Brian Losito has sent us some photos from the TCA/Air Canada archives.

Here is the original photo of six stewardesses on the North Star tail CF-TFE fin #205 first appeared in "Between Ourselves" issued October 1949 and in NetLetter nr 1288 issue January 2014.

The names are from the left: Jean Thompson, Olga Zawaski, Vickie Stewart, Thelma Moore, Mona Gaugh and Margarite Renaud.

Robert Arnold has sent two more photos showing a Merlin engine overhaul at Winnipeg, circa 1957.

Any help from your readers with staff identification would be greatly appreciated. I feel the second photo might have been staged for some reason.

Robert Arnold

Robert Arnold has sent us three more photos from his collection -

I included three photos which I came across in the collection that could use some identifying. To me it appears the chaps are working in the fuel management and testing department.

Who are these young fellows and what are they actually doing. My guess is fuel sampling. Of course, any help from you fine readers is always gratefully appreciated.

1979 April -

First Air timetable from Doug Ewen Jr. collection.

Found in the "Horizons" magazine issue January 1980

The heading was "London lads find pilgrim airlift a hot operation". The scene was unusual. The ice blue tail of a Nordair DC-8 stood out against a desert background. The ramp crew was wearing Air Canada coveralls. The accents were decidedly British. The passengers were dressed in white and each carried a kettle of water. These odd elements were cemented together by a contract signed in Montreal with Libyan Arab Airlines. All Muslims are expected to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca once in a lifetime.

London based employees Roy Novell; Certificated Aircraft Technician and Reg Cosier; Mechanic; recalled working the Saudi Arabian end of the operation while Keith Merry; Certificated Aircraft Technician, and Mechanics Bill Cameron, and Steve Girling recollected their three-week stint in Tripoli. They were part of the company crew that kept two Nordair DC-8's flying around the clock to give 15,000 pilgrims a round-trip to Mecca.

Air Canada had two roles to play in the annual pilgrimage. Even as the London workforce was deployed to Africa as a support team, the Maintenance base at Dorval was hard at work. The two DC-8's used on the service had to be in the best condition possible for the round-the-clock ten-hour round trips. And, of course, there had to be some identification on the airplane. The paint job was done in Montreal.

The Arabic script looked exotic and intriguing. ''What does it say," Reg asked when he first arrived. "God is great'?" "No,'' he was told, it was "Libyan Arab Airlines".

In this photo the London UK employees Roy Novell, Reg Cosier, Keith Merry, Bill Cameron and Steve Girling show off their Nordair T-shirts.

When Robbie Robinson, took early retirement he came across this little bit of nostalgia which he wanted to pass along.

Pictured are participants of the Management Development Course held at the Laurentine Inn at Ste. Agathe Des Monts, Quebec in 1954.

Back row, from the left: Robbie Roblnson. AI Fowlie. Andy Lirette, Jock White, Ed Moore, Oscar Cormier and Harry Simper.

Front row, from the left: Dick Green, Ed Allerdice, Bob Robbins, Jack Mason, Tom Miller Art Russell, Jim Hearns and Bob Cowan (course leader).

Found in the "Between Ourselves" magazine issued January 1964

A number of Winnipeg employees attended a session to say farewell to Norm Donnelly, former Western Region Operations Manager, and "Hello" to his successor, Kelly Edmison.

The group included, from the left: Ken Affleck, Manager, Pension & Welfare Plans; Norm Donnelly; Len Sampson, District Sales Manager; Dick Williams, Flight Dispatch Manager; Lorne Kyle, CNR and Air Canada Claims Agent; Al Imrie, Simulated Flight Training Supervisor and Kelly Edmison, Western Regional Operations Manager.

The Calgary Millwright shop had a new building in 1964, here are a group of the employees.

From the "Rampage" magazine issue dated May 1989.

Modelling the latest in haute couture ramp fashions are:
Jan (the kid) Duncan, Cheryl Chung, Dave Spalding and Craig Adams.

July 1959

Nordair Timetable from the private collection of Bjorn Larsson.

CPA's DC-8 fin 602 (Empress of Montreal) established a new non-stop record from Montreal to Rome on July 29th 1964 making the 4,107 mile flight in six hours 35 minutes. This eclipsed the record set in September 1962 by 13 minutes.

The crew consisted of Captain Ted Allan, First Officer G.M.Richardson, Second Officer Jim McInnis, Navigator Stan Raczlowski, Purser J.M Ory, Steward Leo Cahenzli and stewardesses K.D.Marti, M.Lefebre and Angela Herandez.

Receiving 10-year service pins were H.Yoshida, chief accountant Tokyo, and Miss June Soto, passenger agent, Tokyo.

Making the presentations were Japan Sales Manager Bob Connor, left and Far East regional manager, Ed Ogden, right.

Found in the "CPA Newsletter" magazine Issue dated June 1964

Busy Lines were the focus for these training telephones at the Vancouver training department when this Orient and Latin group spent a week on their customer service course. This was second of three groups who received training.

