Posts Tagged ‘Tiger Moth’

Visit to the Canadian Air and Space Museum

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I heard about this place from a colleague of mine at work, who took his son to this museum. Coincidentally, the day or so before it had been officially changed its name to the “Canadian Air and Space Museum”. Vanessa was away all day, so Annie and I made the trek all the way up to Downsview via TTC and got to the museum, which is housed in the old de Havilland Canada aircraft manufacturing building (basically a big old warehouse).

The Entrance to the Museum

A restored Tiger Moth

The vintage maple leaf on the Tiger Moth

Avro Lancaster being restored and the Avro Arrow replica

Full-sized Avro Arrow Replica

This was the Avro Lancaster that had formerly been mounted on a podium near the CNE grounds, and was a familiar site when driving around that part of Lakshore when I was a kid. One of the people there told me that mounting the plane had permanently rendered it unflyable, but the current restoration effort was trying to fix up the plane as much as possible. Made during the final stages of WWII, she never say any action and was in fact pressed into service to help in search and rescue efforts on the coast prior to being “mounted”.

One of the Merlin engines of the Lancaster

I found this an interesting object to photograph: a thoroughly shot-up fuselage of a Lancaster that was used as target practice at a firing range, which apparently still had some useful parts for the reconstruction effort.