November 15, 1942. P5436 was working over Saanich Inlet near Patricia Bay, practising torpedo drops, when the pilot turned at low speed and low altitude and the aircraft dropped into a stabilized yaw - a flat, skidding loss of control from which a few hundred feet of air offers no recovery. The bomber hit the water and went down six hundred feet to the bottom of the inlet. Luck, and only luck, saved the four men aboard: a flying boat happened to be passing, saw the splash, and had the crew out of the water quickly, with one minor injury among them. The aircraft's war lasted a handful of seconds. Its second life would take considerably longer to arrange.

The wreck sat in the dark for forty-three years. Finding it again was archival work before it was ever marine work - someone went through RCAF wartime files closely enough to fix the ditching point, and in 1985 a remotely operated submarine went down and brought up a complete Hampden. Complete, but barely holding together; decades in salt water had eaten through structure that had never been designed to last a decade in air. Restoration began that same year under Gardham, drawing on salvaged parts from two other Canadian Hampden crash sites to fill the gaps. He finished the work after the museum's own move to Langley Airport, and by 2007 the aircraft was reckoned to be roughly ninety-seven percent complete.

The Hampden looked wrong even by the standards of late-1930s bombers. Its fuselage was deep, rectangular and only about three feet wide - too narrow for a crewman to change places with another in flight, which meant that if the pilot was hit, nobody could reach him. Crews called it the Flying Suitcase. Others preferred the Panhandle, or the Flying Tadpole, for the long thin boom running back to the tail. Canada built them too: Canadian Associated Aircraft turned out Hampdens under contract, and P5436 was the last of that Canadian line. Rather than crossing the Atlantic, it stayed home, flying coastal patrol along the British Columbia shore - the same water it eventually sank into.

Having survived the Pacific, the aircraft was nearly finished off by a snowfall. The museum keeps the Hampden outdoors, and on 26 December 2008 an exceptionally heavy fall of wet snow loaded the left wing until the spars broke and the wing parted company with the fuselage. That wing had been rebuilt largely in wood, the original metal too corroded to reuse, which is part of why it failed. Volunteers repaired it. By 2011 the wing and propeller were back on the airframe. It is a small and telling episode: a museum like this one is not a place where old aircraft are finally safe, but a place where people keep choosing, year after year, to fix them again.

The museum dates to 1977 and now holds more than twenty-five aircraft - jets, piston machines, gliders and helicopters - of which six have been restored to flying condition. An Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck and a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter sit alongside replica First World War fighters, a Sopwith Camel and Pup and an S.E.5 among them, plus an aviation art gallery and cases of smaller artifacts. The problem is space. In 2024 the museum announced an agreement to move to a 10,000-square-metre site at Pitt Meadows Regional Airport, and in January 2025 its Douglas DC-3 was hauled off its Langley perch after the airport judged it an obstruction to aircraft on the runway. For now the collection is still where it has long been, in Hangar 3 on 216th Street.