If only soaring on the yellow wings of history came comfortably.
But if the more than 1,800 flyboys who learned their aircraft fundamentals in St. Catharines during the Second World War could take it, so could I, I thought. Still, for a guy whose only flight experiences have involved cozy jets, sailing hundreds of feet over Niagara Wednesday in a 1950s Harvard Mk. IV flight trainer made it pretty easy to see how far flight has come since the days of propellers and Spitfires.
The plane sported no padded couches, no armrests, no smooth ride — not even an in-flight movie or a flight attendant passing out packets of peanuts. Only a rumbling, nine-cylinder 600-horsepower engine and a metal hull separated me from the vast empty sky. I could even close the glass canopy, but only if I wanted to.
I shut it. No-brainer.
My flight came courtesy of the Yellow Wings project, steered by pilot Andrej Janik, vice-president of maintenance for host group Vintage Wings of Canada. They're flying from airport to airport, spreading the history of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a vast Canadian training line that churned out 200,000 pilots during the war.
As Yellow Wings team leader Dave Hadfield put it, the United States may have been the arsenal of democracy, but Canada was its aerodrome.
Buffeted by heavy winds, Janik and I took to the air from the runway at Niagara District Airport.
Through a maelstrom of thrills and nerves, it struck me as oddly sobering to be launching from runways still laid out much like they were in the days when the airport hosted No. 9 Elementary Flight Training School. They're still plotted in a triangle, Janik said, giving pilots a choice of runway in heavy winds.
Between the wind and a rain squall Janik steered us around, the ride was a little shaky in the Harvard's cramped quarters. In such a small craft, I could feel every twitch and shudder of the plane intimately. Even through the headphones clapped down around my ears, the drone of the propeller was constant as we coasted over the Welland Canal, buzzing like a big yellow bumblebee.
We passed another Yellow Wings plane, a Cornell trainer, before Janik began to turn us around for a loop over Lake Ontario. Suddenly, the horizon was diagonal and I was searching for anywhere to look but down at the ground or up at the blue sky that seemed to surround us like an ocean.
I settled on the view as we curved over the lake, then back toward the airport.
It's a view I'd never get from a jetliner — Niagara laid out like a chessboard of houses, vineyards, rolling fields and gleaming water. From above, I could see everything from trucks on the roads below to big freighters inching down the Welland Canal.
The view has changed a little since the 1940s. Probably a lot. Take the Garden City Skyway, hard to miss on my flight, yet unknown during the flight school's time. It was built in the early 1960s.
And yet in a way, it's still Niagara as thousands of teenaged pilots-to-be saw it: From the cramped, instrument-laden cockpits of their wide-winged little yellow perils.
Time flies, sure.
And yeah, maybe I won't be turning in my notepad for a pilot's licence.
But for all the shaking and turbulence, as we touched down I couldn't help but feel a bit awed by the experience.
Not to mention proud that the little white bag tucked away near my seat remained lonely and untouched.
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