Author: Peter Corley-Smith. Published by Sono Nis Press, Victoria, BC., 1989, 1st Edition. Printed in Canada by Morriss Printing, Victoria, BC. Almost New Condition SOFTCOVER Book, with light handling, slight age-yellowing. Clean inside, tight spine. Size: 8 x 9 inch, 242 pages including index.
BARNSTORMING TO BUSH FLYING 1910-1930, by Peter Corley-Smith, illustrates not only the accomplishments of British Columbia's pioneer flying crews, but how they achieved them.
From the earliest days, when American pilots were making headlines with their exhibition flights over the flatlands of Minoru race tyack and Hastings Par, Vancouver's Billy Start not only matched their exploits but went one better by flying among the mountains in Armstrong in 1912.
There were to be many more firsts in British Columbia. For some time, barnstorming--finding farmers' fields from which to put on aerobatic displays and offer the thrill of a first flight to spectators--became the only commercial outlet for these crews. Then, the great Canadian era of bush flying was launched in the early 1920s, not by private enterprise, but by the Air Board-RCAF crews based at Jericho Beach, on Vancouver's English Bay. These quasi-military crews began to fly fisheries patrols, forestry patrols, to chase drug smugglers, move surveyors to mountain lakes and spray forests with insecticide. By the mid 1920s, commercial companies began toke over, and the country, which had always been so difficult to travel through because of its mountain barriers, was opened up in a way it never had been before.
ISBN: 9780550390201
GC&C Stock #4693
