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 …

This is a story of two worlds. One, a world of isolation for a tiny farming community in Québec during the Second World War; the other, a world of global communications and social networking employed to solve a mystery which involved the first world…

In the black of night of 8 June 1944, two days after the D-Day invasions of Normandy, the dark hulk of a four-engined Lancaster bomber of 15 Squadron, Royal Air Force, trailing a blow-torching curtain of livid flame, lurches heavily…

La dernière fois que nous avons vu notre ami dans La guerre selon Donald Lambie Épisode 2, il était en route pour Bellaria depuis un centre de transit du personnel dans le sud de l’Italie, après avoir terminé un bref cours de remise à niveau pour pilote de Spitfire à Guado, en Italie.

For most young testosterone-fueled, newly-winged pilots of the Second World War, being a fighter pilot was the plum assignment, the glory job, the best of the best - a fighting man with the fastest and the…

n what could easily be the finest and boldest example of death-defying and cheeky nose-thumbing during the Second World War or any conflict for that matter, bomber and intruder crews of the Royal Air Force …