Imagine how excited you would be to find a key piece of your family history amidst formal archival records. That’s exactly what happened to Sian Jones, who works as an archives clerk for Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation; an archivist found herself in the archives! In 2012, Canadian Pacific transferred archives from its steamship subsidiary to the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Archives clerk Sian Jones has worked on the collection, amidst other work assignments, since

Peace and long life, my reading friend. Yours truly dares to hope that all is well in your little corner of the Milky Way. As you have undoubtedly guessed, this week I intend to perorate on a hovercraft / air cushion vehicle, a means of transport for which I feel a certain fondness. The photograph that illustrates my point comes from a weekly published between 1961 and 1972, Vallée de la Petite nation of Buckingham, then Saint-André-Avelin, Québec. Said photo was in the 30 January 1969 issue of

Hello there, my reading friend, and welcome to the first 2019 issue of our blog / bulletin / thingee on the wonderful world of aviation and space, and… What’s this? You do not think that an air cushion caravan fits the mandate of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum of Ottawa, Ontario? I respectfully beg to differ. This unlikely hybrid did lift off the ground, did it not? Besides, you can’t tell me that you are not the least bit intrigued by the image yours truly dredged up from the January 1969

Zdrasvstvuyti / hello, my reading friend. May yours truly begin this peroration by apologising profusely for the quality of the illustration with which I have the pleasure of introducing this issue of our blog / bulletin / thingee? The story behind it more than compensates for its fuzziness. I came across it while perusing a now defunct weekly newspaper from Montréal, Québec, Le Petit Journal . The title of the article was indeed intriguing. It’s not every day one comes across a retired Royal

Bonjour, ami(e) lectrice ou lecteur et… Sorry, wrong language. Greetings, my reading friend. I hope you’re not wearing your best clothes because today’s topic is a somewhat yucky one. Do you remember the April 2018 issues of our blog / bulletin / thingee dedicated to snow removal? No? Yes? Never mind, for there are no snow cones on the menu today. Think mud pies. Huge mud pies actually. Back in 1946-47, some brilliant minds in the United Kingdom began to look at non aeronautical applications of

Welcome and bienvenue, my reading friend. Are you ready to hear about one of the crucial aspects of the history of technology? Yes? Welcome, then, to the world of failure. You seem surprised. Don’t you know that most aircraft designs of the 20th and 21st centuries have been failures? Not every aircraft design was actually put to the test and a great many that were tested were never put in production. Worse still, many operational aircraft did not prove successful, for a variety of reasons. So,

Hi there, my reading friend. Yours truly is pleased to welcome you. We have so much to say (type?) today on the Cushioncraft CC7 hovercraft. And yes, there will be plenty of content from Québec and Canada. Our story began in May 1969, in Montréal, Québec, in the city’s busy harbour to be more precise, when the partly disassembled prototype of the CC7 was unshipped, put on the trailer of an 18 wheel truck and sent to a Department of Transport base at Sorel, Québec. A division of the Saint

You’re back, my reading friend. Has a week passed since our last interaction? Astonishing. Time does indeed fly. Do you remember the topic at hand? Good. Let us continue. Rightly or wrongly, the management of Cushioncraft Limited chose to fully test the CC7 before launching a wide scale effort to sell it. Foreign buyers would be the main target. This approach was based at least in part on feedback from Hovertravel Limited, the first hovercraft transport company in the world and one in which

If truth be told, there is indeed more to life than airplanes. A list of items covered in this non aeronautical category would be very long. Any list worthy of the name should, however, include Belgian style beer, dinosaurs and pterosaurs (Private joke. Hi there, Number One.), as well as air cushion vehicles. In other words, hovercrafts. What is a hovercraft, you ask? The question in itself is painful, my reading friend. It shows how little people remember a go-anywhere machine that promised to

Yours truly was so fascinated by the story of the Air Cushion Landing System that I decided to dig further still. Thus, let it be known throughout the land that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bell Aerosystems Company, a subsidiary of Bell Aerospace Corporation later known as the Bell Aerospace Company Division of Textron Incorporated, was the most experienced manufacturer of air cushion vehicles / hovercrafts in North America. The American company, for example, held the license for the