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Vintage warbirds to overfly Pelham on Remembrance Day

Leon Evans retired from flying intercontinental routes as a senior pilot with Air Canada 15 years ago, trading in jet aircraft for vintage, piston-powered, propeller-driven planes.
Leon Evans
Chief pilot Leon Evans sits at the controls of VeRA, the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum’s Lancaster bomber. DON RICKERS

Leon Evans retired from flying intercontinental routes as a senior pilot with Air Canada 15 years ago, trading in jet aircraft for vintage, piston-powered, propeller-driven planes.

Since 2009, he’s been the chief pilot at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope (near Hamilton), and spends a few days each week taking paying customers aloft for short flights in World War II aircraft, from small, single-engine trainers, to massive, four-engine behemoths like the Avro Lancaster. Evans hopes to be at the controls of the Lanc on Remembrance Day, piloting the aircraft over ceremonies across Niagara and the Golden Horseshoe, as he has done so many times before.

“It all depends on the weather, of course,” said Evans, “but we try to cover as many cenotaphs as possible in Niagara. We usually take off from Mount Hope, cruise over Hamilton and then down the QEW to St. Catharines, Merritton, Thorold, then past Fonthill and Welland, and finally over Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake. We then cut across Lake Ontario to Toronto, and come straight back along the shoreline. If people don't see us, they will hear us. You can even track the flight on your smartphone with the app Flightradar24.”

The Lancaster was probably the most famous Allied bomber of the Second World War. Built in July of 1945 at the Victory Aircraft factory in Malton, Ontario, the Museum’s plane, callsign VeRA, never actually saw aerial combat. It is one of two operational Lancasters left in the world (the other is in Great Britain, and is used only for special airshows and armed forces-related events).

The aircraft is 70 feet long with a wingspan of 100 feet, and was powered for much of the war by four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, which also served the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft. The wartime engines produced over 1600 horsepower each, burning 150 octane fuel, and were manufactured in Detroit by Packard during the war. The planes required 5000 feet of runway to takeoff and land safely.

“The aerial war over Europe in WWII was really about engines and their development,” said Evans. “Rolls Royce and Packard for the Allies, vs. Daimler-Benz and BMW for the Germans.”

The Lancaster, with a crew of seven, had a range of over 2500 miles, and could carry a huge bomb load. It was flown by thousands of British and Canadian air corps over Europe, and won distinction with the daring raids on the Ruhr Dams in May 1943, and with the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz in November 1944. Post-war Lancasters did duty in maritime patrol and arctic reconnaissance, before being retired in 1964.

“It’s a beautiful, stable airplane to fly, but it was never meant to be in the air 76 years after the Second World War,” said Evans, who has encyclopedic knowledge of every facet of the aircraft. “The Lancaster could do the bombing run to Berlin in about eight hours there and back, carrying 13,000 pounds of bombs and over 15,000 pounds of fuel. Bomber formations sometimes had 1000 planes, 30 miles long and 10 miles wide.”

The Museum’s Lanc is dedicated to the memory of pilot officer Andrew Mynarski, who won the Victoria Cross, the Commonwealth’s highest award for gallantry, in June of 1944, when his Lancaster was shot down in flames by a German night fighter. Mynarski had attempted to free the tail gunner trapped in the rear turret of the blazing aircraft, but died from severe burns. The tail gunner miraculously survived the crash.

“It was dangerous work,” said Evans. “There were 150,000 men in Bomber Command, and 50,000 were killed in action during the course of the war, including almost 11,000 Canadians.” Evans views VeRA as a living memorial to the brave veterans who flew the machine, most who were only in their late teens and early 20s during World War II.

“I don’t know where these men get their courage,” said Evans. He recalled being in a pub in England called the Blue Bell that had been in existence for 700 years.

“We were inquiring about coins that were stuck up in the cracks in the ceiling, and were told that WWII bomber crews would have a beer in the pub, and for good luck, they would insert coins into cracks in the beams, to be retrieved when they came home safely from a mission. There are pubs all over Lincolnshire, where the Lancaster squadrons were based, with the same thing. Thousands of coins never retrieved.”

A brigade of men and women serve as the ground crew for the Lanc, and perform a variety of jobs around the Museum.

“We’ve got steel workers, school teachers, a retired surgeon, and of course ex-military and airline types,” said Evans. “They all share a love of airplanes, and are mentored by some of the crew who have strong technical talents.”

Flying these vintage aircraft ain’t cheap.

“The Lanc burns 220 imperial gallons an hour,” said Evans, noting that Canadian Airplane Heritage Museum fundraises through taking passengers aloft for short flights, and also featuring their aircraft at airshows and exhibits. An hour aloft in the Lancaster will cost four passengers $3600 each. Smaller plane flights can be had for a few hundred dollars.

Evans said that the museum’s twin-engine B-25 Mitchell, named “Hot Jen,” may accompany the Lancaster on its Remembrance Day flight. The B-25 bomber was made famous by the Doolittle raids on Japan early in the war, in retaliation for the strike on the American naval base at Pearl Harbour in the Pacific.

 



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Don Rickers

About the Author: Don Rickers

A life-long Niagara resident, Don Rickers worked for 35 years in university and private school education. He segued into journalism in his retirement with the Voice of Pelham, and now PelhamToday
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