The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter

      The de Havilland of Canada organization that Jakimiuk joined had been among the smallest aircraft manufacturers in Canada at the beginning of the war. During die mid-1930s, employment peaked at fifty-two people in the Downsview plant,¹ many of them women who worked in the DHC fabric shop, sewing, gluing and doping linen wing and fuselage skins for the lightweight stick-and-wire biplanes that Downsview’s parent at Hatfield specialized in. Even then, de Havilland’s aircraft construction methods were falling well behind the times.

      The tall, skinny, bespectacled young Dick Hiscocks’s experience working for DHC during the summer of 1937 and for the English parent company at Hatfield the following year impressed him mainly by how wilfully backward the company’s management was-especially compared with its innovative design staff. A University of Toronto student in Engineering Physics 1938. Hiscocks found himself working eighteen-hour days that first summer assembling the Globe and Mail’s “Flying Newsroom,” a twin-engine DH.89 Dragon Rapide mounted on floats.² The Rapide pretty much summed up de Havilland’s design philosophy.

      Like the entire DH Rapide small airliner series, CF-BBG was an elegant machine, with slender biplane wings, a minimum of strut-bracing and wires, and good visibility through an almost-continuous strip of windows running halfway back along the fuselage. It was typical of de Havilland products in having evolved through a progression of gradual changes, each of which slightly altered a thoroughly obsolete concept.

      Fabric-covered biplanes were already things of the past. Lockheed, Boeing and finally Douglas Aircraft, with its epochal DC-3, had all been building larger, faster, all-metal airliners for years. In fact, wooden wings had been outlawed on commercial aircraft operated in the United States since 1928, when a wood-winged Fokker airliner had crashed, killing, among others, Notre Dame’s famous football and track coach, Knute Rockne.

      The Dragon Rapide’s great virtue was its economy of operation. Like many of de Havilland’s small airliners, the Dragon Rapide had found markets as a short-haul commuter airliner and as an executive aircraft for private industry, and would be built in the thousands as a wartime military transport and trainer. The Globe intended to share its flying newsroom with a northern mining promoter.

      Another attraction of de Havilland designs was that they could be assembled by relative novices such as Hiscocks, who found himself placed in charge of wing assembly for the Globes Rapide while still in school. The wood and metal parts were shipped from England. The woodwork involved in assembly was considered within almost any employee’s capabilities. Nor did the shipments from England include drawings, “which were considered an unnecessary distraction for any competent assembler,” Hiscocks recalls.³

      His foremost qualification for supervising the Rapide’s wing assembly was that he had found a picture of the airplane in a copy of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.⁴ There was constant pressure to finish the job, partly because the pilot had already been hired and had nothing better to do than monitor progress, and partly because the customer had all the patience of those who produce the daily miracle that is a newspaper.

      According to Hiscocks’s picture, the Rapide’s unusual tapered wings had straight leading edges that ran at right angles from the fuselage. That was in accord with Hiscocks’s textbooks, which, in those pre-supersonic times, abhorred leading-edge sweepback. The possibility that the de Havilland designer responsible for the Dragon series, A. E. Hagg, might not have read those texts occurred to Hiscocks once the wings were assembled and trial-mated to the fuselage. They didn’t fit. The wings’ leading edges did have sweepback, after all.

      Repairing the damage was all the more difficult because, before the era of bolts with self-locking nuts, the normal practice in assembling bolted machines was to hammer the ends of the bolts to scramble the threads. “It was an effective technique,” Hiscocks remembers “as we discovered when we tried to take those wings apart.”

      An elaborate and fully reported ceremony was held to christen the airplane when it was finished, and its first flight was highly publicized, especially its subsequent arrival back it the Toronto waterfront on August 21, 1937.

      One obvious shortcoming of wood-framed, fabric-covered airplanes was demonstrated that evening, when the flying newsroom returned from its inaugural trip and was being refuelled for the next day’s flight. One tank had been filled when a spark from the nozzle ignited fumes from the empty tank into a ball of flame.⁵ The flying newsroom burned too quickly to be saved, and “all that could be done was to float it away from the dock and let it burn,” recalls Fred Hotson, a DHC employee at the time. Up in smoke went the product of Dick Hiscocks’s summer labours.

      Hiscocks has often wondered whether the fate of the flying newsroom that summer of 1937 was why DHC was unable to offer him work after he graduated. His visit to Hatfield in 1938, arranged by DHC managing director Philip C. Garratt, was, in its own way, equally disillusioning. De Havilland had its own way of doing things, and the company preferred to train its technicians at its own technical school. These graduates were more highly regarded within the company than engineers from Oxford or Cambridge, who were considered scientists, DH people were hands-on types, hardworking fellows who could use tools.

      There were advantages to the way de Havilland operated: the production department was, above all else, flexible. Hatfield could build prototypes cheaply, for almost any market, and could produce short runs of any specific model economically by combining the wing of one type with a new fuselage and powering the result with one of the company’s reliable Gipsy engines.⁶

      Garratt had arranged for Hiscocks to work at Hatfield on an advanced project—at least, it was advanced for the prewar de Havilland. It was the all-metal DH.95 Flamingo on which Jakimiuk had consulted with the de Havilland design team.⁷ Just out of engineering school, wanting to keep himself abreast of the latest developments in aviation, Hiscocks remembers requesting borrowing privileges in the company library. This was regarded as an outlandish request, for which he was paraded before Hatfield’s managing director, “no less.”

      “He wanted to know what earthly use I would have for technical reports, and to his horror I said that there was a lot of good design data in reports from sources such as the Royal Aircraft Establishment. The office of every senior executive in England had a fireplace in those days, and, pointing to this, the head of the company said that government reports were given an ‘ignition test’ at de Havilland.”