Warbird Relic Hunters of the Wild West
As the Second World War came to a close, thousands of war-surplus combat and training aircraft were stored at storage, repair or disposal facilities across Canada. British Commonwealth Air Training Plan Airfields began to fill up with the discarded implements of war—Avro Ansons and Lancasters, Bristol Bolingbrokes, Airspeed Oxfords, de Havilland Tiger Moths, Fairchild Cornells, and more. Most were sold for scrap, some were burned, some bulldozed, but many were sold to local farmers who recognized the old flying warhorses for what they had become—machine parts on the hoof. Not long after the war, they arrived with their tractors and flatbeds at auctions and, for a couple of hundred bucks, carted off or even dragged away across the fields the once-mighty implements of air power. Over the blazing summers and hard winters that followed, they were cut up, pulled apart, drained of their life blood, and cannibalized for components that were now more valuable to farm work than to war craft. Over the years they began to disappear, to rot and to be subsumed into the ground they fought to keep free. Lying out in the prairie sun, the remnant warbirds awaited their final demise. Then, a few decades after the war, there appeared on the horizon a few young men who were brought up on stories of courage, duty and aviation by parents who had lived it just a few decades before. Like high plains drifters, they rode across the prairie in pickups, tracking down the bones and desiccated carcasses of these once-great birds. This is the story of two of those riders of the planes—Jon Spinks and Richard de Boer. Along with others who saw the historic value of what others saw as junk, they played a major part in bringing historic aircraft back to life.—Ed.
Warbird Relic Hunters of the Wild West
When Mosquito KA114 flew for the first time after its restoration in 2012, warbird enthusiasts worldwide celebrated, for it had been 16 long years since the sight and sound of a flying de Havilland Mosquito had graced the sky anywhere on the planet. I smiled as well, but perhaps for reasons more than most, as I had a strong personal connection to this particular Mosquito. Recently, I was reminded of that connection when a member of the Mosquito restoration crew at the Canadian Historical Aircraft Association in Windsor, Ontario asked me whether the main wheels and brakes which they had acquired from Calgary many years ago had been overhauled and were serviceable. I was slightly taken aback to discover that no one there seemed quite sure how they had acquired their main wheels, or from whom. I promised them to fill in the blanks and to provide them with the provenance on their parts.
Between 1985 and 1995, I spent a lot of time with a good friend scouring the farmyards of Western Canada looking for the military airplanes that were made surplus after the Second World War. It started when my friend Jon Spinks was a child back in England, reading airplane books and magazines as many of us did. He read about all the airplanes sold as surplus in Canada after the war, never thinking that they would become a big part of his life until one day, when he was fourteen years old, his parents decided to move to Southern Alberta.
Once he and the family settled into the prairie city of Lethbridge, Jon’s father took him on a fishing trip. Heading out for a day trip, they passed a sign pointing to the hamlet of Pearce, Alberta, which, to Jon, had a very familiar ring to it. He remembered reading that, after the war, many Lancasters had been stored there. He begged his understanding father to make a detour so he could walk the hallowed ground and perhaps see if there were any Lancs still left on the property. This was the early 1980s and of course by then the airplanes were long gone. Though the airplanes were gone, the old airfield proved a fertile hunting ground for a young teen with old airplane stars in his eyes, as lots of Lancaster parts still littered the fields. From that day, Jon was hooked.
Jon progressed to checking the local scrap yards and tracking the sales of surplussed wartime airplanes. His big dream was to find one of the Lancasters spared from the scrappers torch and restore it to flying condition. Long before there was a Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta, Jon discovered the rapidly deteriorating roadside attraction Lancaster sitting at the north end of that farming town, and generously offered to take it off their hands and fix it up for them [he was declined of course]. Jon also talked to 408 Squadron RCAF at Canadian Forces Base Namao about their significant collection of Lanc parts. He was serious and he was determined.
I first met Jon in the early 1980s when he convinced his father to drive him to Calgary to see the Lancaster there. At the time, I was working for the new Aerospace Museum and the Lancaster was still outdoors sitting on its concrete pylon. Jon asked if he could see it up close, so we went over with a ladder and a key so that he could get the inside tour. It was inside the Lancaster that I got my first taste of Jon’s rapid-fire interrogation technique designed to squeeze from the subject every crumb of knowledge about which he so passionately wanted to know.
“What is the plan for the airplane?”
“When are you going to take it down?”
“Is the spar damaged?”
“How much time is on the engines?”
“Could it be flown?”
“What would it cost?”
“How would you paint it?”
Bam, bam, bam! It felt like a long series of rapid-fire punches to the brain. In successive years, I sympathized with many a farmer who found himself on the receiving end of such a grilling.
