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Aviation History
1937
1937 - 0917.PDF
APRIL 8, 1937. FLIGHT. a Commercial Aviation CANADA'S TRANSCONTINENTAL AIRWAY READY One of the main stations on the trans-Canada route, the International Airport at Montreal. How the Problems of Preparation Were Surmounted By JAMES MONTAGNES CANADA'S first complete transcontinental air service is expected to start operation this year. It will eventually bring Halifax within sixteen to eighteen hours of Van couver, and feeder services will connect northern Canada with the cities near the U.S. border During the past year Canada has worked hard in order that the airway may be ready for use at least as soon as the regular Atlantic services are started. The greatest problem concerned the bridging of northern Ontario, which is an almost uninhabited region of lake and virgin bush. This area formed the real reason for the fact that no transcontinental service had previously been developed. Next in imDortance, so far as difficulty is concerned, was the spanning of the Rocky Mountains, over which the lowest prac tical pass is 4,500 feet above sea-level—and surrounded by 10,000ft. mountains at that. In neither of these regions was it easy to lay out aerodromes. Northern Ontario has been bridged by nearly fifty landing grounds between Quebec and Manitoba, which have been laid out by an army of unemployed. These have braved winters, with a temperature of 20 and 30 below zero, to cut down trees, dynamite and burn stumps, fill in muskeg swamp with rocks and boulders, level fields and runways, and keep the encroach ing bush from once more making a wilderness out of the cleared field. In summer these men had to fight big black flies against which mosquito netting is no safeguard. In the Rocky Mountains twenty-five airports were built at a variety of altitudes, but all spaced at twenty-five or thirty- mile intervals, and here another difficulty cropped up when the four-way radio beacons were installed. The mountains, not unnaturally, distorted the beams. In order to overcome this problem two or more beacons had to be installed at each loca tion and the number of marker beacons had also to be in creased. There are to be some twenty-five main radio beacons over the entire route. The ground operations will be carried out by the Air Service Branch of the Dominion Depart ment of Transport; and the work includes the development of airport lighting as well as radio. A teleprinter weather service between hundreds of observation stations is ready to start opera tions over the entire route. Something like $10,000,000 will have been spent by the Government on ground organisation when the service is opened. The route will be from Halifax to St. John, New Brunswick, across the State of Maine, to Montreal, where the transatlantic service will be met. From Montreal it will run via Ottawa Emsdale, Cobalt and across northern Ontario to Winnipeg. At Emsdale the services from Toronto and Buffalo will connect with the main system. Winnipeg, Regina, and Lethbridge are the next major stopping points, and thereafter machines will fly to Cranbrook, Princeton and Vancouver. United States lines have their ter mini at Winnipeg and Vancouver, while Arctic routes connect at Winnipeg and Lethbridge. The whole operational work will, as already explained in Flight, be in the hands of a private company with strong railway and Government interest. (Above) One of the nearly a hundred emergency landing fields constructed out of the bush in northern Ontario, British Columbia and sections of the prairie provinces, on the route of the trans-Canada airway. (Right) Workmen levelling a landing field cut out of virgin bush in southern Manitoba.
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