Flying schools
Air travel was still a new phenomenon in 1914 when the war began. At first, Canadians who wanted to join the war as pilots went to Britain to join the Royal Flying Corps or the Royal Naval Air Service.
More than 22,800 Canadians flew with these British flying services, and another 13,160 were part of the air crews. But Britain lacked the capacity to provide all the necessary aircraft and training, so private firms in Canada stepped up. The largest was the Curtiss Aeroplane Co. in Long Branch, contracted in the spring of 1915 to build Curtiss JN-3 airplanes for the British military. Curtiss also got approval to train pilots at the Long Branch Aerodrome, the first in Canada.
Even though lessons at Curtiss cost $400 for 400 minutes – a fortune at the time – there was a waiting list. There was no more glamorous way to serve in the war than as a pilot. Pilots played a crucial role in the war, not just for the aerial duels they are best remembered for now, but for surveying enemy positions and photographing battlefields from above.
Training sessions began at Long Branch on June 22, 1915, and the first two graduates, Toronto’s A. Strachan Ince and F. Homer Smith, completed the program on July 11.
But as the war continued, the military needed a more comprehensive approach to pilot training.
In 1917, the Royal Flying Corps introduced a Canadian pilot training program and set up six training fields in southern Ontario. Along with the Long Branch field, which had been taken over by the Imperial Munitions Board, pilots were trained at Leaside, Armour Heights, Beamsville, Desoronto and Camp Borden. There was also a School of Military Aeronautics established at the University of Toronto, and hundreds of air cadets lived in tents on the back campus (including William Faulkner, an American recruit). The new Canadian pilot training program enrolled 9,200 cadets. More than 2,500 graduates were sent overseas and others stayed on as instructors. Some 7,400 airplane mechanics also graduated from the program.
Flight training was risky for the inexperienced students: at least 129 cadets and 20 instructors died in accidents. The fatality rate in April 1917 was one death for every 200 hours of flight. But by October 1918 that dropped to one fatality for every 5,800 hours.
Canada did end up getting its own flying force, but not until the last months of the war. Still, nearly one in four pilots who flew British planes were Canadian, and 1,388 Canadians died in the British flying services.