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Episode 4 - Flying into a Bunker (Part 2)
43 Plays6 months ago
Did you know that Canada once had the ability to manufacturer planes that were rather cool and technologically advanced for their time? How about proposals to build airports every 50 KM? Besting the Americans by providing airmail before them? Or how we had the fourth largest airforce in the world at one point?
This is part two of a three part series! Listen to part one before you get to this episode!
This episode's news:
https://www.burnabynow.com/highlights/semi-truck-driver-stuck-in-marina-followed-gps-down-a-bc-boat-ramp-8670336
Heritage Minute:
https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/avro-arrow
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Car Culture Critique
00:00:00
Speaker
Honestly, here is my solemn pledge. If this podcast actually ends up producing a reasonable amount of income, I will use it specifically and strictly for procuring and maintaining another Suzuki Esteem. That car fucking ruled. Are we saying that the Suzuki Esteem is the official car of Dominican moments? Because I'm not going to go and endorse my Hyundai Ionic.
00:00:27
Speaker
It's our Liam's van. I'll do bonus episodes about the condition of the Suki esteem. Okay. Yeah, fine. I doubt we're over have enough to, to buy a Suzuki esteem. How much do they go for $5,000 now? Uh, well, I mean, I bought mine for, uh, $1,700 and, and a case of beer. I don't think that's even legal anymore. I think this is before the PST nonsense came into play in BC.
00:00:58
Speaker
Uh, yes. That explains a lot. Cause I tried to sell my cousin a car once and they got rid of the loophole that allowed you to sell a car for a dollar if they were like family or whatever. And he has the same last name as me, but, um, the insurance, uh, place that was doing all the paperwork was like, yeah, no. Yeah. Even if you gift the car, you have to, you have to pay the book value or whatever.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah. And it's based upon the blue book value, not the black book value, which is basically the scrap cost of it. So you're paying on what an ideal condition car of that year is worth. So just crush it. Well, yeah, that's the fucking annoying thing, is that basically it's just going to end up with a bunch of cars getting scrapped that are otherwise perfectly salvageable.
00:01:50
Speaker
Hey, less cars out there means less cars on the road, which means better traffic. Hey, I've solved traffic. I just think everybody crushed their car. Make owning a car prohibitively expensive. I mean, realistically, that's, uh, that's what fucking like, like all these, like, uh,
00:02:09
Speaker
People effectively just own Canada like you're Galen Weston's and those sorts of people like what they're gonna fucking end up doing It's gonna be too expensive to own a car so public transit will become the only option Yeah, well, let's start this podcast. Shall we?
Hosts' Introduction and Banter
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, sure
00:02:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Shewinigan Moments podcast. My name is Heather and I use she they pronouns. My name is Tamarack and I use they them or it its pronouns. How are you Tamarack? I'm doing pretty good. I haven't spoken to you in so long. I know it's like I haven't spoken to you in
00:02:54
Speaker
period of time. Undisclosed period of time. Exactly. Exactly. I haven't gotten up to pour myself a glass of water and pet my cats and all that. Actually, she's just down next to me, you know, that sort of thing.
00:03:11
Speaker
I was going to leave it vague, but probably at some point I'm going to bring up that it is still Labor Day, or it's still May 1st. Fair. And the sun is still out. That is one good thing we can say at least, that we're not recording this well past our bedtimes. Well, well past your bedtimes. I have a sleeping disorder. I don't have a bedtime. That's fair. I have a very regulated sleep. Shall we do the news?
GPS Mishaps and Truck Troubles
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, let's do the news. Let's do the news. All right, what do you got for me this time? So I have some good news. Yeah, we haven't had an overpass be hit by a semi truck. How long has it been since we've had a semi truck hit an overpass in Vancouver? I think it's been a good month.
00:04:04
Speaker
Let me look this up real quick here because I overpass collision, Vancouver. Here he goes. This person on Twitter. It's been almost a month. Oh my God. We've gone almost a month. No, 12 days. Has there been a more recent one? I missed one 12 days ago. I thought I was on top of this. This is what I get for not going on
00:04:29
Speaker
Twitter anymore. But before you start, let's find out what hit the overpass this time. Let's see here. It happened on the Shaughnessy Elgin Road underpass in Poco, but there's no photos or anything. So but oh, and then before that, it was 13 days. What was that? Wow, we've been we've been asleep at the wheel here.
