Roots of History
The Gazette is digging into a different part of Sturgeon County’s history each month this year to commemorate the county’s centennial. Do you have a topic you want covered? Email [email protected] with your suggestions.
Bill Buckham can remember being four years old watching Lysander fighter planes zoom overhead with his brother in Vancouver.
“The aircraft was so low my brother and I were using sticks to see if we could knock it down,” recalled the 79-year-old retired brigadier general. They missed by a mile, but the guy in the back seat did wave back.
Buckham said he grew up spending his Sundays hanging off the fence at the local airport with his dad watching the planes take flight. Years later, he’d be supervising hundreds of planes and pilots as commander of the Namao airbase in Sturgeon County.
Buckham, who now lives in St. Albert, was one of the thousands of Sturgeon County-area residents at Villeneuve Airport this month for the Edmonton Airshow – the spiritual successor to the airshow he used to supervise at Namao.
Sturgeon County’s aviation history dates back almost a century, and continues today at Villeneuve. In this month’s Roots of History, the Gazette soars through the story of flight in Sturgeon.
First flights
Airplanes were exceedingly rare in Sturgeon back in 1918.Historian Tony Cashman said the first flight anywhere in Alberta only happened some nine years before in northwest Edmonton when inventor Reg Hunt showed off his homemade plane for a few friends. The first public flight wasn't until April 28, 1911, when some 1,800 people witnessed the Curtiss Pusher biplane soar at the Edmonton Exhibition Grounds. Said plane was steered using a wheel and a rocking chair – the pilot literally flew by the seat of his pants.
Legendary pilot Wop May flew a biplane out of a farmer’s field near where St. Albert Trail and the Yellowhead meet today, and it would have been one of the only ones in the Edmonton-area skies back in 1919, Cashman said. May offered joyrides on the plane, and also used it to deliver cargo, pull stunts, and (in September 1919) help catch a killer. On Feb. 9, 1921, as part of an attempt at the first flight to northern Canada, May took one of his planes to Big Lake to test the use of skis as landing gear.
Sturgeon County was a flyover zone for much of the next 20 years, with most flights taking off and landing at what would later be called the Edmonton City Centre Airport.
Enter Namao
It was the Americans and the Second World War that really put the county on the map when it came to aviation.The Americans shipped about 8,000 planes through Canada during the war to reinforce its Russian and European allies, Cashman said. The traffic was too much for City Centre, so the Americans built a second airstrip near Namao around 1942.
Royal Canadian Air Force historian Maj. Bill March said the skies over Sturgeon would have been abuzz with hundreds of planes taking off and landing at Namao airbase every week, with everything from agile P-39 fighters to lumbering B-25 bombers blackening the skies.
The Americans handed Namao airbase off to Canada following the war, but the RCAF didn’t do much with it until 1955 when it moved its Blatchford Field operations there, March said.
Buckham said one of the first things Canada did with the RCAF Station Namao was to extend its runway to 14,200 feet so the Americans could land their massive KC-97 Stratofreighters on it, making it the longest runway in the British Commonwealth and (later) a backup landing strip for the space shuttle.
Namao airbase employed some 2,200 pilots and civilians in the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom lived in Sturgeon, Buckham said. Local farmers would have seen Voodoo interceptors, Chinook heavy helicopters, and Hercules transports taking off and landing at all hours, as well as paratroopers leaping out of airplanes. (The cows didn’t seem to mind the noise, noted Peter Francis, a retired lieutenant colonel with 435 Squadron who flew for many years out of Namao.) Nations from around the world also sent their planes to the air base for cold-weather testing.
In addition to their Christmas open house, Francis said Namao airbase also held a biannual airshow that regularly drew some 100,000 guests.
Buckham said Namao’s airshow tended to have more formation flying than the one now held at Villeneuve, as well as more fire and explosions – sometimes more than they planned.
One common move at the airshow involved flying a Hercules low to the ground, kicking a cargo crate out the back, and then firing rocket bottles to climb super-fast, Francis said.
“One of our more senior pilots – I won’t mention any names – always liked to be right down where his wheels were almost on the grass,” Francis said.
“When he lit the bottles, he set the infield on fire!”
Namao airbase was no stranger to fatal accidents over the years, said Buckham. One of the worst was on March 29, 1985, when two Hercules transports collided in mid-air, killing all 10 on board.
