Canada is a very large place indeed and much of it contains no Canadians whatsoever, save for sport fishermen and tiny remote communities. The great boreal forest …

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

At around 11 o’clock on the sunny morning of 3 June 1942, a dogfight erupted a few thousand feet over the Mediterranean Sea just to the west of Malta, near the island of Gozo. Nine pilots of unarmed…

I know of no other pilot’s seat in all of aviation like the one in a Lysander. It’s a throne. It’s way up high, and climbing up there is like ascending the ratlines of a square-rigged ship…

In 1967, Canada was celebrating its centennial with exuberant projects and a new Canuck pride from coast to coast. Canada was indeed young, but so was aviation…

On 18 August 2016 it will be 75 years to the day since a teenager named Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr. lifted his Supermarine Spitfire Mk I from the aerodrome at…

At 1500 Wednesday 16 March 1949, seven Hawker Sea Fury FB 11 fighter bombers thundered off the light fleet carrier HMCS Magnificent, steaming off Colón, Panama on the…

At around 10:30 a.m., on a cold and windy 11 November 1990, a woman in her late eighties by the name of Mrs. Elsie May Pearce walked slowly and sadly up the broad grey granite steps of ….

All day long on the first of January 1944, the weather at RAF Gransden Lodge and throughout most of Cambridgeshire was grey and cloudy with typical English mists drifting across the airfield…

Let’s be perfectly honest here. I am a 67-year-old man, paunchy around the edges, with an ever-expanding universe of liver spots, fading in self-esteem and I come …

Dear Arnold, My name is Dave O’Malley. We’ve never met before. In fact, I was born 6 years and 5 months after that terrible day over Saint Martin de Mailloc, France. But, I must admit, sometimes I feel I know you. Well, maybe not well …

As early as the summer of 1944, Japanese Army and Navy fighter and bomber pilots began training for “special attack” suicide missions against both Allied ships and aircraft. Known as kamikazes…

Vintage Wings of Canada is proud to announce the acquisition of the Adolphe Cassandre Collection of vintage Second World War and Cold War propaganda, recruitment, and motion picture posters. After nearly a year of negotiations…

In the summer of 1942, Malta, a small island just 80 kilometres south of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, was the most bombed place on earth. The strategic importance of the Allied-controlled island was magnified after the North…

These days, we look upon aerial refuelling as the purview of the world’s largest air forces—a force multiplier, a reach extender, a vital link in the projection of force. But it was not always this way. In the beginning, …

The stories of the heroic airmen of the Second World War that we are all familiar with and which command our interest and our passion for history, are stories of flight training and the adventures and tragedies…

For some, the noise of thundering airliners, roaring thrust reversers, and shrieking jets are anathema. For others, these sounds are a way of seeking inner peace…

During the long and endless months of the Second World War, Canadian skies from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island resounded with the bellow and drone of aircraft engines and, for those who lived in the flatter parts of the land, there was the daily…

On Saturday 22 March 2014, a new era dawned for warbird operators across the planet when a delicate, lime green Second World War Fleet Finch took to the air in minus 22 degree temperature. Her pilot, George Arborpremo, eased the throttle forward…

In 1990, when Basler Turbo Conversions of Oshkosh Wisconsin rolled out the first Basler BT-67 with its DC-3 airframe and modern turbine engines, vintage aviation and radial engine enthusiasts around the world were aghast. Replacing the sonorous and oil-flinging Pratt and Whitney radials of the venerable Gooney Bird …