00:04:55
Speaker
Let's see here. Zero days, 21 hours. What hit this one here? Somebody suggested it was Chohan again. It's been a while since we've heard of Chohan, but I don't think they got their operating license back. I don't believe so. Also, now's probably a good time to note that the official podcast policy is that we will continue deadnaming Twitter as long as Elon keeps deadnaming his daughter. Yeah, that's fair. I think that's reasonable.
00:05:21
Speaker
Well, all right, it's been a while. It's been happening every once in a while. What happened this time for truck is it doesn't sound like an overpass got hit. It was not an overpass and it wasn't a solid this time, which I guess is kind of, kind of good. Um, so, so like, uh, you use GPS when you're driving. Yeah. Yeah. The sat nav is often enabled. I use Apple maps, which is for better or worse, maybe not. So Apple maps has improved.
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely improved since the good old days I've heard of, you know, being told to drive straight up into space. Did that actually happen? Yeah, there are 3D projections kind of put roads on vertical surfaces for a little bit. Hell yeah, it's like F-zero.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately, this particular driver on this particular F-Zero track mistook the speed boost. This was not a shortcut. From Burnaby now, a semi-truck driver stuck in Marina following followed GPS down a boat ramp. Oh, dear. I'm just looking at this now. And from a Suez.
00:06:34
Speaker
Like right near where I grew up. Fair enough. I thought we weren't going to disclose the general area where you grew up. I grew up in undisclosed location in the interior of the province. Fair enough.
00:06:48
Speaker
Oh dear. So over the weekend basically a driver was just following a sat-nav at night and followed it right off the fucking boat lodge. And of course it's a driver from Surrey. This is where I grew up. I'm willing to tell you all where I grew up.
00:07:07
Speaker
I mean, population wise, sorry, is about as specific as somewhere vaguely in the interior of the province. Just not in terms of like geographical area. That's fair. So this is not like the first times the thing like this has happened. No. Like I have heard so many instances of people doing this.
00:07:33
Speaker
it's not unheard of. I believe there have been situations where sat nav has directed people to drive on a bridge that would definitely crush under the load of a truck like this. And other cases where sat nav has directed people to drive on to train tracks.
00:07:52
Speaker
train tracks one i haven't seen i have seen there's a uh there's a truck there's a tram tunnel uh somewhere i think it's either in montreal or in toronto it's in toronto it's a it's a common occurrence that you have to it fucks so many things up because it's the
00:08:08
Speaker
Um, is it? Oh my God. Is it union? I think it's union. What'll happen is every once in a while, somebody will just drive into the tunnel and then get stuck. And then of course the streetcars just can't, um, connect with, um, the subway. Yeah. It's really, it's a really stupid situation.
Automobile Quality and Safety Concerns
00:08:25
Speaker
Yes. Uh, great separation. Good car continues to be bad. Exactly.
00:08:32
Speaker
The thing I like about this is this and the Overpass Strikes are things that are very tangibly relatable kind of disaster scenarios. Everybody's been led astray by GPS and kind of ended up taking a weird turn.
00:08:52
Speaker
not to such disastrous consequences because they're not driving as large of a vehicle and probably haven't been driving for as long. But fuck, distracted driving is no joke. And yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker
I was just thinking about the train track situation. I just remembered it. It happened not too long ago. There's the old B.C. electric line that runs down along the Fraser River that's still in use, or I think it's actually gone dormant since. But when a Tesla with FSD or I'm assuming it was the FSD drove right onto the track and got stuck. This was like a couple of weeks ago. Oh, that is oof.
00:09:32
Speaker
And Elon Musk wants semi-trucks to use FSD, doesn't that terrify you? I mean, full self-driving, I should say. Yeah, what if it was like a Tesla, except even bigger, heavier, and more capable of turning a child into pace? And can catch on fire at will. Oh yeah, I mean, I said it's like a Tesla. That's fair, that goes without saying.
00:09:54
Speaker
like Elon Musk jokingly sold a flamethrower to promote his digging company. However, he unironically sold a flamethrower by way of all of his fucking cars.
00:10:10
Speaker
Like I know we're deviating from talking about truck drivers driving into the water, but like I've been in a Tesla and I just don't understand how they get labeled as luxury when they feel like I'm inside of a PT. Yeah, not PT Cruiser. What was that old Dodge caliber? That's what it feels like to be inside of these cars. Like if you've ever seen kind of. Yeah. The thing about the Dodge caliber that made it nicer than a Tesla is a lot of them had a built in fridge.