“When you train for reality, there’s a risk involved,” Buckham said.
“There’s a price to be paid, whether in peacetime or wartime.”
Civilians taxi in
While civilian planes have criss-crossed Sturgeon throughout the last century, they didn’t have an airport at which to land there until 1969, which was when Terry Harrold and Peter Kurluk built the St. Albert Airport (so named because St. Albert was the closest community).Brian Harrold, Terry’s son, said Terry and Kurluk ran a water-bomber company in the 1960s that initially operated out of the City Centre Airport.
“It was too expensive (to park there), so they decided they’d build their own airport and park the airplanes out there,” Harrold said.
Terry and Kurluk bought about 190 acres of cheap, flat land just northwest of St. Albert and started digging, said Harrold. They hauled an old Second World War barracks up from Lamont and dug a 3,000-foot-long ditch to get clay for the gravel runway. Later, they filled that ditch with water so to make it a landing strip for floatplanes. By 1973, the airport was fully licensed.
Harrold said the airport was pretty quiet in the early days apart from his father’s water bombers and pilots who liked the place’s cheap rates. Still, it slowly drew other businesses and hobbyists, and housed some 100 planes by the late 1970s. Kurluk would not live to see this, as he died in a plane crash in the early 1970s.
One of the most unusual planes at the airport was the Second World War Lancaster bomber Terry used for firefighting. By 1974, it was believed to be the last Lancaster in the world still in active use, the Gazette archives report. That fact caught the eye of Sir William Roberts, who bought the plane and flew it to Britain for his collection.
Like Namao, Villeneuve Airport came about due to congestion at the City Centre airport, said Abe Silverman, a longtime tenant at the airport. In this case, it was the federal government that wanted a new airport to handle City Centre’s training aircraft.
The $6-million facility officially opened on Oct. 28, 1976, with a spectacular stunt, the Gazette archives report.
After about 100 guests had sat through the usual speeches from politicians, 14 aircraft suddenly appeared in the east. Flying in tight formation and led by a vintage yellow Fleet Finch biplane, the squadron lined themselves up with the 3,500-foot runway, flashed on their headlights, and charged right at two men in white overalls who were standing in the middle of the runway, gritting their teeth.
At the last moment, the Finch’s pilot pulled back on the stick just enough to clear the two men and slice through the ribbon they held between them on two poles, the Gazette reports. As the pilot waved in triumph, the remaining planes roared past.
Silverman said Villeneuve did not initially have a control tower – that turned up in 1982 – and initially had just a handful of planes and hangars. Still, “it was a busy, busy airport,” with more than 100,000 takeoffs and landings a year.
The turbulent future
The St. Albert Airport went bankrupt around 1984 after Terrence’s business partner ran off with all the money, Harrold said. The family moved up to Fort Smith, where they now run Northwestern Air Lease Ltd.The airport carried on under a new owner but never saw more than a handful of planes a week, said Don Stubbs, who has run Delta Helicopters there since 1986. Around 2010, the owners closed the airport and remade it into the ProNorth Industrial Park.
“It kind of died a natural death,” Stubbs said of the airport.
The federal government decided to close Namao airbase in the early 1990s in order to save money. Francis said the decision came as a shock to him, as his squadron had been based there since 1944.
“It was kind of a tragedy for me to see the air force leaving Namao. They had such a proud history there.”
The army took over Namao airbase in 1994 and renamed it CFB Edmonton.
Villeneuve Airport nearly folded in the 1990s as it was losing some $300,000 a year, Silverman said. He and other airport tenants lobbied the Edmonton Regional Airport Authority to take the place over in 2000.
The runways of the St. Albert and Namao airports still exist today, and aviators still fly out of both – Stubbs runs a heliport at ProNorth, and 408 Tactical Helicopter Squadron flies out of CFB Edmonton.
Villeneuve, in contrast, has seen tremendous growth since the closure of City Centre, Silverman said. With better water and infrastructure, he predicted that it could become a huge economic driver for the county.
Villeneuve has also played host to the Edmonton Airshow these last three years, allowing Sturgeon residents to see many planes of the past take flight. Buckham said it’s important that people see those old birds fly in order to inspire a new generation of pilots.
“You’re seeing aviation in its purest form.”
