then circle the water tower in figure-eight turns; then do a spot landing back at the aerodrome.
“The examiner had positioned a square canvas sheet with a red X on the field. When I was downwind, he would wave a white flag and I was to close the throttle, glide down, land, and stop within fifty feet of the spot. All went well. And I stopped with the spot under the right wing.”
At that point, Stirton noticed the instructor, Bob Eddie, speeding towards the Gipsy Moth in his car. Eddie leapt out of the driver’s seat and proceeded to tear a strip off the pilot trainee.
“What did you do that for?”
“Do what for?” Stirton asked.
“I’ll give you credit for getting down to the spot,” Eddie fumed, “but you were turning at too low a height. You know you can’t turn below 400 feet. Go up again, and if you’re too high, side-slip off some height. But for God’s sake don’t turn so close to the ground!”
“A side-slip,” Stirton repeated. “Okay.” And off he went.
Unfortunately, Stirton had never been taught how to side-slip. On the second approach to the field, he throttled back, turned the Gipsy Moth to line up with the examiner’s canvas sheet, noticed he had a bit too much height and lowered his left wing to slip sideways down closer to the ground.
“Suddenly, the aircraft stalled and sank like a brick,” Stirton recalled. “I had forgotten to lower the nose to maintain flying speed as I came out of the side-slip, and the poor Gipsy Moth hit the ground so hard that the undercarriage was punched up into the fuselage. The wings drooped down onto the grass. And I cracked three ribs.”
The crash of Gipsy Moth CF-ADI nearly put an end to Stirton’s flying ambitions. But by January 18, 1939, the aircraft had been repaired and was flying again, and Bob Eddie’s blood pressure was back to normal. Al Stirton passed and received his pilot’s licence. In May, he had accumulated seventy hours on airplanes at the Moose Jaw Flying Club, and earned his commercial licence. But flying jobs were few and far between that summer, so he just took friends for rides to build up his hours.
If he had stopped flying after that crash landing, Stirton might never have been invited to join the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. He wouldn’t have taught the basic principles of flying to hundreds of young military pilot trainees at St. Catharines Elementary Flying Training School or flown any anti-submarine patrols in Sunderland flying boats with No. 423 RCAF Squadron over the North Atlantic.
In fall 1939 the Blitzkrieg against Poland began in Europe. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3. A week later Canada did the same. And that’s when the war came looking for Al Stirton. The day after Canada declared war—September 11—Stirton received a telegram from the minister of national defence inviting him to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Naturally, he answered yes, “thinking that I’d become a hero as a fighter pilot.”
Similar missives arrived on the desks of flying clubs and private aviation companies from Halifax to Vancouver to Yellowknife. Just about everyone who was anyone in the commercial flying business in Canada received a telegram.
Wilfrid “Wop” May received one in Edmonton. A former Royal Flying Corps pilot, May had returned from the First World War a hero with a DFC and twelve enemy aircraft to his credit. The following year he had launched the first air service at Edmonton’s Blatchford Field. May is credited with the first commercial flight from Edmonton, the first freighting flight for Imperial Oil into the Northwest Territories, and the first commercial passenger flights into the Peace River district of Alberta. May’s mercy mission of flying diphtheria vaccine in an open cockpit Avro Avian from Edmonton 500 miles to Fort Vermilion on January 3, 1929, captured world attention; as did his participation in the pursuit and apprehension of Albert Johnson (dubbed the Mad Trapper) in 1931. Wop May, like Al Stirton, answered the telegram (and for his role in the BCATP was eventually awarded the American Medal of Freedom).
Ottawa also sent for Clennell Haggerston Dickins in Winnipeg. At the time “Punch” Dickins was in his thirties and working as the general superintendent of Canadian Airways. He was in charge of all air mail service from the Great Lakes to the Pacific and the Arctic. Dickins, like May, was a First World War veteran in the Royal Flying Corps with a DFC to his credit and had pursued his aviation career in the bush, flying in and supplying prospectors in the North. His flight for Dominion Explorers in 1928 was the first ever to survey the barren lands of the Arctic. In 1929 Dickins had been the first pilot to fly over the Arctic Circle in Canada. The call from Canadian Pacific president Sir Edward Beatty about “a wartime job” for Dickins turned out to be crucial to the launching of the Atlantic Ferry Organization.
Calls also went out to a couple of commercial pilots flying in Quebec— Charles Roy Troup and Walter Woollett. “Peter” Troup had served in the RAF’s peacetime No. 39 Bomber Squadron but had resigned his commission, emigrated to Canada, and pursued a career in Quebec’s bush country with Fairchild Aviation. Not long thereafter, “Babe” Woollett did the same, leaving No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron to seek his fortune at Fairchild in Canada.
Between them, Troup and Woollett did every conceivable kind of flying in the 1920s and 1930s. Troup raced seaplanes at the Canadian National Exhibition and led the Trans Canada Air Tour of eight Bellanca aircraft as part of a sales promotion. Woollett flew some of the first survey crews into northern Quebec and Labrador, flew an international mail route, and led countless rescue missions, including one to locate and retrieve his friend Peter Troup. But the greatest of their collaborations cast Troup and Woollett as co-designers of the BCATP Air Observer Schools, right after war was declared.
The skill of the air observer was viewed by the RAF military establishment with awe that bordered on reverence. In its air crew training manuals the British Air Ministry went so far as to say that “in many respects the air observer has the most responsible and exacting task in a bomber aircraft. . . . Mentally he must always be on the alert. . . . He must estimate and plot the course, be able to take snap readings, judge weather conditions, look out for ice and keep alternative objectives and landing grounds in the back of his mind . . . He must show a marked ability to handle figures, and be sufficiently skilled in signals to take a portion of work off the wireless operator. Above all he must never make mistakes . . . He is a wise and considerate pilot who appreciates the difficulties of his air observer.” Few flyers had greater respect for the air observer than did Babe Woollett.
Woollett’s high regard for the skills of air observation came from one of his earliest flying experiences. As an RAF elementary flying student training at Duxford EFTS in 1924, Woollett quickly adapted to doing “circuits and bumps” with the instructor in the second cockpit of his trainer aircraft, an Avro 504K biplane. On the day he soloed, leaving his instructor, Flight Lieutenant Sutherland, on the ground, Woollett became so enraptured by the sights of nearby Cambridge that he headed for home in the wrong direction. After buzzing the horseracing crowd in the grandstand at Newmarket on Classic Race Day, “my main concern became finding my way home. Fortunately, I happened to know that the main road from Newmarket to London ran right through the middle of Duxford Air Force Station.” When he finally landed back at Duxford he was nearly court-martialled for flying so low over the standing-room-only Newmarket grandstand; but he gained a life-long respect for those who navigate aircraft to and from given points on the map.
Probationary Pilot Officer Woollett advanced from his Avro trainer to the presentation of his RAF wings and confirmation as a pilot officer. After five years of peacetime service in No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron, he emigrated to Canada in 1929 and spent ten years “flying in the backwoods of [northern Quebec and Labrador with its] uncharted lakes. . . . We’d go through the ice, hit rocks and driftwood . . . through a lot of very dangerous and dashing flying.” In addition to navigating his way around the bush, Woollett had worked his way up to operations manager