00:10:41
Speaker
What a piece of shit. Both cars are pieces of shit. But actually, you know what? Cars from that point in time, I will say, are equally as shitty as a Tesla that is made today in terms of build quality. And that is really bad because the car industry in the late 2000s was suffering. Like obviously they were hemorrhaging money because they put they went all in on shitty gas guzzling vehicles and then all of a sudden the credit crunch comes in and nobody can afford to fill the damn things or even let alone maintain them.
00:11:11
Speaker
a thing that would not happen again. Oh, we're we're we're barreling towards another catastrophe. I think it's been it's a miracle that it hasn't played out yet. And I have to think that the pandemic played a role. Yeah, my my my brother very stupidly recently got another yet larger truck. And I'm glad he doesn't listen to this podcast.
00:11:38
Speaker
The thing that I always tell people is that people who buy large vehicles today kind of
00:11:45
Speaker
don't really have an option now because if you want to buy a new vehicle, it's going to have that child killing, you know, meter high bumper scenario anyway. And like, you can't go out and buy a Dodge Caravan anymore. Like they still make them, but they're not, they're not the status vehicle that they were in the 90s. Like all families in the 90s had a Dodge Caravan.
00:12:09
Speaker
Well, not a Stata symbol, I should say, but it was like that was the vehicle that middle middle class people would buy. Like my parents had a Plymouth Voyager to upgrade from a Dodge Cavalier, sorry, Dodge Cavalier, a Chevrolet Cavalier. Okay, fair, fair. Yeah, which I mentioned a couple episodes ago. Yeah, my mom drove a GMC Safari van.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, and that was like the competitor to the Dodge Caravan. So like the cars today are just you know, they exist because not because of the consumer market necessarily, but because well, you know, the United States came up with all these regulations around emissions and then
00:12:49
Speaker
automakers went well if we build vehicles bigger we don't have to conform to them which is why we have trucks that can murder children just by you know hitting them like it's terrifying like I every time I see a new vehicle on the road and I see how high up the I just hope that if I get hit by one of these vehicles with the meter high bumper that like the death is instantaneous because
00:13:11
Speaker
It's just horrifying to see these vehicles on the road. Yeah. I mean, I, I got into a nasty bike accident with a fucking, uh, like 40, like, uh, like, like one of their like cargo van things, like the delivery vans. Those have a bumper that's lower, like a overall front frame that isn't that high up. Well, it's on a bike. So I went over the hood, but normally I wouldn't have. Right. Christ. I hate, I fucking hate new cars.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway, to round out this rambling, some of which may have been cut out, there is a way that we can transport goods en masse all over the country that doesn't require a bunch of sleep-defrived underpaid drivers to drive down boat launches and also hit overpasses. It's called a fucking train.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, the loading gauge. Like these things have trains have unified loading gauge standardized containers. Well, yes, the standardized containers is not reflect. I don't think you know what, at some point we're going to talk about the railroads and I don't think we're going to get into how we're coming for you Canadian Pacific.
00:14:32
Speaker
It's going to be like a five part episode, I swear, because like this is a this is a three part episode. Hopefully it's three parts. I haven't finished the episode for part three yet, but I'm pretty certain it'll be three parter. Let's look at that script, shall we?
Canadian Aviation History and Evolution
00:14:45
Speaker
No, you will not look at that script just yet. Well, I mean, I think I don't know. No, we'll see. I think I think we should move on unless there's something else you want to add to this.
00:14:57
Speaker
Uh, no, uh, ban on cars, build a fucking train. This country was built on rails. I have opinions on what you just said, but you, you and I have had many alcohol induced conversations about this topic. This country was built on rails and genocide. That's the two things we got. That's the only two things we got. That's the thing that makes me so sad. All right.
00:15:20
Speaker
So I'm not replaying the clip from the last episode because if you haven't heard it already, that means you didn't listen to the last episode. And thus you should go back to episode. Yes, please play part one and then play part two. So this is your opportunity to hit pause. And now that you're back, you can listen to this episode.
00:15:42
Speaker
Although maybe we should like add the, maybe I'll add an introduction, uh, of like, uh, uh, fucking vault tech better living underground or whatever. That'll fit into 15 seconds. The fuck is this vault tech? Oh, no, no, no, no. Wait till we get to the end.
