Brace for Impact. Peter Pigott

      When the first pilots’ licences were awarded in 1920 after study and testing, Billy Bishop (left) and William Barker (right) refused to do either. Put in an embarrassing position, the Air Board quietly issued commercial pilots’ licences without tests to both air aces. Library and Archives Canada.

      This last restriction was guaranteed to cause friction between the Air Board and fighter aces such as Billy Bishop and William Barker. Both men felt they had served their time in the RFC with distinction. That they now also had to prove themselves to be competent pilots to examiners who, in their minds, had probably spent the war “flying desks” at home was humiliating.[10] To Bishop and Barker, Scott typified all that was wrong with the Air Board and its pedagogic regulations. Scott had only been at the front for four months before being invalided to Canada, where he was posted to Camp Borden as staff officer in charge of training. What could he possibly teach two icons about flying? Besides, a chap hadn’t needed regulations on the front to fight the Germans!

      On January 24, 1920, James Stanley Scott, now the controller of civil aviation (CCA), set an example for other veterans and issued himself the first private pilot’s licence. The first air engineer’s licence was issued to Robert McCombie on April 20, 1920. On the same day a Curtiss JN-4 (G-CAAA), belonging to the Aerial Service Company in Regina, was the first civil aircraft to be registered. The first commercial pilot’s licence was earned by Reginald Groome on July 31, 1920. Eileen Vollick was the first Canadian woman to earn a private pilot’s licence (March 13, 1928) and also the first Canadian female to parachute from an aircraft — a JN-4.[11] Mrs. J.M. Miller was the first Canadian woman to earn a commercial licence (February 5, 1930). In Canada, by 1921 there were 171 licensed pilots and 109 registered aircraft.

      It was another matter in the United States, where several states had been issuing their own pilots’ licences for years, just as they did automobile operators’ ones. These became invalid when the Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch began pilot certification and issued its first pilot’s licence on April 6, 1927. Orville Wright, who was no longer an active flyer, was asked if he would accept “Licence No. 1” but declined the honour.[12] Three months later the Aeronautics Branch issued the first federal aircraft mechanic licence. As important for safety was a nationwide system of aircraft certification. The branch had already issued the first airworthiness-type certificate on March 29, 1927, to a Buhl Airster CA-3 biplane.

      The first court of inquiry into an air crash wasn’t long in coming. On August 18, 1920, Hibbert B. Brenton died when his Boeing flying boat flipped over into the water in Vancouver’s English Bay. An experienced pilot who had flown in the RNAS during the First World War, Brenton had been attempting to qualify for his commercial licence. A day earlier he had made a test flight before Major Clarence MacLaurin, the Air Station superintendent in Vancouver.

      Although it was a hazy evening — there was a mist on the water — Brenton decided to fly. At about 6:30 p.m. he taxied the Boeing out of False Creek, took off, and circled English Bay before landing. He repeated this at 7:00 p.m., climbing to a height of 1,000 feet, and attempted to land in the same spot. This time eyewitnesses saw the aircraft start into a steep descent and turn into a half loop. Two explosions were heard, and witnesses saw smoke flow out of the engine. Brenton was seen falling out of the cockpit, while the Boeing looped down and hit the water with a splash.

      The newspapers estimated that the accident was seen by an audience of 5,000 locals. The tug Vancouver was towing logs in the bay. Spying the crash, the captain of the tug cut his logs loose and headed for the floating wreckage. Other boats followed, and men dived into the water around the half-submerged aircraft to search for the pilot’s body. What remained of the Boeing was pulled ashore by the Vancouver and left at Cardero Street while the search for Brenton continued into the night.

      The first court of inquiry into an air crash was held in 1920 and discovered that the pilot was killed when his flying boat overturned because his glove was caught in the control cables. Vancouver Archives.

      Asked by reporters what caused the crash, Major MacLaurin quite correctly didn’t venture an opinion except to say that Brenton was a good pilot. Then he telegraphed the Air Board in Ottawa to set up a court of inquiry. Both aircraft owners, Aircraft Manufacturers Ltd. and the Hoffar Motor Boat Company (the company that had just serviced the Boeing), told the press the crash wasn’t the result of a mechanical problem. The locals were aware that this was the boat company’s second unfortunate venture into aviation. On September 4, 1918, its H-2 hydroplane built for the Department of Lands and Forests had crashed into a house on Vancouver’s Bute Street.

      Assembled in Vancouver on August 30, the court was composed of three air force officers: Major A.M. Lester, Squadron Commander C.M. Cudmore, and Lieutenant W. Templeton. Six witnesses were called to give evidence. Two were the policeman who had seen the crash and one was the aviator Captain Ernest C. Hoy, DFC, who spoke on behalf of the aircraft’s owners and J.B. Hoffar.[13]

      No minutes of the inquiry survive, and if the design and manufacture of the rescued flying boat and its engine were examined, there is no record of it. Why did Brenton choose to fly in the increasing gloom of dusk when reference to the water would have been difficult to estimate? What were the two explosions heard from the Hall-Scott engine? The definitive conclusion of the cause of the crash, however, had been arrived at long before. After the aircraft was pulled ashore on August 18, an examination of it had revealed that one of the pilot’s gloves had jammed the pulleys between the passenger seats that carried the elevator controls.

      What occurred that evening foreshadowed Major MacLaurin’s own death. Two years later he also drowned when the HS-2L seaplane he was flying plunged into shallow water on the Point Grey shore of English Bay. Witnesses saw the aircraft struggle to gain height after the engine failed. The flying boat ran into the beach and overturned, trapping MacLaurin under it.

      The Roaring Twenties were defined by flappers, flivvers, silent movies, and barnstormers. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, unemployed pilots (such as Charles Lindbergh, Alan Cobham, and Hermann Göring) in clapped-out, war-surplus aircraft worked their way across what was still a rural world, giving thousands their first sight of a flying machine — and sometimes their first flight in one. At the same time the Canadian Air Force did what it could to publicize its existence by accomplishing the first trans-Canada flight from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, between October 7 and 17, 1920. The Air Board aircraft were being slowly worked to death on forestry patrol, photographing/mapping the country, and serving as government transport, with their pilots constantly wary of the wood shrinkage in the main spars of their wartime aircraft.

      Unlike the British government, when Ottawa codified a civil air policy, it didn’t create a civil air ministry to govern it but gave the responsibility to the minister of militia. On May 23, 1920, in one of his last acts as prime minister, Borden approved a budget of $1.6 million for the continued operation of the Air Board before handing over the reins to his successor, Arthur Meighen. Opposition members, led by Meighen’s university colleague, William Lyon Mackenzie King, were loud in their criticism of this action, saying it was a waste of funds. Aviation had little practical value, they said, and the government didn’t fund race-car drivers, acrobats, and lion tamers, all of whom were in safer professions, so why should it extend this courtesy to aviators?

      Aviation author Jonathan F. Vance points out: “However, it was one thing to create a regulatory regime, it was a quite another thing to convince the public that it was safe to fly.”[14] What the public knew and revelled in were the barnstormers: roving airmen who came to isolated towns to put on air shows for a couple of days, then moved on before air force officers could catch up and enforce the Air Regulations. What killed the barnstormer were clapped-out aircraft, foolhardiness, greedy carnival promoters, cow pastures used as landing fields … and running out of luck. But as a survivor of the era remarked: “The most dangerous thing about flying was starving to death.” Air Board files record that deaths at air shows were either because the “pilot failed to recover from a stall too close to the ground” or “the machine went into a spinning dive when the control column was jammed”