The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Celebrating 100 Years of the Ontario Provincial Air Service

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

The Ontario Provincial Air Service will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in Sault Ste. Marie. Ontario's fleet of yellow aircrafts conduct a number of resource management programs including aerial wildlife surveys, fishing stocking, rabies vaccination distribution, but it's best known for its expertise in forest fire patrol and suppression. The service has gone through a number of name changes over the decades and morphed into the Aviation, Forest Fires and Emergency Services under Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. Jeyan Jeganathan visits the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre to revisit the rich history of the Ontario Provincial Air Service in northern Ontario.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. The Ontario Provincial Air Service was launched here in Sault Ste. Marie at the city's waterfront in 1924.

It grew to become the world's largest non-commercial air service, and now it's being recognized for its contributions here in Ontario for the past 100 years. The views of northern Ontario never get old for Doug Sneddon. It's just part of the whole experience of hanging around airplanes. It's what they do. Definitely a freedom. You're out there by yourself doing something that is kind of fun. Sneddon has been hanging around airplanes most of his life.

He worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources servicing planes for the Provincial Forestry Aviation Service. DOUG SNEDDON, I worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources servicing planes for the Provincial Forestry Aviation Service. I worked as an aircraft maintenance engineer for 20 years and 13 years as an aircraft maintenance engineer manager. So I was manager of all the small airplanes, Twin Autos, the Turbo Beavers, and the King Airs. Although he retired from the ministry in 2021,

Sneddon has continued his passion for aviation through his work as a flight instructor. He is one of the many former and current employees who have been part of the Ontario Provincial Air Service's legacy since its inception 100 years ago. We're standing in the hangar of the former Ministry of Natural Resources Aviation Services group. This hangar was constructed in 1948 when the new de Havilland products started to arrive,

like the beavers and the otters and that sort of thing, and they needed some sort of accommodation. And this complements the old hangar, which you may have already seen down there, which was constructed in 1924. Bob Thomas is the founding president of the Canadian Bush Plain Heritage Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and a retired information officer with the Ontario Provincial Air Service. The Canadian Bush Plain Heritage Centre was created in 1987 by local volunteers, many of whom were active or retired members of the Ontario Provincial Air Service. Every Friday morning was coffee day, especially for retirees,

and retirees could come in and get free coffee and donuts. So they would come in at 10 o'clock, sit down, and start telling stories. Now employees, after half an hour, have to go back to work, but the retirees could hang around. Fantastic anecdotes, great stories about the old days in the Air Service and what was going on and where to find an old downed airplane. All of these things and it occurred to me that none of this is being recorded and so much other history is being lost and what can we do about

it and who would be interested. Today, Ontario's fleet of yellow aircrafts runs several resource management programs, including aerial wildlife surveys, fish restocking and rabies vaccination distribution. But it's best known for its expertise in forest fire patrol and suppression. Just like much of the country, Ontario is coming off the heels of one of the worst wildfire seasons on record. More than 700 fires and over 400,000 hectares of forest burned. Smoke travelled across Canada, blanketing the province and even sending plumes of smoke across the border into the US. But it might be surprising to know that the air service wasn't originally created

to fight forest fires. So it was started by the Department of Lands and Forests in 1924. And so the Department of Lands and Forests is concerned with forests. Northern Ontario is covered with forests, essentially. A lot of what they were concerned about was finding out the extent of those forests,

that it was a major question of the economic value of those forests, both to the government and to industry more broadly. And so doing forest surveying, finding out what kind of timber is actually out there. This is our collection storage area, and in particular where we keep our archival collection. Mary Collier is the curator at the Canadian Bush Plain Heritage Centre. The museum has a large collection of photos, logs and even failed experiments from the early days of the air service. These are some of the paper bags that are left over from an experiment in water bombing

that the air service did in the 1950s so they had these kind of waxed paper bags and they would fill them with water so they puff out about yay big and drop them um on fires from aircraft either from helicopters or from fixed wing aircraft. And that was an experiment in water bombing. Two years before the Government Air Service was created, Canada experienced one of the worst natural disasters in its history, the Great Fire of 1922. A wildfire ripped through the town of Haleybury, Ontario in neighbouring communities,