00:15:59
Speaker
Okay, we'll put that clip somewhere because I want to talk about some things. But first, this is your episode. Yes. You should save that for a Deep and Bunker episode. I do want to make a Deep and Bunker episode. We'll make that a bonus episode.
00:16:18
Speaker
I will fine. Well, I mean, I'll comment on it here and plug a potential future bonus episode. All right. So at the end of the last episode, we left off talking about Billy Bishop and how he destroyed the Eton department store chain. And but also Canada received an imperial gift from Great Britain after the end of the war. This meant that more airplanes were available for civilian and defense purposes. In June 1919, Parliament passed an act which formed the Air Board
00:16:48
Speaker
which regulated the use of airplanes and other flying machines in Canada. They were tasked with controlling civil aviation and performing air defense, meaning it was the precursor to the Royal Canadian Air Force.
00:17:01
Speaker
Like as we know it as a like effectively self-defense force. Yeah. So it's, it seems to us a little bit all over the place initially. Um, but Canada was the first country in the world to pass legislation around the activity of flying and the airport itself was responsible for managing the airplanes given to the country.
00:17:23
Speaker
The other thing that your board was tasked with, which is what you were talking about, was the planes were used for forestry, photograph surveying, and anti-smuggling patrols. Why would they need to do anti-smuggling patrols in early 1920s Canada? I don't know. Why would that be a thing?
00:17:46
Speaker
This also meant the creation of civil aviation facilities with five in 1920 initially, and a few more as the years went on. This one's a little bit of a side note, but this also created the Royal Canadian Air Force's base Jericho Beach.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah. Of which I bring up because we're here in Vancouver and it is today home to a rather nice place to hang out in the summer. Pretty much every summer I try and go out there and parking is a nightmare, but it's a lovely place to hang out. You should just bike. It's an easy bike ride once you're off the Central Valley Greenway.
00:18:22
Speaker
Last summer I was not able to do it, but you're correct. Bonus episode. We just fuck off to the beach. You gotta stop suggesting bonus episodes on the recordings. No. It was however considered for a full-fledged airport at one point.
00:18:40
Speaker
And also a deep seaport. There was like a plan to build. Yeah, I kid you not. So I don't have the details written here, but for the deep seaport in particular. But what I do know is there was a plan to build a railway from.
00:18:54
Speaker
Um, where the, you know, the railway line that goes up the Arbutus cut, that's no longer there. That was intended to also split off and go around what is now rec beach and then meet up with Jericho beach. And the idea was there was a London based company that wanted to build a deep seaport at Jericho beach.
00:19:13
Speaker
I see. And they never like decided to depth gauge the peach. Well, they would have probably dredged the fuck out of it. Oh, they would have had to. Yeah. Well, you got to do that with any port, but like the thing is, is that it's a rather sheltered area to begin with. Like it can get rather rough there, but not to the point of like, say, if you're going to go build a deep sea port in to Fino.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, okay, fair. I suppose it's one of those things where this was the age where being sheltered was more important than being easily navigable.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's part of the reason why they're building that giant port out in Robert's Bank, or rather they did build one there, and now they're expanding it. Yeah. The Airborne eventually created the Canadian Air Force, and its first official base was at Cap Borden, originally built in 1916, now CFB Borden. It's now no longer an Air Force base.
00:20:08
Speaker
And I'm going to make this clear before you interject is named for former defense minister and not a prime minister. Is it the same guy? No, no. This was a defense minister. I think it was a liberal defense minister. I just can't remember which cabinet he served under.
00:20:24
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. By 1923, the Airborne was amalgamated with the Department of Militia and Defense and the Department of Naval Services to form the Department of National Defense. This results in the creation of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Something I should add during World War One, the Canadian Air Force was created in 1918, but it was disbanded in 1920 due to them being stationed in the United Kingdom.
