Qualla: Canadian Forces Station Ladner

Canadian Forces Station Ladner: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. They filled the bog with hay. That is not a metaphor. When the Royal Canadian Air Force went hunting in 1940 for flat ground on which to teach young men to fly, the farmland east of Ladner was ideal in every respect but one: it was wet. Crews hauled in hay and gravel, packed it down over the soft spots, and on 10 April 1941 runways opened across three farms that had been appropriated for the purpose. Over the next thirty years the field kept changing its mind about what it was - elementary flying school, fighter station, bomber university, then a radio post listening to the Pacific - before closing altogether. What happened next is the part almost nobody expects.

Image: The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Canadian Forces Station Ladner: Tiger Moths Over the Delta

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Canadian Forces Station Ladner: Learning the Liberator

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 A...

Image: The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Canadian Forces Station Ladner: Call Sign WVS

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Image: The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Canadian Forces Station Ladner: Picnics, Then Propellers Again

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 som...

Image: The original uploader was Lommer at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0