Front from left: Becha Jiminez, Lima CTO; Monica Sievers, Santiago CTO and Mrs. Winnie Yue, Hong Kong CTO.

Rear: Yoichiro Kuhara, Tokyo CTO; Francisco Vargas, Mexico Sales Representative; Alfredo Vega, Mexico Sales Representative; Salvador Ramos, Mexico CTO-Traffic and Melquiades Velasco.

Service Pins were presented in 1964 in Mexico by Jack McBride (left),  Manager CPA de Mexico, to Mexico City Assistant Traffic Supervisor Julio Henriquez Ripoll, second from right, (5 years) and lfonso Bravo Lopez (10 years). Looking on at right was Oscar Rodriquez, who had recently been appointed as Sales Administrator.

Norman Hogwood, from New Zealand, sent us this information.

I’m reading a book called “One Summer – America 1927” by Bill Bryson.

In it, Lindbergh has flown to Paris, Byrd has crash-landed on the beach in Normandy so the papers are full of aviation stories.

He says they’re silent on the 12th of July, 1927 except for one small item about an event in Canada the day before when a survey plane took off from an airfield near Lake Manitoba. It carried a pilot, a photographer, and a surveyor. The weather was fine. Witnesses reckoned it climbed to about 2000 ft in a normal manner but when it emerged from a cloud bank they saw the occupants fall out, one at a time, and plunge to their deaths.  According to Bryson the events surrounding that incident are largely unknown. A very strange happening and I wonder if you or any of your friends have the answer to the riddle.

We, at the NetLetter, contacted, Betty Draper, one of our readers, who sent us this information -
I found this for you I think it is the one you are looking for. I didn't find it in the Winnipeg paper, that's odd as it happened in Manitoba, they always have the news from the 1800s. I found it in the New York Times, and this was the information-

Three Fall Our of Plane 1,000 Feet in Air;
Canadian surveyors Die in Strange Accident.
Winnipeg, Canada, July 11, 1927 (AP) -

Three members of a Manitoba aerial photographic survey party were killed near Fairford, Manitoba, this afternoon when in some unexplained manner they fell from their machine a distance of about 1,000 feet. The dead were Flight Officer W.C.Weaver of Melfort, Saskatchewan, pilot in charge; A.T.Hardley, photographic mechanic, of Locre, Manitoba; F.H. Wrong, Surveyor of Topographical Survey Branch, Ottawa.

Eyewitnesses say the plane entered a cloudbank. Lost to view for several minutes, it later was observed following an erratic course through the clouds. The watchers were suddenly startled to see three men come hurtling through the air and the machine follow in a shallow nose dive to earth.

The body of Flight Officer Weaver was recovered near the shore of Lake Manitoba, at Hilbere. The bodies of the others were also recovered.

Norman had also copied his request to Geoff Hayes, and this was his reply -
My good friend Andy Triolaire, (ex Director of Safety, Canadian Airlines) has attached a (possible) report of this mysterious event.

This was the pertinent paragraph -
Two of the eight Vickers Viking Mk. IV's were the only aircraft made at Vickers in Britain rather than the Canadian Vickers company. G-CYET, pictured, suffered a Category A accident on 11 July 1927. The accident involved the failure of the hull in the air and a structural test on G-CYEU at Winnipeg practically duplicated this failure leading to a local modification on the remainder of the fleet to strengthen the hull.

Following up on the article by Jean-Rene Cadorel regarding Captain Gordon Jones 
in NetLetter nr 1335, Pete Wakefield sends this comment -

Wow, the remarkable story of Captain Gordon Jones.
I've been with AC over 30yrs and was not aware of his heroics in this incident. I did some brief research and learned there were actually 29 people aboard the DC-8 that night. No doubt 28 of them eternally grateful to this man and his remarkable piloting skills. His obit is a testament to his life. Seems our hero was a modest man, and humble in nature.
A great legacy ... remarkable indeed.

Pete Wakefield

Good omens?
In a week when Britain’s' top flying superstitions were revealed - the our most popular being touching the aircraft before take-off, taking a good luck charm on board, refusing to sit in certain seat numbers and saying prayers or carrying a religious charm, according to www.sunshine.co.uk - we recon these aircraft registrations, snapped at the Bahrain air show, would be sure to instill white-knuckle travelers with plenty of confidence or concern, respectively.

For some reason D-OWN, D-OOM and D-EATH didn't prove too popular.
(source Flight magazine Feb 2/16)

Diane and David Bellemy sent us this url to www.RoadWarriorVoices.com

This is what is was like to fly in the 1940s from which we extracted the following -
A good night’s sleep. Every single seat — I repeat — every single seat aboard Boeing’s 1940s stalwart Stratocruiser could fully recline and form a sleeping berth. Fully horizontal sleeping wasn’t just an ultra-luxury ticket amenity in the 1940s. It was standard. Cabins, from the rear of the plane all the way up to the first class seats up front, were constructed to allow passengers the utmost comfort. Airlines also began providing their own pillows and blankets to passengers, along with chewing gum, toothbrushes, razors and sewing kits.

Didn’t we almost have it all?