Archie Pennie is a man of uncommon forthrightness, who continues to share with anyone interested, the nature and the detail of his personal experiences as an instructor pilot for the BCATP and as a …

There is no doubt that Canada, pound for pound, fights above its weight when it comes to aerospace technology and contribution to modern aircraft design and propulsion systems. …

Laid across John Bennett’s dining room table, like memories strewn across the decades, are dozens of yellowed photographs, some notes written for some purpose now long forgotten and an aeronautical…

We were on for a sweep and I was having an awful day. You know, when everything seems to go wrong from the start. Well there I was, doing my cockpit check and somehow I must have bumped the gun button…

Bert Joss relates his experiences flying the Swordfish at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia during the Second World War. As we get set to bring our Fairey Swordfish to full flying status, new relationships with…

During the Second World War, would-be black aviators like 18 year-old American Eugene Richardson knew they would be called upon to fight their war on two fronts. Before they could show the world …

It was three months after VE Day and the crew of an RAF Handley Page Halifax (LW170) set out on a long distance weather patrol out over the Atlantic approaches to the British Isles. Sometime during the flight, the war-weary Halifax …

It’s 6:30 in the evening in early October of 1943. Fred is strapping himself into a de Havilland Tiger Moth sitting on the short-cropped grass outside Hangar 3 at Number 13 Elementary Flying Training School St Eugene,…

On July 28, 1949 three passengers climbed aboard a Grumman G21A Goose at Montreal for a 19-day journey around Quebec and Labrador. The flight plan included more than a dozen stops…

The Vintage Wings hangar holds many treasures. When you walk into the hangar, some of these artifacts immediately catch your eye… and your imagination. The sleek and shiny Spitfire personifies airborne grace. ..

The word “unique” seems inadequate and an understatement when attached to the remarkable life of Elizabeth Muriel “Elsie” Gregory MacGill….

Like many of the guests, I wander about, letting my feet take me where they will and find myself near the Spitfire. Very soon, I am involved in a conversation with two ladies and a gentleman, …

Drayton Valley, the town where John Bootsma brought up his family, lies atop a high plateau between the South Saskatchewan and Pembina Rivers about half way between oil rich Edmonton and …

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 …

On July 9, 1918, famed American aviatrix Katherine Stinson flew a mailbag containing 259 letters from Calgary to Edmonton in western Canada’s first air mail delivery. Eighty-eight years later, on July 9, 2006, …

A classic warbird not in the VWC collection (yet?) is the B-25 "Mitchell". It served impressively in more theatres of war than any other aircraft in WWII. Not only was it flown by RCAF pilots during the war (in RAF units), …

June 6, 1944 has become immortalized as D-Day. For the people of Western Europe, who had endured four years of brutal Nazi occupation, this was a day that had been desperately hoped for and longingly dreamed of.

Of the many photographs sent to me by the Houle family to help understand who Albert Ulric Houle really was, there is one that I keep going back to again and again. It is not a photograph of him in his uniform,…

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 …

Broadcaster and writer Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation”. More than sixty years ago, during the turmoil of the Second World War, they were young men and women in their twenties and thirties; …