00:20:49
Speaker
and it was now peacetime so demands for air defense were seen as unnecessary yeah what are we gonna use like aircraft for in peacetime i don't know what are we gonna do with aircraft yeah like what is flying yeah what is like look if there's not a war on we're not gonna bother it's like how everybody plays hearts of iron
00:21:13
Speaker
This does not create a unified command, I must add. That doesn't happen for another 40 years. So it was 1960 something when the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy, as well as the Canadian Army, no, Canadian Army, not Royal Canadian Army, was merged into the Canadian Armed Forces. This didn't happen until the 1960s. The use of royal appended to the Canadian Armed Forces was only because Canada saw its sister Dominion, Australia, take on the word in its Air Force name
00:21:41
Speaker
and decided that it wanted in on it too and King George V said whatever. Ah, yes. It's the it's the like post great patriotic war guards divisions kind of bullshit of like, well, it sounds cool. It makes us feel nice. Like only the only the Navy and the Air Force got royaled. The Army did not. They knew what they did. I cannot wait for the Royal Canadian Space Force.
00:22:06
Speaker
Oh my fucking god. You had to remind me. I just like the idea of having the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Space Force. The Canadian Army is just going to always get the dregs. I mean, to be fair, that was their experience at the Somme, so. I'm staying in 1920.
00:22:35
Speaker
Staying in 1920, the first passenger flight was made between Winnipeg and the pass, which is about 500 kilometers northeast, or northwest, excuse me. This was for a fur trader working for the Hudson's Bay Company, I believe.
00:22:47
Speaker
Hallelujah. Sorry. Worst fucking skit but still lives rent free in my head. Christ. By 1926, it would take about six days to fly from Montreal to Vancouver. That's, I think that's faster than taking plane at that point. Sorry, taking a train. But don't quote me on that.
00:23:06
Speaker
It might be actually slower. In the same year, the RCAF seized control over non-military aviation. And this response was handed over to a new branch called the Civil Government Air Operations, or CJAO, which the RCAF supported until the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King. Ah, your boy.
00:23:28
Speaker
Create Department of Transport in 1935. One of one of his kind of good moves. Yeah, you know that we have it's now called Transport Canada, but the Department of Transport still is I guess the official name. During this time, airplanes were being built in Canada. Shipbuilder Canadian Vickers ventured into aircraft manufacturing in 1923 when it won a contract to supply seaplanes or flying boats to the RCAF. This is going to be funny, but
00:23:55
Speaker
All of its plane designs were given names such as Vancouver, Vanessa, Faruna, Vadet, Veloz, Vigil, and Vista. The flying boats were also fucking amazing. They were cool and their design stuck around for a long time. They worked. It also licensed builds of other planes, including a little British company called Avro, but also a German Fokker.
00:24:25
Speaker
Um...
00:24:27
Speaker
The King's Return. I know. We're going to be we're going to be talking about Avro a little bit more in this episode. We only mentioned Avro a couple of times in the last episode, but it is what it is. The Haviland aircraft of Canada was formed in 1928 and it still survives to this very day, despite its original parent company being no more. They largely built DH-82 Tiger MOS for the RCAF. They would also go on to build Canada's first orbiting satellite, the Alouette 1.
00:24:55
Speaker
That's that's a funny name for it Hey, remember we got a whole football team. That's called that I called the LOS Yeah, but it's a Canadian football team. That's called the LOS specifically a Canadian hand egg team Hey, you know what? Sure Whatever
00:25:17
Speaker
By 1927, the importance of airways was quite apparent and a system of airports were proposed. What the proposal included was every 160 kilometers would have a major airport with emergency landing strips every 50 kilometers or so across the entirety of the country. That is ridiculously dense if you understand the geography of Canada. Well, that's not so bad.
00:25:44
Speaker
it if you're dealing with just flat surfaces. So like if you're going across like, you know, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, it's flat enough. It's like where it starts to suck ass is anywhere like west of Jasper. Yeah, pretty much. It's like, hey, let's build an airport every 160 kilometer famous words of person who has never seen British Columbia. Well, like, one of the sketchiest airports I've had the pleasure of landing was in trail.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, oh, that's a good line. No, wait, sorry. It wasn't trail. It was Castle Guard. Cascades to the north of it. I always cross it to up because they're not too far apart. But like, it's not the sketchiest airport I've ever landed in. In fact, the sketchiest airport is not even in this country. But like, as you're landing, you get pretty close to it. And like, I was flying in, oh, some sort of turboprop. I can't even remember anymore. It was like some sort of whatever Air Canada uses for turboprops.
00:26:39
Speaker
Crash 8 probably or Dash 8. Crash 8? Is that the nickname for them? Yeah, it's a, I think it's actually, I think it's a de Havilland project. Well, now they're made by Bombardier. Yeah, Bombardier definitely, well. Yeah, it's de Havilland Canada Dash 8. Well, there you go.
