No. 18 Elementary Flying Training School was the first tenant of the newly christened RCAF Station Boundary Bay, and it arrived with De Havilland Tiger Moths and civilian instructors - the school was sponsored by the Aero Club of B.C. and run as the Vancouver Air Training Co. Ltd. The aerodrome opened officially on 2 July 1941, part of the vast British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that turned Canada into the Allied world's classroom. Then the war arrived on the wrong ocean. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, planners decided the west coast was exposed, and Boundary Bay looked like the best place from which to defend Vancouver. No. 18 EFTS was disbanded on 25 May 1942 and its people and Tiger Moths went east to RCAF Station Caron. In their place came fighters: No. 133 Squadron with Hawker Hurricanes first, then No. 14 and No. 132 flying Curtiss Kittyhawks, rotating through the delta while the coast waited for an attack that never came.

On 1 April 1944 the station acquired a far stranger job. No. 5 Operational Training Unit stood up at Boundary Bay to teach Commonwealth crews to fly the Consolidated Liberator, the big American four-engined bomber the RAF intended to send against Japanese positions in southeast Asia and the Pacific. The choice of location was deliberate: mountains on one side, ocean on the other, weather that swung between them - conditions the planners believed would resemble what the crews would meet on the far side of the world. Students worked up through North American Mitchells before graduating to the four-engined aircraft. A Bristol Bolingbroke towed targets, Kittyhawks flew fighter affiliation exercises, and a Noorduyn Norseman handled the errands. Demand for air gunners quickly outgrew the field, so on 15 July 1944 a detachment opened at Abbotsford and the Liberators moved there. Boundary Bay kept the beginners. No. 5 OTU departed on 31 October 1945, and the station's last wartime duty was the least glamorous and most human of all: processing airmen out of uniform and back into civilian life.

The RCAF decommissioned the station in 1946 and the grass began reclaiming it. Three years of silence ended in 1949, when the site passed to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals and reopened as the Vancouver Wireless Station, call sign WVS - radio operators working equipment that handled communications and gathered signals intelligence. What grew north of the runways was less a base than a small town. There were 150 permanent married quarters, singles quarters, messes and dining halls, a medical inspection room, a chapel, a gymnasium, two ball diamonds, tennis courts, woodworking and automotive shops, a fire hall, and a grocery store that eventually became a CANEX. Families raised children there through the tensest decades of the Cold War. When the Canadian Forces unified in 1968 the place was renamed Canadian Forces Station Ladner, and the same reorganization that gave it the new name soon took everything else: CFS Ladner closed permanently in 1971.

For a decade Ladner treated the abandoned airfield as a very large backyard - picnics, public fairs, cars racing on runways built for bombers. Then Vancouver International Airport ran out of room to hold both airliners and weekend pilots, and Transport Canada went looking for somewhere to put the light aircraft. The pavement was still there. Restoration followed, and on 11 July 1983 two of the three runways reopened as Boundary Bay Airport, CZBB, with the third surface handed over to driver training and other events. The revival outgrew every expectation. Multiple flight schools now operate from the field, and in 2021 it logged roughly 248,000 aircraft movements, making it one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country. North of the runways, where the married quarters and the ball diamonds stood, Delta maintains the North 40 Park Reserve - a walking trail, interpretive signs, and an off-leash dog area laid over the footprint of a vanished village.