Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum

A visit to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum really doesn’t count as much of a wander as it is only 8 km from home, but it is a pretty cool place to visit. Today was SkyFest, with various visiting aircraft to augment the usual impressive collection of planes, as part of the 50th Anniversary celebrations.

We got to see some of the planes close up, saw and heard some flying including the B-25 Mitchell and the CF-18, got to sit in a fighter jet and best of all, went on board two WWII planes.

We have experienced the Lancaster bomber fly overhead many times, over our house and at TiCat football games, which is pretty amazing in itself as there are only two left in the world that still fly, despite manufacturing over 7,000. The one here in Hamilton is the only Lancaster in the world that you can fly in as a passenger, but you need to book well in advance as the $3600 ticket price doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent as all flights in 2022 are already sold out. Today we got to go on board for a small donation and a long wait in the line-up as there were lots of people like ourselves thrilled to be in a Lancaster.

To get in we climbed a ladder through the escape hatch and crawled through to the cockpit where one of the pilots was waiting. There was little space on board, but they fly now with 4 passengers and 4 crew, and during the war would have had a crew of 7. Maneuvering around was a tight squeeze in spots, but they have installed seats for the passengers which are undoubtedly a big improvement over what the original design would have been. It was definitely to drop bombs efficiently and not for comfort.

The other plane we went on board was a Douglas C-47 Dakota, and this particular plane actually flew at Normandy on D-Day. We were standing in the plane looking at writing on the walls left by soldiers, including one whose daughter just flew over from England to see where her father had left his signature when he was wounded in WWII. There are still D hooks on the sides where they would have attached stretchers, piled 3 high. As a transport this plane had much more space than the Lancaster, so no contortions required to move around, but imagining what it would have been like to be loaded in there on stretchers.