00:27:00
Speaker
So I've had the pleasure of flying in one of those into Castle Garden. You do make some interesting turns. You're not that far from the mountains. There's not much space there. The sketchiest airport that I have done, I did this in, I think it was a 737. I was flying from Lima to Cusco in Peru. And you're landing at an airport in the Andes, which is like the airport's runway elevation is something like 3,500 meters.
00:27:27
Speaker
So that should give you an idea of like how fucked up it was the land here. Like it's a miracle that they they have like this plateau at this elevation. It's also a miracle that the plane can take off. Like the air is super thin there. Like I was trying to go to the bathroom at one point when I was staying at a hotel in Cusco and just getting out of bed will just exhaust you. And that's even with all of the altitude sickness pills I was taking. Wow. Flying, flying around mountains is fucking scary. Like,
00:27:56
Speaker
There's like flying over it. It's fine, but flying through them. Terrifying. Like you're not even able to fly a plane over the over the Himalayas. It's like it's considered not safe to fly an airplane over them. Well, also, because if you went down around there, rescue would be damn near impossible. Well, yeah, we push mountains are like famously impossible to traverse or very difficult to reverse rather.
00:28:23
Speaker
Well, you can just imagine they can have a situation like that. Was it that urgent Argentinian football team? Yeah.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, not terrifying. Airports were given modern amenities such as navigation beacons as well as navigational and runway lighting. Important. Many of the airports were also created during the Great Depression. By decades passing, the airway system, as it was called, stretched a distance of 5,000 kilometers, enabling one to fly from Vancouver to Sydney, Nova Scotia. Despite this, the first cross-country flight did not occur until 1949.
00:28:58
Speaker
Took a while, but also how many Vancouverites have regular business in Sydney, Nova Scotia?
00:29:06
Speaker
I used to fly to Halifax a couple times a year for work. It's a good place to visit, but I don't know if in 1949 that was a thing people were really doing. Cross-country commerce wasn't as big of a deal. No, and that's definitely something in the future we may end up talking about. Halifax was a much busier city in this time period than it was, rather than what it is today.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, my comment is more the opposite is that basically most of the major centers in Western Canada are very much post-war inventions. That's true. Actually, going to that, the system would eventually be expanded to allow flight from Edmonton to the far reaches of the territories. One thing you may have noticed, I haven't dropped any words about Newfoundland. Newfoundland did not join the country until 1949.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, that should be, I would hope everyone who's a Canadian listening who paid some attention in socials was aware of that. You'd be surprised. A lot of people don't realize it's actually called Newfoundland and Labrador, hence why it's NL on our
00:30:18
Speaker
addresses, but they didn't enjoy Confederation until 1949 and it was the last province to do so. That's the one time that somebody built a train and got burned for it. That's a future topic.
00:30:36
Speaker
Historically, Canada, please do a Newfoundland's bankruptcy episode so we can talk. Well, that's the reason why they joined the Confederation. They were bankrupt and the United Kingdom was like, no, we're not doing anything. You're now Canada. Yeah, they didn't they didn't join us so much as we bought them. They had a cooler flag prior to Confederation. It looked like Neapolitan ice cream. OK, but they still have the coolest flag. They do have a cool flag now and they had a cool flag then.
00:31:04
Speaker
Excuse me? The coolest. Fine. I'll agree with you. Although I will say that I am partial to New Brunswick's flag. Excuse me? The coolest. It's the coolest flag. Come on. I know I said I'm getting tired of hearing about bonus episodes, but I think we're going to have to discuss the fucking... Wait, we do have an episode on flags in the future.
Canadian Flag Debate and Gender in Aviation
00:31:24
Speaker
Hell yeah. I just realized this. We can talk about our problem with the Canadian flags in that episode. Okay. At the very least, Ontario has the worst one.
00:31:32
Speaker
So is Manitoba. Yeah, they're tied for worst. Ontario had it first. They're practically the same. Yeah. Would that make Manitoba the worst one? Because they got its, like, Ontario already had the shit flag and they decided garbage too. No, no, no, no, no, no. When we get to the episode about the Canadian flag, this will become an actual topic because I already know, like, I already have planned around talking about
00:31:56
Speaker
why Manitoba and Ontario have the flag that they do, and those flags are not an invention of anything prior to the 1950s. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so we'll get into that at some point. By 1928, the first woman to receive a pilot's license had happened.
