Qualla: Canadian Museum of Flight

Canadian Museum of Flight: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fred Gardham was in his eighties when he began putting the bomber back together. He had worked in Canada's wartime aviation industry, and he had flown in this particular aircraft - Handley Page Hampden P5436 - when it was almost new. It came back to him salt-eaten and fragile, piece by piece, after four decades on the floor of Saanich Inlet. He rebuilt it in a Vancouver workshop, component by component, over years. What he produced now stands at the Canadian Museum of Flight at Langley Regional Airport: the only Handley Page Hampden on display anywhere in the world, out of 1,430 that were built.

Canadian Museum of Flight: The Stabilized Yaw

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 n...

Canadian Museum of Flight: Forty-Three Years Down

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ham...

Canadian Museum of Flight: Why They Called It the Flying Suitcase

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Canadian Museum of Flight: Boxing Day, 2008

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 w...

Canadian Museum of Flight: A Full Hangar and Not Enough of It

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 fighte...