourage commercial aviation in Canada, American private enterprise would seize the opportunity to fill the void. Prime Minister R.B. Bennett had encouraged air companies in Quebec and Ontario with airmail contracts and, by 1931, it was possible to fly between Moncton, New Brunswick and Edmonton, Alberta. But with the Depression settling in, the airmail contracts were cancelled or given over to the RCAF and the airlines were pushed to bankruptcy.

When he was re-elected, Mackenzie King created a Department of Transport, consolidating the nation’s marine, railway and air services into one portfolio, and appointed CD. Howe as its minister. Howe plunged in and immediately had to contend with a vocal lobby of entrepreneurs who had invested in those struggling air companies as they had the Liberal coffers, and now expected that the new government would reward them with lucrative business contracts. The most prominent of these was the Winnipeg businessman, James Richardson. As the owner of Canadian Airways, the largest air company in Canada, Richardson had been led to believe by Bennett that if ever a national airline was sanctioned, his would be it. But when the Canadian Airway’s airmail contracts were cut, Richardson switched his support to Mackenzie King’s party. With its victory, he was confident that Canadian Airways would be made the national air carrier. It had the routes, the pilots and the aircraft, and both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways had shares in it.

The new minister was directly opposed to Richardson’s expectations. One of most the expensive burdens of the Railway Age in Canada, Howe said, was the financing of two transcontinental lines in a country that could barely afford one. His opinion of the private and public sectors owed much to his New England religious upbringing. Private enterprise to him was associated with greed, the public sector with inefficient bureaucratic bungling. Both had to be controlled by the government. During the 1930s, authoritarian socialism in various degrees was accepted both in North America and Europe. Strong-minded men like Roosevelt, Hitler or Stalin vested all national enterprise in their own hands. Howe was of the same mold, albeit a more genial one. The over built railway system and undercapitalised aviation companies had kept Canadian transportation far behind that of the United States and Europe and always an engineer, Howe’s yardstick to anything was: how efficient was it?

He decided that there should only be a single airline to connect the major cities of Canada from coast-to-coast and that it would be government-owned. In June 1936, Howe left for the United States to study their advanced aviation industry. During the parliamentary summer recess, he adventurously flew from New York to Los Angeles in a bone-jarring, ear-splitting Ford Tri-Motor. He met both Juan Trippe, the legendary head of Pan American Airways, and Eddie Rickenbacker, the First World War air ace who later became president of Eastern Airlines, and discussed starting an airline with both of them.

With his mind made up, Howe returned to Ottawa and proposed a bill to Parliament to create a national airline by Dominion Day 1937. It would be called Trans-Canada Airlines and would strive always to be profitable. Both railways would have equal shares in it with whatever private aviation interests that each might nominate. There would be nine directors on the governing board, three from each railway and three from the government. If there were losses, Ottawa would only guarantee them only for a period of two years. Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA) was to be the government’s flagship carrier, its chosen instrument in the air, and would compete against all foreign and domestic air carriers.

The president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Sir Edward Beatty, wrote to Howe, objecting strongly to the composition of the board stating that with only three votes, his company would always be in a minority position against Howe and the CNR. To no one’s surprise, he refused to participate in the birth of Trans-Canada Airlines, leaving it’s future to the federal government and the Canadian National Railway. Richardson also refused a seat on the TCA board and an offer to cooperate with feeder lines from his own routes. He did however, sell TCA three of his aircraft, and give up Canadian Airway’s Vancouver to Seattle service which became the government airline’s first route. Howe even succeeded in luring some of Richardson’s experienced staff away from him. There was never any doubt that this was to be Howe’s airline. When one member of Parliament attacked him about it, saying that this public enterprise smacked of socialism, Howe countered with “It’s not public enterprise, it’s my enterprise!”

On April 10, 1937, the passing of the Trans-Canada Air Lines Act gave Canada its national airline. True, it was a ward of the Crown and a poor relation to the giant Canadian National, which would do its marketing and ticketing, but in the misery of the Depression, TCA was a tangible symbol of the country’s aeronautical ambitions.

The bill had passed through Parliament with some criticism. The new airline’s president might be Samuel Hungerford, the president of CNR, but Howe had given several of the most senior positions in the airline to Americans. His response to this criticism was that nationality was immaterial, that William Van Horne who had built the Canadian railways had not been Canadian and that the CPR’s own previous president, Thomas Shaughnessy was American. Besides, he felt that there were no Canadians qualified to run a trans-continental airline¹.

