Honoring the Lancaster on Canada Day

Social media was abuzz today, Canada Day as the Canadian Warplane Heritage Lancaster took to the skies to honour our nation’s 153^rd birthday. In the footage here we show a ceremony that took place at the Victory Aircraft Corporation in Malton, where the Toronto International Airport is now located. The occasion was the first Lancaster Bomber produced at the plant. The factory would go on to produce 430 of the craft which were instrumental in the night bombing operations over Germany. As the war came to an end there was talk of converting the plan to the manufacture of civilian transport using the Lancaster as the base. This came the Avro York, a 24 passenger aircraft, and the Lincoln. One of each of these was built by Victory, which also built 6 Lancastrian passenger planes. None of these Lancaster variants were particularly successful and were soon rendered obsolete by  Douglas Aircraft which had developed the DC4 and DC6’s which were much better suited to commercial passenger use. Victory had another life though as it was sold in 1945  to A.V.Roe which built the CF100 jet fighter and the ill-fated CF105 Arrow. This footage also shows the Anson bomber, a Canso amphibious aircraft, a Hawker Hurricane and a Mosquito bomber in flight.