On Canadian Wings: A 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.

This is the third instalment of a trilogy by Peter Pigott, one of
Canada’s leading authorities on aviation history. The first two
volumes were Wings Across Canada: An Illustrated History of Canadian
Aviation and Taming the Skies: A Celebration of Canadian Fight. Like the
first two books, this volume profiles planes and people who have made
significant contributions to Canadian aviation. The book opens with the
tiny Bleriot Monoplane, which wowed Canadian aviation fans in 1910, and
ends with the Airbus, a massive airliner. Pigott does not confine
himself to set themes such as fighters, transports, or bush planes.
Instead, he jumps from category to category with only chronology
dictating the order that the planes appear in. Fifty airplanes are
profiled, including the Nieuport 17 fighter plane, the HS-2L Flying
Boat, the Lockheed Electra, Fairey Swordfish, Vickers Wellington, the
Vickers Viscount, De Havilland Otter, and the Bombardier Learjet. Also
profiled are such curiosities as the Avro Lincoln and the Burgess-Dunne
biplane, the latter being Canada’s very first military aircraft.

Pigott is a fine storyteller. He packs each profile with fascinating
anecdotes that make these long-disappeared aircraft come to life before
the reader’s eyes. Scores of vintage black-and-white and colour
photographs accompany the text, and Pigott notes if any of the aircraft
survive in a museum or private collection. If you are an airplane,
military, or Canadian history fan, you will definitely want to add this
book to your collection.