00:32:14
Speaker
Eileen Volick of Weirton, Ontario. Finally a place in Ontario that's not named after somewhere in England. Hold on a second. Isn't it? Oh, hold on a sec. Thank God it's not. Okay, cool. We have to double check this because I'm about to run my mouth here and it's the only place name that seems to exist. If it exists elsewhere in the world, that's fine. It's just place names in England we care about. Going back, Eileen Volick of Weirton. Weirton? Whatever. Weirton, Ontario received her license when she was 19.
00:32:44
Speaker
However,
00:32:45
Speaker
This is a product of its time. Men could get their license as early as being 17 years old. But she was told to wait until she was 19 because the government didn't think she could fly due to her gender. Yeah. Flying ability is stored within the balls. I thought everybody knew that. No, I didn't. I guess I won't be able to fly a plane. On March 13th, 1928, she flew a... You told me last episode you're too terrified to go into a hot air balloon.
00:33:15
Speaker
You're never going to fly a plane. Hey, listen, you never know. I still fly on a fucking plane every once in a while. Like, you and I are probably flying this August together. Don't remind me. I am I am legitimately actually afraid of flying. We'll do our best because
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah. On March 13, 1928, she flew a Curtiss jetty to become the 77th licensed pilot in Canada. The test involved making four landings from 1500 feet elevation to land within 150 feet of a designated point on the ground. I just want to interject that
00:33:54
Speaker
As much as I've been poo-pooing aircraft, the Curtis Jenny is a very, very attractive looking plane. It's very handsome. It looks really straightforward. It's a simple plane. It has what? It's a biplane. So there you go. It has two wings. Also, it required an additional landing with the motor off. So you have to use it as a glider and land within 5000 feet of a designated point. She also had to perform five figure eight turns before two designated points.
00:34:22
Speaker
And additionally, she had to fly 175 miles or 280 kilometers cross country. I'm assuming cross country. It means fly in a direct path. I don't know. Yeah, it's a little, I'm not a pilot. I don't know. I'm plain nerds are probably going to be ripping into this and being like, what the fuck is she on about or some shit. Any event, her height at five feet tall or a meter and a half required her to sit on a cushion.
00:34:51
Speaker
Nice. There was a there's a there was a thing in the 60s when they were designing fighter jets and all that. And well, I don't think we're going to talk about in the next episode anyway, where they discovered that using average heights and everything for that was actually a really disastrous idea. So
00:35:08
Speaker
Yeah, the average I think it's like the average height of like at least like an American like art like army airmen was like surprisingly short just due to weird coincidence of selection. Yeah. One other thing she was friends with Amelia Earhart. All of these all these folks were like friends.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, there isn't that many pilots and I guess like being the first Canadian woman to receive a pilot's license would gather the attention of someone of the likes of Amelia Earhart. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, whatever happened to her. What did ever happen to her? Stay tuned for our Amelia Earhart episode.
00:35:56
Speaker
There's never going to be an Amelia Earhart episode. She was afflicted by a terrible illness of not being Canadian. Exactly. While many of the airstrips were built in the Great Depression, the federal government avoided spending excess money on aviation itself.
Aviation Industry Challenges and Growth
00:36:11
Speaker
For example, while Royal Mail Canada, the precursor to Canada Post, had been sending express mail from an aerodrome outside of Toronto in 1928, austerity led to them cutting air mail contracts and creating financial struggles for small aviation companies.
00:36:26
Speaker
This would never happen again to Canada Post. We did airmail before the Americans. When did the Americans do airmail? I didn't bother looking into that. Airmail scandal of 1934. That's wild. We did it first. We were the first to do airmail then because I think the airmail scandal was in the 1930s.
00:36:49
Speaker
Huh, I did not know that. The thing is, I wasn't really doing a lot of checks on what the Americans were up to because this is a Canada podcast. Although, well, during this time, Canada found itself without a national policy for the development of commercial aviation within its borders. Much of the domestic flying was limited to bush flying from airstrips near railways. So the railways and the airplanes were tied together, something that makes a lot of fucking sense. But for whatever reason, we don't do that today.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah. Also like, you know, just like in transport fever where you, you know, have a unit train filled with coal and then you go and shovel it onto an airplane. You could put oil on a plane in transport fever. Yes. I think you can do that in OpenTTD as well.