Related Stories
Click on image
Over the next couple of years, Jon came to learn and finally accept that there were no wild Lancasters left roaming the Canadian Prairies. Not to be deterred, he set his sights on the next best thing: a Bristol Fairchild Bolingbroke—a twin-engine patrol and bombing and gunnery training aircraft (a Canadian-built variant of the Bristol Blenheim Mk IV) used by the RCAF in the Second World War. With more than 600 built for Canadian service, it turned out there were still some of them on farms across Canada, and a growing interest in the type in the United Kingdom with one British organization serious about restoring one to flying condition. Jon managed to find, disassemble and salvage his first “Boly”. He located a second example and asked me if I would like to help him recover it. It was the start of a ten-year long adventure for both of us.
Every summer for a decade, we would acquire a truck, and if necessary a trailer, and head out to track down the elusive war surplus Bolingbrokes that Jon had researched over the winter. We had some great adventures, met some very cool people and did some interesting deals with museums, dealers, restorers and collectors in Canada, the UK and the USA. We split the expenses on our salvage trips and co-owned anything we found. We financed some of the trips by selling any non-Bolingbroke things we came across: bomb racks, war time RCAF neck ties, flying boots, a P-51 header tank, Lysander canopy and wheel pants, a P-40 radio, etc.
After we had salvaged several Bolingbrokes, Jon identified the one that he wanted to restore. In order to attain full ownership of it, Jon offered to trade me some other parts to buy out my half. I agreed in principle and soon thereafter he showed up with a small pickup truck loaded with de Havilland Mosquito parts. Done deal! Where the Lancaster was his dream airplane, the Mosquito was mine.
Jon explained that a Mosquito had been sold surplus out of Vulcan, Alberta at the end of the war. It was bought by Farmer Smith for $150, who in turn sold it to a local teenager who had spotted it rotting away in his yard twenty-five years later. The then 18-year-old Clint Armstrong paid the same $150 for the sagging airframe in 1973, and with the help of his father and friend Randy Umsheid, had dragged it home to Champion, Alberta where it sat for another five years. (See the home movie shot by Clint’s father Floyd on moving day: https://youtu.be/t10w39bMY7o)
In 1978, Ed Zalesky, who was at the time the director of the Canadian Museum of Flight and Transportation in White Rock, British Columbia, heard about the airplane and bought the sad and sagging remains of the Mosquito for exactly what Clint and Farmer Smith had paid for it years earlier: $150. Modern mythology and books on Mosquito survivors record that the Zalesky crew took a break from loading the airframe only to come back to the fuselage broken in two by an overeager farmer. Don’t believe that part of the story. Eventually Zalesky, not one to maintain the $150 tradition, sold the Mosquito to Jerry Yagen for $25,000 US. Many years and a couple of million dollars later, KA114 was resurrected and flown again in 2012.
But back in 1992, my friend Jon did what, to date, no one else had done: he traced back the airplane to its first postwar owner, Farmer Smith, and subjected the poor man to an infamous Spinks grilling.
‘What did you take off the airplane?
Where did you use it?
Do you still have it?
Did you trade any of it away?’
Farmer Smith had indeed stripped a lot of parts from the Mosquito for use around the farm. That is why farmers bought airplanes after the war; to use parts and materials that couldn’t easily be acquired during and after the war. That included sturdy wheels for carts and wagons, rubber tires, sheet metal (though in short supply on a Mosquito), hydraulic rams, glycol, steel cable, lead weight, fuel tanks, nuts, bolts and of course an altimeter which graced the dashboards of hundreds of tractors and farm trucks for decades across Western Canada.
Farmer Smith still had all of the parts he had removed and for the most part had kept them indoors. All he wanted for this treasure trove was for Jon to replace the Mosquito hydraulic cylinders that he was still using around the farm. For the price of a couple of Princess Auto specials [Princess Auto is a well-known Canadian retailer specializing in farm, industrial, automotive, and hydraulic parts and equipment], Jon acquired a truckload of Mosquito parts, that for a half share in a Bolingbroke became mine. I was thrilled. It was 1992 and I had the beginnings of a Mosquito project.
The single car garage in our townhouse condo served as the storage location for these and many other treasures. I managed to talk my wife out of her indoor parking space by convincing her that this ‘dirty junk’ was in fact a collection of rare, valuable and rapidly appreciating artifacts. When it came time for the divorce a few years later, that rationale proved to be an expensive tactical error.
