Political fire shoots down Airfest

Airfest, a major historical aircraft show hosted at the Alberta Aviation Museum, gets ready for take-off one last time and organizers are launching it in style.

Since 1989 Airfest has celebrated the past, present and future of aviation in Western Canada with special fly-ins of military, civilian, commercial and police aircraft. In its 12-year history it has become one of the Capital region’s major tourist draws, attracting as many as 20,000 visitors.

This year is no exception. On Sunday, anywhere from 40 to 60 military, commercial and experimental aircraft will fly in from distant ports. Some of the more prominent are the Discovery Air Hawk One F-86 Sabre and a Second World War training biplane called the Canada Boeing Stearman.

“This is where it all started,” says executive director Tom Hinderks, pointing to the 50 aircraft on display at the museum’s double hanger on Kingsway Road. The Alberta Aviation Museum has the third largest collection in Canada after the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa and the Reynolds-Alberta Museum in Wetaskiwin.

At first glance Hinderks, a pilot turned administrator, cuts an Indiana Jones figure, dressed in a bomber jacket and fedora. Bold and pragmatic in his approach to navigating the museum’s destiny, Hinderks is equally conscious and respectful of the aviation greats that set the bar for today’s pilots, legends such as Wop May, Russ Bannock and Peter Blatchford.

But even as Airfest’s excited anticipation builds, the latest round of politics surrounding the City Centre Airport land destined to become a family neighbourhood of 30,000 residents has cast a pall on the museum.

A casualty of Edmonton’s City Centre redevelopment master plan, the air museum’s future is in limbo and has been placed on hold for at least 18 months. It is jammed between a rock and a hard place.

Situated on several acres bordering the City Centre Airport, the museum has no room to expand, which it desperately needs to grow to full potential. When the airport closed the longest runway, about a mile in length, Airfest was unable to bring in the big aircraft that were a major fundraising draw.

With a main revenue stream cut off, organizers have had to make tough choices. “Rather than have Airfest die out, we decided to end it with a bang,” Hinderks explains.

Ironically, the museum’s hanger has been designated a historic site. It can’t be moved or torn down. And the puzzle is how the museum will fit into the redevelopment.

As a private, non-profit facility, the museum operates on a $600,000 annual budget. But in spite of the large role aviation has played in assisting businesses of every stripe get footholds throughout the province, there has been little corporate sponsorship. In particular Hinderks singles out the major oilsands producers that have profited from Alberta’s well-developed aviation routes. “During the airport debate no one wanted to get involved. Many felt we were closing and we’re not.”

To remain viable, the museum has developed a more extensive educational program than the Smithsonian with 30 provincially approved K-12 modules and a hands-on work experience program. This year the curriculum met the needs of about 6,000 students. “We had to turn away an equal number because we don’t have the physical capacity.”

And in a leap towards the future, the museum is developing flight simulation programs. The driving force behind the technological innovation is Dave Heathcote, director of education and technology.

For 29 years, the St. Albert resident and former pilot had been NAIT’s aviation program head for pilots and avionic engineers. Through the years, he not only developed a curriculum with national accreditation status but also built a heavy aircraft simulator.

A volunteer at the museum for several years before his NAIT retirement in 2007, Heathcote was immediately snapped up. One of his most exciting projects is a flight simulator wired into a retired cockpit of a Douglas DC-6. It is outfitted with nine life-size screens and 60 operational switches interfaced with a computer.

“In a simulator you can duplicate anything an aircraft can do. You save the training costs, it’s safer and the learning curve is smaller.” Heathcote explains. “These days commercial pilots spend more time flying simulators than actual aircraft.”

The flight simulator provides a variety of programs for any number of real-life stress situations including bombing exercises, fires, wind shear, instrument failure, errors in reading instruments and artificial horizons. There are even cross-country flights and a three-hour re-enactment of the Battle of Britain.

Heathcote is keenly aware costs for training pilots are fairly hefty. The fuel alone for light aircraft can run from $125 to $150 per hour. For large transport aircraft, fuel costs jump to about $4,500 per hour.

Many Canadian pilots graduate from training programs with less than 300 hours flying time — an expensive proposition without access to flight simulators. And Heathcote and Hinderks are marketing the newly developed simulator to an industry looking at ways to keep costs in line.

At Airfest, two Mustang cockpits have been set up with flight simulation packages the public can test. Once sitting in the cockpit, a pilot can fly up to 60 aircraft ranging from a First World War single-engine Sopwith Camel to a contemporary C-130 Hercules or a Griffon helicopter. “We even have a six-minute flight from Edmonton International to City Centre.”

There are many smart marketing terms to sell the Alberta Aviation Museum. But strip away the marketing gloss and quite simply there are more than 100 volunteers from restoration specialists and computer programmers to gift shop attendants and tour operators who put a lot of heart into what they do. It’s a neat place to visit and Hinderks said it best with, “It’s fun, it’s romantic, it’s exciting, it’s an adventure. There are heroes. There are scoundrels. It’s not a hologram. It’s not a theme ride. It’s the real thing.”