The Firebirds: How bush flying won its wings (Rare, 1974)

The first bush pilots were men who had used their wings to fight the German Army. But in Ontario, the enemy was fire … forest fire that had killed as many as 224 people in one day, destroyed 7 towns and burned 2000 square miles of wilderness. Author Bruce West describes the battle which the firebirds have fought ever since.

Here is a true story of ingenuity, guts and gasoline … bush pilots and the men who have kept them in the air since the turbulent beginning of bush flying, the creation of the Ontario Provincial Air Service in 1924. They were characters too … like the first director who always parked his 16-cylinder Cadillac roadster in front of the Legislative building, rewarded competence, rejected complaints and accepted resignations in a hell of a hurry. And there was an air engineer Bill Hill whose Junkers aircraft nosedived into the ice, shattering its propeller, a thousand miles from civilization. Bill whittled a new propeller from oaken dogsled runners and-flew the Junkers home !

Back around 1924, when school boys were supposed to be skipping classes to carry water to the elephants of a visiting circus, Bruce West was sneakily taking an occasional day off from learning to carry pails of gasoline for an HS2L flying boat temporarily based, during a mapping operation, at his home town of Huntsville, Ontario.

Over the years since then, he has held an abiding love for flying. He made his first solo flight in a de Havilland Moth at the Toronto Flying Club in 1937 and still carries a private pilot’s licence. His newspaper career, as a reporter and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, has taken him all over Canada, from coast to coast and into the arctic, as well as to various parts in Europe, Africa and South America. His hobbies, apart from flying, are hunting fishing, and amateur radio, for which he holds a Class  A operators licence. He is the author of four previous books.