During the Second World War, more than 72,000 young men served as pilots, navigators, air gunners, bomb aimers and flight engineers with the Royal Canadian Air Force, but following the end of hostilities, the vast majority never flew again.

Seventy years ago, the shattered, smoking, brave and blood covered hulk of the battleship Bismarck slipped backwards and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The date was May 27th, 1941….

When I was a child, when dogs were free-range, when days were forever and being inside was prison, I knew a German Shepherd dog named Sheba. Sheba was massive, collarless, dirty with oil …

Thinking, “what a beautiful day” – a solid blue sky and the tranquility of near silence as the wind softly whispered past the cockpit... Wait a minute! There's something wrong with this picture! This isn't a glider. This is a twin-engined Beech 18…

Not all the heroes of the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz were made in the air and not all of them were men. From London's Steve Hunnisett comes this story of a young French Canadian woman who wanted to make a difference and who then paid the ultimate price…

Vintage Wings has recently created a program unique among vintage aircraft operators worldwide - dedicating each aircraft in their collection to a specific Canadian airman, whose personal story exemplifies…

The telephone woke me from my usual fitful night. For a few seconds I hovered between sleep and consciousness. The telephone rang again. In the darkness, with my duvet pulled tight around me…

flew my 145th and last combat mission 5 Nov '67, not by choice. I had arrived at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base on March 15, 1967 after completing the Wild Weasel School at Nellis…

A friend has remarked that I belong to an exclusive club which has not had a new entrant for 56 years and whose remaining members are now all around 75 years old. The common bond is that they were overseas…

Doug Warren,the last of the Second World War's Warren Twins, dies at age 89 in Comox, BC.

Born in Newcastle, England, McLarty moved to Buenos Aires as a boy. In response to Hitler's invasions, Don volunteered as an Argentine national for the Royal Canadian Air Force…

Certainly, the most spectacular things about Vintage Wings of Canada are the exquisitely restored and meticulously maintained vintage aircraft of the collection. Pilots love and live to fly them,…

On the lovely summer's evening of August 5th, 1944, fifteen year-old Gerald Plant was walking to the home of his best friend in the English village of Creswell in Derbyshire.

Scotch, especially the single malts of Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg, Bruichladdich and Bowmore, drew me to Islay, the most southerly of the islands of the Hebrides. With eight active distilleries,…

The Fairey Battle was a British single-engine light bomber built by the Fairey Aviation Company in the late 1930s for the Royal Air Force. The Battle was powered by the same Rolls-Royce Merlin piston engine that gave…

It’s Christmas Eve and though just early evening, the dim light of winter is long receded, replaced by the orange vapour darkness of an urban night. Outside my house a Canadian hibernal front descends

The stark, compelling aerial photograph above was taken on July 3, 1944, during an American bombing mission over Timisoara, Rumania. Unlike so many aerial combat photos, whose exact date and location…

Last week, on November 24th, 2011, I was sitting at my desk in my office just a short seven iron from Parliament Hill, slogging through some work for Vintage Wings. I leaned back from my constant myopic squint at my computer screen,…

Seems a long time since we had enemies we could trust! The Cold War was real: a long, bi-polar stand-off stretching from the end of the Second World War until 1989 - when the time was right for The Wall to be taken down…

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, during a tour of Vintage Wings of Canada or at an air show: “Whaddya call that bullseye thingamajig there?” or “How come the bullseye on the wing …