Success Stories

Highlights in the History of Canadian Aviation

Chronicle of Canadian Aviation History

Since the cold winter day in 1909 when Alexander Graham Bell’s Silver Dart took off from the ice of Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia to mark Canada’s first airplane flight, innovative Canadian men and women have pushed the limits of science and imagination to forge a remarkable history of aviation in this country.

Thanks to a successful partnership among the National Aviation Museum, the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa-Carleton and the Canada’s Digital Collections (CDC) program, the story of Canada’s first century of aviation is now available electronically to all Canadians.

The organizations collaborated on a special project to digitize a portion of the museum’s extensive collection of archival aircraft photographs and create a unique Web site, Highlights in the History of Canadian Aviation.

The project was made possible by the Canada’s Digital Collections program, funded by the Youth Employment Strategy. The program provides young people aged 15 to 30 with valuable multimedia experience as they convert significant Canadian content for display on the Information Highway.

After successfully completing CDC’s competitive application process, the National Aviation Museum’s New Media Officer, André Mercier, received funding to hire a youth project team. The hiring was done in collaboration with the Youth Services Bureau, which provides counseling and employment services to low-income, high-need and high-risk youth. The museum provided the four-person team with the project theme and content as well as computer equipment and technical direction, while the Youth Services Bureau provided work stations and project supervision at its Orleans office in Ottawa’s east end. 

Mercier says the project was a perfect opportunity for the museum to begin digitizing its archival collection of 85,000 aircraft photographs. “Before we started, we had nothing in digital format except some photo CDs,” he says. “The project really helped us to kick-start the digitization process, with the goal of making our photo archive available for searching over the Internet.”

During the course of the four-month project, team members scanned and catalogued 8,500 photographs or ten percent of the Museum’s archival photo collection and created a bilingual Web site featuring 300 photographs of 25 different aircraft, all of which played an important role in shaping Canadian aviation history. 

The Highlights in the History of Canadian Aviation Web site begins with Bell’s Silver Dart and moves on to the First World War heroics of Canadian fighter aces and the exploits of daring bush pilots who opened up Canada’s north in the 1920s and 1930s. The story continues with the growth of domestic airlines, Canada’s emergence as the “aerodrome of democracy” in the Second World War and the astonishing development of the supersonic Avro Arrow, one of the great technical achievements of the jet age.

For team coordinator, Phil Dlab, 22, the project provided a fascinating learning experience in Web design and multimedia technology, while offering him the chance to develop his people management and coordination skills. “I was given a lot of freedom in developing the site,” says Dlab, who, along with his training supervisory duties, helped write and edit the Web site text.

“Phil was very keen, well organized and quite focused in his work,” observes museum librarian Fiona Smith Hale. “He put a lot of thought into the organization and presentation of the site.” She says the project team’s dedication and hard work has really paid off. “  The project has made our collection more accessible and more useful to Canadians. It is also helping to spread the word about our country’s rich and fascinating aviation history.”

The National Aviation Museum was so impressed with the team’s performance that it recommended Dlab and two other team members for a contract to digitize railway photos for the National Museum of Science and Technology. The fourth team member had already used his CDC project experience to land a job with a local high-tech company.

After completing the railway photo digitization project, Dlab worked briefly at the National Aviation Museum before moving on to broadcast work in Toronto. “The digitization experience looked pretty impressive on my resume,” says Dlab. “It really helped open doors for me.”

Linda Smith, Acting Coordinator of the Youth Services Bureau East End Unit, says the collaborative project offered participants an important bridge between school and full-time employment. “The project was a tremendously positive learning experience that helped youth team members feel good about themselves and what they were doing, while providing them with the skills they needed to get into the workforce.”

Visit the Canada's Digital Collections World Wide Web Site at http://collections.ic.gc.ca