Canadian Wings: A Remarkable Century of Flight

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Because of its huge size and sparse population, no country has embraced
the airplane more fondly than Canada. Fortunately, Canada has worked
hard to preserve its aerial heritage. Nearly 50 years ago, the National
Aviation Museum was created to collect and preserve specimens and other
relics that relate to the airplanes that have served Canada. Now called
the Canadian Aviation Museum, the collection sits in a state-of-the-art
8,000-square-metre site on the former Royal Canadian Air Force Base at
Rockcliffe, Ontario. This beautiful book has been created both to
celebrate the move to the new building and to commemorate the upcoming
100th anniversary of Canada’s first airplane flight by Alexander
Graham Bell’s Silver Dart in 1909.

The introduction discusses how the Canadian Aviation Museum came to
exist, and traces how the collection started with just a few
“trophy” German aircraft captured by the Allies after World War I .
The remaining content is divided into dozens of chapters that examine
significant contributions to Canadian aviation by people, planes, and
patents. Chapters include “The First World War,” “Barnstormers and
Bush Pilots,” “The Second World War,” “Naval Aviation,”
“Helicopters,” “Peace and the Cold War,” “The Development of
Air Travel,” “Recreational Aviation,” and “Aircraft
Manufacturing in Canada.” Hundreds of striking photographs make this
book very hard to put down. Some are vintage black-and-white shots taken
in the fledgling days of flight while others are up-to-date full-colour
pictures of aviation as it exists now. An appendix lists all the
aircraft currently held in the Aviation Museum’s collection. This book
is a must-have for anyone interested in Canadian aviation history.