While most students of aviation history, and indeed North American history, are aware of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and their determined struggle just to be allowed to fly combat missions alongside white combat pilots …

Author, artist, historian and researcher Terry Higgins has been writing, illustrating and assembling a comprehensive historical compendium of the exploits of the famous 404 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force…

If you want to be part of one of the most exciting things to happen to Ottawa/Gatineau in decades, but can only devote a couple of days each summer, have we got a job for you! …

Suddenly however a plane came down circling around with its engine heavy smoking. We noticed at once when it came out of the damp that it was a British fighter. The lower it came the more scared we got because we didn’t know where it should come down, because of its circling around. ..

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

Of my five Christmas celebrations in wartime RCAF units, 1943 was the most memorable. The earlier years had not been without their unusual features. The first, 1940, when I was at…

Recently, we lost that great British dramatic actor Richard Attenborough, whose role in The Great Escape set the tone for the great laconic and stoic British war heroes depicted thereafter. In 1963, Attenborough appeared in…

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, which had been in the planning for years, took the Germans by complete surprise, despite the massive buildup on the littoral of southern Great Britain…

Along the sunny Gulf Coast of Mississippi runs a VLA route (very low-level, high-speed flying) frequented by American military fliers for decades. Back in the early nineties, on a dock on Davis Bayou, with a cold St. Pauli Girl beer in my hand…

The privileged spectators draw close. Conversations stop. All eyes are on the old contraption as it creeps up gently to the beautiful old biplane. Is it going to work? Is it going to turn the propeller…

It is our tradition at Vintage Wings of Canada to offer up a story of an American aviator on the occasion of Thanksgiving, that most important of American holidays. Of course, we have Thanksgiving in Canada as well, but it is a full month and…

War, for any nation caught in its misfortunate grip, can be a fiery forge of national identity. Victory or humiliation in conflict can serve to shape the national consciousness and international …

Two Royal Canadian Air Force airmen would become the first to die in Canada in the Second World War, but they would not be found until 1958. Canada is a very, very large country. Most of it is unpopulated. In 1939, it seemed a lot bigger…

In my mind, there are not many aircraft from the past 114 years that are a perfect distillation of all that is wondrous, beautiful and simple about powered flight. Some are damn fast, many lethal. Some are sexy like an Italian sports car, some boring like a city bus…

Inside the glassed-in nose of a Heinkel He 111 bomber, a pilot and his navigator/bombardier sat in silence, a silence that only they recognized beneath the blasting thunder of their ship’s two Jumo V-12 engines...

Are you, like me, stuck in a dead end job? Has being third fry-cook at Marcel and Hughette's P'tit Patate Casse-croûte lost its original "job-appeal”? Does it say "Acting Second Assistant Filing Manager, Dormant Records and Forms" ….

We celebrated a lot of things last Saturday night at our Victory Gala. Firstly, we celebrated a new widely inclusive operational model and the remarkable independent Board of Directors we have recruited.

Seventy-five years ago this year, one of the most storied and talked about battles in military history took place in the skies of England. It was a battle that raged for three and a half bitter months, yet involved less than 3,000 Allied combatants—all pilots with the Royal Air Force, mostly British, but also Canadians, Polish,…