My father took me to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton this afternoon. He volunteers there now that he’s not flying, and he makes a terrific tour guide: he paced everything well and gave me a wonderful range of information on each craft. There are over forty planes in the collection, housed in a wonderful new delta-shaped hangar, and every single one of them flies (except for the two wired up, and the fiberglass reconstructed craft that was destroyed in the fire that burned down the original hangar).

There are several bright yellow trainers (my favourites!) spanning several years: Finches, Moths, Harvards; there are bombers, recon craft and others. Every once in a while Dad would connect the craft to something I would recognise from his own history: “This is the one I flew in Portage-La-Prairie; this is the one I would fly up from Summerside to see your mother in Montreal.” I had no idea he had trained on so many warplanes.

The trip was fascinating, but unfortunately what I’ll remember the most is the Lancaster. The Lancaster is one of the Heritage Museum’s pride and joys; fully restored, it flies for display several times each year, and for a modest fee of $1000 (gulp!) will take passengers for a half-hour ride. It’s a beautiful aircraft. It was on the tarmac today along with four or five trainers doing passenger tours, as well as an F-5, a DC-3 and a couple of others odds and ends. We paused by the open hangar door to watch it taxi in, guided by the ground crew, and everything seemed just fine right up until a surreal moment where everyone watched without comprehending what was truly happening. Rather than completing the slow and graceful arc into the open area to taxi to a stop, the Lancaster came too close to the parked DC-3, and inexorably, like a bad dream, the right-most prop hacked into the left wing of the DC-3.

We stood in the hangar door and stared. Planes don’t do that. The surreal moment hung there as two gigantic aircraft attempted to occupy the same place. Then the props cut out on the Lancaster and it stopped dead, ground crews were running out, and the noise that I hadn’t truly heard over the sound of the engines ceased. There was debris on the runway, and a sense of numb horror in the air.

My father had spent the last hour or so detailing the expense and effort that goes into restoring these aircraft, and I had taken it all to heart. I admire any sort of dedicated restoration, and to keep an outdated piece of machinery in flying trim is a particularly impressive work. Many of the craft in the museum hangar have been salvaged from barns or fields, rusted and broken; some have been pieced together from three, five, six other craft. Apart from three paid mechanics and a cleaning staff, everyone involved in the Museum work is a volunteer, which means the pilots, the interpreters, and the restoration crews do it out of love for the aircraft and the history.

The horror I felt watching the Lancaster’s prop destroy the wing of the DC-3 was partially based on the knowledge of the expense incurred and the historic memorabilia damaged, partially on the despair of the men and women who had invested so many hours of maintenance and pride into the two craft, and partially on my empathy for the pilots, fighting a huge craft weighing several tons as it just didn’t make the turn, taking the responsibility for the result on their shoulders. The latter was heightened later on when while my father and I were having lunch, the co-pilot of the Lancaster came in with an accident report to fill out, and that disconnected air that someone dealing with shock displays. He was an old piloting friend of my father’s who sat with us as he filled in his report (although he said that it was impossible to reconstruct what had gone wrong), and we watched as the Lancaster was finally pushed back away from the DC-3 and examined. The damage to the Lancaster appears to be minimal; the DC-3, on the other hand, might lose the wing panel, which is removable thanks to a couple of hundred bolts. Depending on the extent of the damage, it will be either restored, or replaced if a panel can be found elsewhere.

The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum is one of those places I truly admire, making an attempt to preserve history for future generations. The memorabilia they house (crafts and gear, medals, uniforms, communications) is evidence of another time that wasn’t so long ago. In the past century, our rate of development has shot through the roof; more progress has been made in the last hundred years than in two to three centuries previous. We go so fast that we lose track of how we got here. When I tour places like this, I am simultaneously amazed at how much I know, and always dejected at how much I still have to learn. Which is why I admire people like my father, donating time to teach people about where they came from, sharing their knowledge.

The entire staff of the Museum deserve a tip of the hat for their work, past, present and future. I’ll be back again; and I know that after many long, expensive hours of reconstruction, maintenance, and finishing, I’ll see the DC-3 and the Lancaster fly again. Because that’s what they do; they bring the past back to life. And every one of them should be honoured for it.