In the messy and expensive trauma that can be divorce, dreams can take a serious beating. One of those dreams was my ‘Mosquito project’. To add insult to injury, the “rare, valuable and rapidly appreciating artifacts” ended up being sold for about 10 cents on the dollar, even at 1996 values. Some gentlemen from the Canadian Historical Aircraft Association in Windsor, ON came and hauled them away for their Mosquito project. I consoled myself with the thought that at least they had gone to a good home.
A few years later, I got a phone call on a Sunday afternoon from a gentleman with a high-pitched voice and a distinct southern American accent. “I been calling around and people tell me you used to scrounge up old airplanes. Ever come across any Mosquito parts?” the caller asked.
“Yes, I have” I told him and then I asked who was calling.
“This is Jerry Yagen of the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach” he answered.
“Oh dear, Mr. Yagen. This is sadder than you can imagine. Not only do I know what you are looking for, I used to own most of it, and it wasn’t just from any old Mosquito; it was all from your very airplane.” I told him.
I went on to explain how I came to acquire the parts and how I came to lose them. At the end of my sad little story Jerry said “Well that’s a damned shame because I’d-a bought those parts from you, as well as the truck you hauled them in, the garage you stored them in and the house you were living in!”
I didn’t know whether laugh or cry. Before I had a chance to do either, I remembered one of my acts of petty defiance during the divorce process. I had kept the triple pneumatic gauge from the collection of Mosquito parts. It was as good as new and had been displayed in a prominent place as a prized possession in each of the dozen places that I bounced to and from in the years after the divorce. I asked Jerry for the address of the shop that was restoring the Mosquito and I promised him I would send it there. He suggested that it would probably be the only original piece in the instrument panel. It cost me $75 in postage to mail it to Avspecs in New Zealand, but it felt good to know that it would be reunited with the airplane.
Despite the loss of my very last genuine Mosquito part, I maintained my passion for the type. In 2007, I heard rumors of a $1.5M deal to sell the Mosquito that was stored in Calgary to an overseas buyer. I started a campaign to prevent the sale and to see the airplane finally restored. That campaign lasted as long as the Second World War (longer than the war if you are American) and often felt like the Second World War. It got very nasty with lots of people jumping into the fray on both sides of the debate.
The ‘Calgary Mosquito’ was an ex-Spartan Air Services aerial mapping airplane that had been acquired in 1963 by Lynn Garrison for his dream of an ‘Air Museum of Canada’. When the organization failed, the City of Calgary took possession and ownership of this and several other abandoned airplanes. In 1975 the newly formed Aerospace Museum of Calgary was created in order to restore and display the City owned collection.
At one point during the debate over whether to sell and export the Mosquito, a city alderman who supported the sale tried frightening people with big numbers during a radio interview, by saying that he knew of a Mosquito being restored in New Zealand that was going to cost $15,000,000. At that time, there was only one Mosquito being restored in New Zealand. Its owner, Jerry Yagen, heard about this wildly over the top claim.
A few days later I had a voice mail message from Jerry Yagen telling me in heated tones to give him a call and that he would gladly share with me how much he paid for every ‘damned’ part of that airplane. When I called him the next day, he had the file open on his desk and item by item, outlined what he paid for the mortal remains of KA114, for the engines and props, assorted bits and pieces from around the world and a new Glyn Powell Mosquito airframe. Armed with the facts, I was able to refute the alderman’s wildly exaggerated claims about the cost of restoring Calgary’s Mosquito.
In the end, the newly-formed Calgary Mosquito Aircraft Society (CMAS) won the fight to keep and restore not just the Mosquito, but the City of Calgary’s Hawker Hurricane as well. In the process, the City acknowledged the rarity and significance of the airplanes and agreed to fund half of the cost of restoring both airplanes to run and taxi status. We were on the hook for the other half.
From first rumour of a sale in 2007 to signing a contract with the City of Calgary to restore the Mosquito in 2012, my board members and I made a lot of connections and attended a lot of provincial, national and international conferences to learn, connect with others and support our goals. In 2013, Jack McWilliam, now Vice-President of CMAS and the leader of the actual restoration on the Mosquito, and I attended the Smithsonian-organized and sponsored Mutual Concerns of Air and Space Conference being hosted that year by Seattle’s Museum of Flight. On the first day of the conference we were encouraged to stand up and introduce ourselves and give the 30 second ‘commercial’ on the organization we were representing. The next day as we were catching the bus from the hotel to the museum, a large affable Englishman sat next to me and introduced himself. “I’m David Hunt and I am with the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia and we have a flying Mosquito” he told me.
“I’ve heard about it. Congratulations” I replied, not feeling the need to elaborate.
“As you are from Canada and have a Mosquito, I have to tell you this story that Jerry related to me about this fellow in Canada who had a collection of parts from our airplane. Incredible really…”
Now I could laugh about it.
Richard de Boer