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There's an untold story about aerial survey in our country.
High altitude photography, I think it was a Canadian
achievement in aviation.
Spartan Air Services was a Canadian aviation firm that was
created just after World War II.
The aerial survey of Canada is almost an unknown story
and yet it was so critical in the development of the country,
opening it up.
Everything we do now with our landscape relies on
aerial photography.
People in the aviation world would have seen Spartans go
through the airports and whatnot.
They would have seen it and said, well okay, that's a
Mosquito, because Spartan is doing aerial survey work.
I don't think, other than that, they would have any big memory.
Canada wanted to map the country so that it could be opened up
for development and resource extraction.
Anything you do, you need a map.
This was the first time that Canada had an accurate sense of
what it was, where it was, how big it was,
and what was up there.
The RCAF was doing all of the mapping in the north
with Lancasters.
They found it too expensive and also they weren't going to the
most northern places and the work the Spartans did there;
fantastic I think.
Spartan had gotten into the high level aerial survey business in
1950, using the P-38.
That had its limitation.
Spartan had been doing the photo mapping work with American built
P-38 Lightning airplanes and they had all kinds of problems
with the airplane.
Although it was a beautiful airplane to fly, it didn't
perform as expected at 35,000 feet.
In order to get the range, they had to put external fuel tanks
on the thing which added significantly to the weight and
to the drag, so it slowed the airplane down, it took longer to
get to altitude and couldn't hold the altitude as long.
One of the bigger problems too, was that in order to do photo
mapping, the airplane has to fly perfectly level.
Well, you put those fuel tanks on a P-38 Lightning and
suddenly it's flying nose high.
If you're trying to shoot straight down,
you've got a problem.
They had to dispense with the external fuel tanks which meant
the plane could only fly for a handful of hours and, of course,
when the weather was good, you need to get up to altitude and
fly as much as you possibly could.
It made a big difference if you could only fly for three hours
versus five and a half hours.
The engines were less reliable.
They were breaking down fairly frequently so Spartan discovered
that the Lightning was probably not the best airplane for the
job and that's when they said
'let's go out and find something better'.
They gave one of their key people a bag full of money and
said go to England and find us something.
They didn't tell them to go by Mosquitos, they simply said
"There's got to be something better. Go see what you can find
over in England."
Spartan chose one of the most revolutionary aircraft of World
War II; the fast, high-flying de Havilland Mosquito launched
Spartan into a new level of aerial mapping.
The long term ripple effect of the work that they did is
phenomenal and it reverberates right down to today.
There isn't a resource company in this country that doesn't owe
something to the work done by the people of Spartan
and by these very airplanes.