killing more than 40 people and destroying homes and businesses. To protect those valuable forests and prevent further loss of life, the department got involved in fire suppression. The Ontario Provincial Air Service has gone through a few name changes since its start. Currently, the service is run by the Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Service section of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. The service is credited with advancing bush plane design and development over the past century. A bush plane is a plane that can go where a normal plane can't. Something that can land without a runway, essentially. It can either be on wheels, it can be on floats to land in the water,

it can be on skis to land in the snow, but it's a plane that can go kind of off-road in places where there aren't airports. We have some photos from our collection of the H-boat and of the hangar here in the early days. So this one is of a crew with one of the H boats. The Curtiss HS2L flying boat was the first type of aircraft that the air service purchased when it was established. It was designed by the US Navy during World War I

as a maritime patrol aircraft and featured a 74-foot wingspan, large Liberty engine, and a base shaped like a boat so it could land on water. After the First World War, aircraft had kind of come of age and their usefulness in terms of doing aerial surveying and being able to spot wildfires, the government had contracted private operators to do some of that work in the early 1920s. But by 1924, they decided, you know what, we can do it cheaper ourselves. And so they purchased the planes, hired up the staff and created this air service, which was the first of its kind.

The air service purchased 13 HS-2L flying boats to round out their fleet. Today, a one-quarter scale replica of the Pioneer plane hangs in the rafters of the museum, among some decommissioned aircrafts that were used later by the service. After the war, they were kind of retrofitted, so they had previously just had the two cockpit spaces and then a hatch in the front for, in the case of military uses, a machine gunner, for example, or somebody doing that submarine spotting. Additional cockpit areas were added between those two that could be used for either freight

or additional passengers, and then that front hatch became the observer's hatch. You had a guy who sat in the front of an H-boat with very thick fabric, and he would actually sketch lakes and rivers and forest types and make notes. What type of trees are they? Are they healthy? Is it a good-looking area to harvest? This sort of thing. While they were doing all that, somebody would say, wow, there's smoke. There's a fire. So how do we report it? Well, they couldn't report it initially because they didn't have any air-to to ground radio contact. But when they got back to base they could not only report it, they could also pick up one or two firefighters with their shovels and a couple of other things and fly them in if it was an accessible site. As the aircraft grew away from the H-boats into later years, you could transport a whole fire crew and their equipment and their pumps and the hose and food and tents and everything else.

And what does it do when it gets over the fire? It opens its bomb doors. The bomber doors open up and 6,000 litres of water comes pouring down on the fire below with enough force to snap a mature tree in half. That's why we can't be on the ground when the water bombers come. The museum aims to connect people of all ages to Ontario's forest protection heritage. So they would put foam in there and they would add that to the fire, to the water to put the fire out. Fighting wildfires requires a combination of firefighters both on the ground and in the air.

Strategy depends partly on landscape. Northern Ontario has plenty of lakes. Making the job of a CL415 water bomber very easy. It can scoop up over 6,000 litres of water in just 12 seconds. A major improvement since the early days of the Air Service. So that started as somebody experimenting with a tank of water just sitting on the seat next to them in an open cockpit aircraft to trying out what turned into roll tanks so that they can fill up as you taxi, dump a bunch of water all at once, roll back up, and you can just keep going that way to getting those tanks built into the floats themselves, those integral float tanks in the 1960s. This year, the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre is marking the Air Service's centennial

with a number of events, including a reunion with current and former Air Service employees. I think one of the biggest things is to bring retirees back, and retirees are coming from so far as we can gauge, from as far west as British Columbia. There are people who have longstanding service with the Air Service, and they would like to come back and reminisce. So the reunion is probably the biggest part of this whole thing. And we want to take advantage of that in the sense, I want to sort of implement something like we tried to do back in the 80s. If you're going to have all these retirees here,

and they're going to tell stories, and they've got fantastic anecdotes and memories to share, it's got to be documented. For a lot of former and current employees, there's an immense amount of pride as well. And there's a lot of people that put a lot of heart and soul into it. And there's still people doing that with new projects that are coming along every day. It's kind of unusual in a museum to find yourself becoming more and more relevant. But that is the case, I think think with climate change as it goes and the

wildfires being that much more present and so both for what the the current situation is and the role that aircraft play in fighting those fires. For us it's important to know that it was something that was was built here that Ontario saw the need, invested in that, put a lot of research and development into it, and it has really been kind of a homegrown thing, especially for us here in the Sioux. Thank you.