Stephen J. Thorne

The Queen of the skies: Iconic Lancaster flies again

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

She’s a big lumbering brute but, oh, how she flies!

Proponents of the Spitfire would no doubt take umbrage, but devotees of the bigger warbirds of the Second World War unabashedly call the Avro Lancaster the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

The crews who survived those long, cold and terrifying night missions over Germany—stragglers limping home, as they so often did, with their fuselages riddled by flak and 30mm cannon rounds, chunks of plane missing and wounded or dead aboard, hoping against hope they weren’t pursued—no doubt have a case.

READ MORE

More from Front Lines

• Military decoys work as well now as they did eight decades ago
• A good parade
• Authorities struggle over what to do with Nazi relic

Wikimedia

The mathematical miracle of the Gimli Glider

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

It is a sound you never want to hear while manning a 132-ton Boeing 767-200 at 41,000 feet in the air. And despite their accumulated 22,000 hours of flying time, Captain Robert “Bob” Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal had never heard a sound quite like it either, emitting from the depths of the plane’s Engine Indicator and Crew Alerting System (EICAS). It was a sharp-tongued, steel-plated bong.

“Oh fuck,” Pearson blurted into the cockpit voice recorder.

The engines of Air Canada Flight 143–what would come to be known as the “Gimli Glider” – had flamed out.

READ MORE

More from Military Milestones

• To Kill the Right to Kill
• Celebrating history’s first nuclear-arms control agreement
• A gigantic job

RCL members and their families can benefit from exclusive discounts on car, home, condo and tenant’s insurance at belairdirect. Learn more at legion.ca/belairdirect

Learn More