I left Toronto with a smile on my face. I climbed out over Lake Ontario, smallest of the Great Lakes, but still a giant body of water. The first part of the trip was over the lake, then along the St. Lawrence Seaway. Then I would head northeast across Canada and the very tip of Maine and into Newfoundland. This hop would end at Gander Airport.
Part of the reason this world trip had appealed to me was the idea of re-creating, in the Corsair, flying during the Second World War. Now, I was feeling it. The trip to Minnesota, then to Toronto, had been little different than any of the practice hops I had made. This was different. This was how those planes made it across the ocean to the European Theatre. First, to Newfoundland, then Greenland, and on to Iceland.
The real problem with those early flights was a lack of predictable weather and lack of precise navigation gear, not the distance. They didn’t have weather satellites or radar and GPS. Sometimes, a flight would take off from Canada heading towards Greenland and the fog and clouds would roll in and the flight would become completely lost. Not only that, but aircraft radios early in the war had a very limited range. You might not even be able to tell anyone you were lost. There was a reason it was called dead reckoning; if you reckoned wrong you were dead. That’s one reason so many flyers simply disappeared.
On one ferry trip, a group of P-38 Lightnings took off from Greenland to Iceland. The clouds rolled in so the flight turned back to Greenland. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the airport on the Greenland coast because of weather and had to crash land on the ice shelf. They walked to the coast where they were picked up by the Coast Guard. Ten planes destroyed by weather. Recently, an expedition found the planes and managed to cut through the ice and restore one of the planes, the Glacier Girl.
How would those pilots feel when they were in my place, flying to Gander, the last stop in North America? They were on their way to war. Would they be worried or full of bravado? Maybe both. Many of them weren’t young men as they flew off to war. They had children and wives they were leaving behind. War is a young man’s affair. Young men have less to lose and they don’t think as much about what they are getting themselves into. Older men know. As they flew along, looking down at the endless forests of Canada, would their thoughts turn towards what they were leaving, maybe forever, or would they be looking ahead, knowing that they were joining a long line of men who had fought to protect the liberty they and their families enjoyed? Would they be nervous, not just heading into the theatre of battle but at the long over water flight ahead?
I watched large container ships steaming up the seaway probably heading to Toronto where I had just left. I settled back and let my mind take me on thoughts of what those flyers lived through, the sacrifices, the victories. Below was an endless sea of trees. I suppose in some ways it wasn’t all that different from the endless sea ahead of me the next day; green and hilly instead of green and flat. I flew on.
The flight path took me over the very northern tip of Maine, across a small part of Canada, and across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Newfoundland. This is where the Vikings supposedly landed on the coast of North America, hundreds of years before Columbus. But they never pursued the discovery, being more interested in raiding Ireland, England, and France for booty. So it was Columbus who brought the first European settlers into the New World, who got credit, or blame if you were an inhabitant. But, as I said, they were the second to last conquerors. Native Americans won the first round and lost the second round. They were fifty percent in conquests. It evens out.
I landed at Gander and parked. It was cold and drizzly. I had the plane fueled and checked so that I could get off early the next day for that long flight. I wasn’t much in the mood for female companionship after Victoria had wrung me out the day before, so I headed over to the hotel to get rest. I was feeling the cumulative effect of three days of travel and of the exercise of the day before.
I wandered around Gander a bit and picked up lunch. I talked with the locals at the diner. They were interested in my flight. Not much happens in Gander I gathered. Since it wasn’t hockey season, there was really nothing of interest happening.
I wound up back in the airport hotel watching reruns of Nanook of the North and Sergeant Preston of the Mounties until I fell asleep. The only other choice was reruns of the entire season of the last Canadian NHL champs. Ugh. The only thing more boring than watching hockey would be watching NASCAR.
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