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December 14, 2018 9:33 pm

Rare WWII Hawker Hurricane plane restoration almost complete

2018-web-head-shots-kent-morrison1.jpg?q By Kent Morrison Anchor  Global News
News: Restoration almost ready on rare WWII Hawker Hurricane in Wetaskiwinx  link to story and video: https://globalnews.ca/news/4765192/hawker-hurricane-wwii-plane-restoration-alberta/
 

WATCH ABOVE: A rare World War II fighter plane is being restored in Wetaskiwin and it's almost ready for the public. As Kent Morrison explains, the Hawker Hurricane has taken years to re-build and once caused a battle between allies.

 

Passion isn’t something often captured in words. Sometimes you can see it — sometimes you can’t. But you can always feel it. Feel it in yourself, or feel it in someone else.

Inside a hangar in Wetaskiwin, Alta., passion is everywhere.

I actually promised not to reveal exactly where this particular hangar is.

“We wouldn’t get any work done,” I was told. Passion is contagious, after all.

For more than five years, Greg Davis has been slowly and meticulously re-building a rare WWII aircraft called the Hawker Hurricane.

 
 
 
 
 
Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018"> Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Kent Morrison, Global News

A process that began with what he calls “a pile of boxes on the floor.”

Pictures of the Hurricane are pinned on the wall. Diagrams and magazines litter tables. He has a Hurricane manual and a number of textbooks.

He re-assembled the plane using the pieces he was given. Most everything else he built himself. Figuring out what paint to use took a year and a half.

“Trying to find out exactly what shade of green is appropriate for this airplane is almost impossible,” says Richard De Boer. He’s the president of the Calgary Mosquito Aircraft Society. He has a huge diagram of the plane rolled out in front of him. A fellow aircraft aficionado and model builder drew up the diagrams.

READ MORE: Shearwater Aviation Museum unveils Hawker Hurricane aircraft replica

Few have actually seen what Davis has been working on, but de Boer has been here a lot.

“You know, every few months to check on the progress, to help out with parts, to source materials and plans and information has been my life for quite a number of years and I love that part of the process,” says de Boer.

You see, he’s the money side of this operation and he knows just about everything there is to know about the Hawker Hurricane.

“It was a few 100 guys in the Royal Air Force flying Hurricanes and Spitfires that beat the German invasion back and prevented them from taking over the UK and that’s where the Hurricane really made its name,” says de Boer.

 
 
 
 
 
 
<img class="story-img" src="https://shawglobalnews.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/IMG_9897.jpg?quality=70&strip=all&w=512" alt="Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018"> Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Kent Morrison, Global News

The few allowed in the room agree that though the Spitfire gets most of the credit for famous WWII air battles — it’s the Hurricane that is the hero.

“The reality is, the Hawker Hurricane shot down more German airplanes than all other allied aircraft types combined,” says de Boer.

The Hawker Hurricane was also used in the Second World War to defend Canada’s Atlantic sea approaches.

READ MORE: Montreal veteran gets 70-year-old wish by flying in B-25 bomber

According to de Boer, about 14,500 Hurricanes were built for WWII. Around 1,400 were made in Canada. The one being re-built inside this hangar guarded Canada’s west coast in the 1940s.

Following the war, it was sold to a farmer in Gravelbourg, Sask. In 1963, it was purchased by the Air Museum of Canada, which intended to build an aviation museum in Calgary. A few years later, the museum idea disappeared and the plane eventually ended up property of the city of Calgary.

“It literally sat disassembled in in boxes, in storage from 1963 onward,” says de Boer.

READ MORE: Saskatoon man restoring vintage German fighter plane

About 10 years ago a wealthy collector from the UK approached the city about buying another vintage plane owned by Calgary, called a de Havilland Mosquito. The collector was willing to pay $1 million for the Mosquito and the Hurricane, with the intention of restoring the Hurricane and sending it back to Calgary.

de Boer suspects the restoration would have been done with cheaper parts, so the Calgary Mosquito Aircraft Society wanted to stop the sale of the planes.

“We went to the city as the owners and said, ‘look don’t do this deal, it’s a really bad idea,'” de Boer said.

It took years, but the Society convince the city to keep the planes. Eventually they worked out a deal. Calgary would pay $700,000 to have both planes restored and The Calgary Mosquito Aircraft Society would have to raise the another $700,000. It was done in less than two years.

“Anything it takes so that this airplane doesn’t leave Canada.”

 
 
 
 
 
Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018"> Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Hawker Hurricane airplane restored in Wetaskiwin, Alta. December 14, 2018

Kent Morrison, Global News

There are 62 Hurricanes left in the world, and just 17 of them fly. This one won’t take off, but it will come close — able to start up and taxi the runway. By the spring, it will be at The Hangar Flight Museum in Calgary.

READ MORE: I’ve seen things that humans shouldn’t see’: 99-year-old Calgary veteran shares WWII memories flying over Europe

“We can start it up and put it on the runway and let everyone enjoy it,” says Brian Desjardins from the museum.

“The completion will be the cherry on top of the ice cream on the top of the sundae,” says de Boer.

As for Davis, he won’t mind when the Hurricane is out of his hangar. Restoring airplanes is his passion, but it’s also his job. Once the Hurricane is gone, another passion will be waiting.

