Flying Canucks II: Pioneers of Canadian Aviation
About this ebook
Flying Canucks II takes us into Air Canada's boardroom with Claude I. Taylor, to the Avro Arrow design office with Jim Floyd, inside the incredible career of Aviation Hall of Fame pilot Herb Seagram, on C.D. Howe's historic dawn-to-dusk flight, and with Len Birchall in a Stranraer seaplane before he became, in Churchill's phrase, "The Saviour of Ceylon." It includes the story of how Scottish immigrant J.A. Wilson engineered a chain of airports across the country, how bush pilot Bob Randall explored the polar regions, and the ordeal of Erroll Boyd, the first Canadian to fly the Atlantic. The lives of "Buck" McNair and "Bus" Davey, half a century after the Second World War, are placed in the perspective of the entire national experience in those years. Whenever possible, Mr. Pigott has interviewed the players themselves, and drawing on his experience and contacts within the aviation community, has created a multi-faceted study of the business, politics, and technology that influenced the ten lives explored in depth in this book.
C.D. Howe, wartime Canada's absolute government czar used to say that running the country's airline was all he really wanted to do. With a rich aviation heritage such as this, Flying Canucks II depicts the elements and the enemy at their worst and the pioneers of Canadian aviation at their best.
About the author
Peter Pigott works for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. His first book on aviation was written in 1988 while on posting to Hong Kong, where at the request of its government he wrote a history of aviation in the Colony. After postings in Vienna and The Hague, he returned to Canada with his family. In 1994 he had a collection of aviation biographies, Flying Canucks: Famous Canadian Aviators, published by Hounslow Press. The following year he went back to Hong Kong to research Hong Kong Rising: The History of a Remarkable Place which was well received by the public and the press. He is also the author of Gateways: The Airports of Canada, a study of what he calls one of this country's most entertaining and historic places - the local airport. Mr. Pigott was born in Britain in 1947, and educated in India, Canada, the United States, and Britain. He is currently working on a comprehensive history of commercial aviation in Canada. Peter believes his passion for aviation can be traced to the 1919 family memory of when a Vickers Vimy bomber on a record-breaking flight from Britain landed in the fields of his grandfather's farm at Safrajung, Delhi making it the first airport in India.