The dawn-to-dusk flight at St. Hubert airport, July 30, 1937. Howe is sixth from the left, with the pilot, J.H. Tudhope, on his right, and J.A. Wilson, the controller of civil aviation, is third from the right.

Air Canada Archives

But by the eatly summer of 1937, the deadline for TCA’s start looked far from being met — the pilots and ground crew were still being trained in California on the Lockheeds that the Minister had personally ordered. One of the problems the Canadians had was adapting to the Lockheed 10s, then the fastest transports in the world. Used to wood and canvas fixed-wheel biplanes that had no flaps or retractable undercarriages, the TCA pilots’ training was taking longer than expected.

To deflect any adverse publicity from his pet project, Howe came up with a flamboyant stunt. He ordered his staff to accompany him on a well-publicised dawn-to-dusk flight from Montreal to Vancouver on 30 July. The saga of the flight has become part of Canada’s aviation history. The aircraft to be used was the Department of Transport’s new Lockheed 12A CF-CCT² and the pilot chosen for the flight was the celebrated aviation pioneer, Squadron Leader J.H. “Tuddy” Tudhope of the RCAF.

The publicity flight came close to disaster. Although the Lockheed 12A had a reserve fuel tank fitted, because of the fog, two refueling stops were missed, and the plane landed at Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dangerously low on fuel.

Air Canada Archives

The very early morning of July 30 was dark, rainy and forbidding at St. Hubert Airport. With the Ottawa delegation aboard, Tudhope took off at 4:0lAM EDT into the deteriorating weather over Montreal. An experienced pilot and navigator, Tudhope decided it was too dangerous to fly, landed and promptly put the aircraft away in the hangar. In rhe midst of a thunderstorm, Howe told him to have it wheeled out once more. Then he ordered what must have been the thoroughly unwilling passengers into it. They left again at 5:18 AM, made it to their first refuelling stop, an emergency airfield at Gillies near North Bay, Ontario. After that the cloud cover was so thick that they missed the second one at Kapuskasing and flew on to try and find a gap in the clouds to land at Sioux Lookout.

By now the frightened (and very green) passengers were probably wondering if they would ever see their offices again. Tudhope spent a lot of the flight on his knees poring over the map trying to figure out where they were. When he thought that they might be over Sioux Lookout, he took a chance and steeted the aircraft through the clouds. As luck (or his calculations) would have it, the town lay directly beneath them, to the relief of all on board. There were three more stops — Winnipeg, Manitoba, Regina, Saskatchewan, Lethbridge, Alberta, and finally, Vancouver.

Thunderstorms followed the party across the country and even the Lockheed’s reserve fuel tank almost ran dry. But for the others, the worst must have been watching the minister making a show of casually reading his papers and smoking his pipe through it all. That he could work through the papers in his briefcase while all around him were airsick, is part of the Howe legend.

The little airliner skimmed over the Rockies in high turbulence and it took all of Tudhope’s skill to keep it level. To climb any higher meant encountering the pilot’s worst enemy — icing. The early bush pilots had already calculated that to avoid ice building up on their aircraft’s wing, they had to fly at a minimum of 11,000 feet. However, to clear the Rockies, an altitude of 12,000 feet must be maintained. This balancing act between icing and slamming into a peak in poor visibility, made for a tense flight for all aboard.

After a total flying time of fourteen hours and thirty minutes, CF-CCT landed at Sea Island Airport, Vancouver, on July 29, seventeen hours after leaving St. Hubert. Howe disembarked, beaming to the news cameras like the politician he was. When James Richardson who had considerable experience with cross-country flying, read of the publicity stunt, he said that it was a miracle that they were not reading the obituaries of all aboard in the papers and that why this man Howe wished to advertise his ignorance on so many subjects was difficult to understand.

On September 1, 1937, Howe’s airline opened for business. Flown by Billy Wells and Maurice McGregor, a metallic-silver Lockheed 10 A, with Trans-Canada Airlines painted over the passenger door, took off from Sea Island Airport, Vancouver for Seattle. TCA charged the passengers $7.90 for flying them the 122 miles between the two cities The Seattle newspapers covered the event with the banner headline: “Elaborate ceremonies greet Canadian plane.” Unfortunately, the newspaper disgraced itself by concluding...