WATCH: Londoners enjoyed a flypast of fighter aircraft on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015, when four Supermarine Spitfires and two Hawker Hurricanes flew over the Westminster Abbey.

SpitfiresEngland_qtp_640x360_529254467548.jpg?w=670&quality=70&strip=all

 

© 2018 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

 
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And another project is on the go in Yellowknife.

Yellowknifer rebuilding plane that dropped bombs 75 years ago

Mikey McBryan, the general manager for Buffalo Airways, bought the shell of the DC-3 aircraft on eBay.

DC-3 aircraft will be flight-ready for 75th anniversary of WW II's D-Day

CBC News · Posted: Dec 15, 2018 7:00 AM CT | Last Updated: an hour ago
 
mikey-mcbryan.jpg
Mikey McBryan, general manager of N.W.T.'s Buffalo Airways, bought the aircraft on eBay. (CBC)
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A gutted, vandalized plane sitting at an airport in Montreal is getting new life from a Yellowknifer.

Mikey McBryan, the general manager for Buffalo Airways, bought the shell of the DC-3 aircraft on eBay. McBryan plans on making it flight-ready for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which was June 6, 1944.

"I've been doing D-Day stuff with DC-3s for the last 10 years," said McBryan. "I never knew the DC-3s dropped bombs on D-Day."

The information can be found in the plane's logbook, according to McBryan.

dc-3-plane-in-montreal.jpegMcBryan said on D-Day, thousands of these planes flew over the English Channel in the invasion to drop paratroopers over Normandy. (Jason Howe)

McBryan wrote in a social media post that the logbook says the plane hasn't flown in almost 30 years, and that it had once dropped a dozen 20-pound bombs.

The plane is in pretty rough shape. There are no engines on it, the flight controls have rotted off, and the inside has been stripped by "treasure hunters," he said.

But Buffalo Airways has many of the parts needed to put the plane back together. The company's flagship aircraft are the Second World War-era DC-3s and DC-4s it uses for passenger and cargo flights. Buffalo and McBryan were featured on the former History Channel show Ice Pilots NWT.

dc-3-plane-in-montreal.jpeg
The airplane is in pretty rough shape, said McBryan. There are no engines on it, the flight controls have rotted off, and the inside has been stripped by 'treasure hunters.' (Benoit de Mulder)

He said they will need to travel to Montreal to work on the plane. He'd like to get the plane flying in six months, in time for the anniversary.

On D-Day, he said thousands of these planes flew over the English Channel in the invasion to drop paratroopers over Normandy.

"There's very few surviving aircraft of any type that did this job. So finding something with this much history is kind of like a needle in a haystack."

McBryan acknowledges that the plane has a dark background, as it dropped bombs on people.

"The more troubling thing is paratroopers that were in these airplanes had … only about a 20 to 30 per cent survival rate."

He said there was a good chance that many, or all, of the soldiers on the plane died.

"It's something to remember," said McBryan.

He doesn't know what the future of the plane will be after it is up and flying. But he said if anyone wants to follow along with the plane's progress, he will be updating his social media pages.

mikeymcbryanikey Well folks, I bought a “new” DC-3. This isn’t just any regular goonybird though. This bird flew in the D-Day invasion! Her log books (FZ668) even mention she dropped 12 twenty pound bombs as she flew to her drop site that morning. Making her a D-Day “Bomber”. She hasn’t flown in almost 30 years and guess what... we are going to try and fly her on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day where she sits in Montreal. This will be a huge undertaking as this aircraft has been stripped out over the past three decades. But luckily enough we know where is lots of DC-3 parts. After that we plan to fly her to Oshkosh Airventure 2019 so you guys can see her in person.
Aircraft History: this aircraft was built in January 1944 by Douglas Aircraft Company at their plant in Oklahoma City. S/N 12253, C-47A-5-DK, tail number 42-92451. The RAF registration FZ668 was subsequently assigned to her when she was based in Europe. The Night before D-Day on June 5th 1944, FZ668, this Dakota, took off at 23:20 as one of a fleet of 108 RAF C-47s whose mission was to neutralize the German forces behind the beaches to be used for the landings. Her crew was F/O Nicholl, F/O Dale, F / s Marsden and Sgt Caves.

On board FZ668, bearing the chalk number 253 for this operation, twelve 20-pound bombs, "a small surprise for the troops defending the coast in France" as it was referred to in the operation log of the squadron, were dropped when crossing the French coast. Seventeen paratroopers jumped at around 00:50 on DZ "K" located near Toufreville that morning on D-Day. 
Their objective was to destroy the bridges over the Dive River. The paratroopers were split into two groups and met strong German resistance. The bridges were destroyed by engineers and the battle for the liberation of Europe began. FZ668 landed safely back at Blakehill Farm at 3:10. On top of D-Day this Aircraft also flew 5 mission during the operation Market-Garden.

After the war, she was purchased by Canadair, converted as DC-3C and flew for Trans-Canada Airlines as CF-TER
During the 70's she was acquired by Transport Canada who flew her until the early 90'S as CF-DTD.

Aircraft location: CYHU - St-Hubert Airport, Montreal, Canada
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