Explorer

Allow me to offer you a big safe aerospace salute, my reading friend. I would like to talk (type?) to you about an engine, and what an engine! In 1956, realising very well that the heyday of the piston engine had passed, the American parent company of Canadian Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company Limited of Longueuil, Québec, the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division of the American aeronautical giant United Aircraft Corporation, gave it a mandate to develop jet engines of limited power. Shortly

An important piece of Canada’s marine transportation history has set sail for a new home in the Ingenium Collections Conservation Centre.

Oyez, oyez, let it be said everywhere on this Earth that the subject of our blog / bulletin / thingee for this week does not touch upon aviation or space. Yours truly wanted to broaden your horizons, my reading friend. The photograph with which I kickoff said subject comes from The Gazette, a daily newspaper from Montréal, Québec, that I do not consult very often. It comes, say I, from the 18 July 1959, sorry, 1969, issue. The legend of said photograph read as follows:

Greetings, he who has spent a great deal of time over a keyboard salutes you. While I realise that spring is in the air, up here, did you stop for a moment to think about the people currently living in Antarctica, for whom the month of May is a harbinger of winter? And yes, my reading friend, as the caption of the photo above, found in the May 1939 of the Canadian aviation monthly Canadian Aviation, states all too clearly, our topic of the week has to do with the land at the bottom of the world

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