Iceland, sort of

Canso, Wings over Springbank July 27, 2019

This is supposed to be a post about Iceland and it is, indirectly. The ones about the holiday will follow when I get some photos organized to go with them.

Today we went to the Springbank air show. I saw an ad for it probably on Facebook and we decided it would be a fun adventure. We took the C-train to Crowfoot station and then got on a shuttle bus to take us out to the airport.  We packed our lunches last night and both had water with us since the temperature was about 27 when we left the house. At that point it wouldn’t have taken much to persuade me to hide in the basement for the day.

I was surprised that there wasn’t a huge line to get on the shuttle bus and the event itself didn’t really seem crowded. There were a lot of really interesting planes and helicopters parked alongside the runway. There was a model of the Avro Arrow next door to a Lear jet. The cadets had one of their gliders out and there were a few helicopters in the mix. There was also quite a large plane that was painted yellow and had a buffalo on it. When I got around the front and read the sign, I saw that it was a Canso. 

Instrument panel Canso

Dad didn’t talk too much about his time in the RCAF in Iceland other than the pranks that the Canadians and the Americans played on each other, but I do remember that he talked about working on Cansos.  I never thought I would see one. I mentioned to the woman at the table outside that my dad had been in Iceland and worked on Cansos. She asked me to write down his name and squadron.  I didn’t know the squadron but I put his name on a list of others already there. I doubt they’ll be able to find out anything but it’s a neat connection for me. When I got to the door of the plane and started talking to the guy there, he told me that he would get me into the cockpit, that as the daughter of someone who served in the air force, I was a VIP. That felt weird. I did get to sit in the cockpit and chat with the guy who was there providing information.

Me in the cockpit of a plane Dad probably serviced

He said that after the war this particular flying boat was refitted as a water bomber and ended up at the bottom of a lake from where it was salvaged. It flew more missions fighting fires that it ever did over the North Atlantic. He also said it was commissioned in June of 1944 and transferred to Iceland in December of 1944. I know Dad was there at that time so there is a good possibility that I was sitting in a plane that he had worked on. The guy in the cockpit also told me that the Cansos went out in the dark, caught up with the convoys, flew with then during the day and then found their way back to Iceland in the dark. Apparently, they were armed with depth charges against submarines.  I don’t know how all of that worked since it seems to me, they wouldn’t be able to carry enough fuel to fly most of a night and a day; however, it’s another bit of interesting information and I may have misunderstood what he said.

Many of Dad’s papers had have long since disappeared and others are in binders in a storage locker. For some reason I have kept two photo albums of Dad’s from Iceland and I spent this morning looking through them. I may have inherited my interest in photography from him for there are photos of sunsets, flowers, and boats reflected in water. These are all in black and white, but I doubt he would take photos such as these if his only interest was in documenting where he was. Or, perhaps I’m searching for connections between us. He carefully labelled all of the photos and postcards with his name, rank and serial number – seriously! Annoyingly for me, he seldom wrote anything about where the shots were taken. I have inklings that I’m more like my dad in some ways than my mum, his love of writing and reading, his tendency to be a pack-rat, his love of birds. I think we might have understood each other quite well if only we had allowed it. Now that I have lived longer on this earth than he did, I feel a sense of connection through his tools that I use regularly and, now, being able to sit in an airplane that he probably helped to maintain. I’ve heard others say that death doesn’t end a relationship, but I didn’t think that a relationship could grow stronger after death. I may have been wrong.

Dad is in the end of the front row on the right