Yellow Wings Tour About to Take Flight

In 2011, Vintage Wings of Canada will bring the stories of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) to Canadians as we commemorate an extraordinary period in our nation’s rich aviation history.

The plan, established in 1939 between Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, resulted in the training of approximately 210,000 aircrew over a four-year period. Nearly half of the Commonwealth air forces pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, air gunners, wireless operators, and flight engineers were trained on Canada soil. The BCATP was a massive wartime undertaking that brought much prominence to the nation and allowed US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to decree Canada as the ‘Aerodrome of Democracy.’

Yellow Wings will see four of Vintage Wing’s trainers – The North American Harvard, Tiger Moth, Fleet Finch and Cornell - tour throughout Canada during the summer of 2011 making stops at various aerodromes that once served as a BCATP training school or squadron.

Yellow Wings will honour the legacy of John Gillespie Magee on the 70th Anniversary of his famous poem High Flight, a mantra to aviator around the world still to this day.

These are the stories that make up the very culture of our aviation heritage. But we need your help. Vintage Wings is calling for sponsorship and donations to support the Yellow Wings Tour. Invest in our aviation veterans; help us tell their stories. Click to Donate and be part of the Legacy.