00:37:32
Speaker
I haven't played open TDD, but yeah. These are games that you play, like these are games I got stupid familiar with when the pandemic lockdowns were real bad and I was like, well, we're going to have to learn how to do transport, I guess. Going back to what we're talking about here.
00:37:50
Speaker
An example of where the commercial aviation was not really working out was the Imperial Airways at Great Britain, which was the precursor to British Overseas Air Company, I think it's BOAC, which later then merged with another airline to become British Airways, had no means of having passengers who are flying to Canada to connect elsewhere. And so as a result, they had to rely on Pan American, AKA Pan Am,
00:38:17
Speaker
eras of the United States to further their journey. One little note, and this actually is something I feel like would be fun to talk as a bonus episode at some point is the Canadian Pacific Railway as early as 1921 to form its own airline. Yes. They did eventually. They got their dream, which again, I cannot stress enough, CPR, we are coming for you.
00:38:44
Speaker
Actually, it's no longer CPKC because it's Canadian Pacific, Kansas City. Yeah, it's Canadian Pacific. We are doing Tim Horton's imperialism and slowly buying up everything that you hold dear. Well, I don't know how the ownership structure works, but they're still incorporated in Canada and headquartered there.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah, Byzantine as all these companies tend to be. In 1926 Western Canada Airways was formed and in 1933 United Air Transport aka UAT was formed. UAT was important because it would later be merged into Canadian Pacific Airlines which was run by Canadian Pacific Railways. Hell yeah!
00:39:28
Speaker
Trans Canada Airlines, which was also formed, sorry, Trans Canada Airlines was also formed in this interim, which later would become Air Canada and would eventually gobble up Canadian Airlines, which was formerly Canadian Pacific Railways Airline. And that merger definitely worked out great for everybody. Yeah, we love Air Canada. In fact, the thing is, it's like if I had to pick between WestJet and Air Canada, I'm going to pick Air Canada.
00:39:56
Speaker
to fly locally within province not Air Canada because this is more expensive but like yeah if you're going any distance like WestJet's seats suck.
00:40:09
Speaker
I've never had a good experience sitting on a WestJet seat. The last time I flew WestJet willingly, I chose to do so. I was flying from, of all places, Las Vegas back to Vancouver. I sat in the seat and I was like, why did I do this to myself? And the only reason why I did it is because I needed a last minute flight to Vegas, which if you know me, you know I'm going there on a pure duress. It was not a good time. WestJet service is fine. There's nothing inherently wrong with it.
00:40:38
Speaker
The seats are awful. It's a commuter airline that's bread and butter. Yeah, at least it's not Greyhound Air. That's a reference. The Great Depression was not kind to the RCAF as cuts to military spending affected airfield construction, pilot training was also reduced, aircraft purchases were also cut, and operational activities were reduced.
00:41:03
Speaker
Despite this, auxiliary squadrons were formed in the 1930s. Priorities were increasing focus on military operations over anything civilian. The damage inflicted by the lack of funding left the RSCAF really not all that important as a military force by the end of the 1930s. This would become important to address when a certain German painter turned dictator decided that Poland needed to be straightened out.
00:41:28
Speaker
Oh, that's a way to phrase it. I just don't want to I just don't want to say it's like how else do I reference this? It's like I it's like fucking like, there's so much we can talk about reference to what was happening in Germany in the 1930s.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah. Poland, Poland done got partitioned. Poland, Poland was made part of Germany without their consent. Anyway, moving on.
00:42:02
Speaker
So now it's World War II. Did you know that the last war to end all wars was not the last war to end all wars? Well, it was the war to end all wars, but not this one, or the next one, or Vietnam, or either the Gulf wars, the war in Afghanistan, or the other war in Afghanistan. Yeah. So now it's World War
Canada's WWII Military Contributions
00:42:26
Speaker
II. As quickly as Canada entered the war in 1939, on its own abolition this time around,
00:42:31
Speaker
that's that was primarily symbolic it is worth saying well at this point the act of Westminster had already passed oh sorry the statute of Westminster had already passed and Canada was actually able to make its own military decisions but Canada's ties back to Great Britain were a lot different in the 1930s than they are today very much so like this was this was a war that we were always going to join
00:42:58
Speaker
much to the chagrin of the French Canadian population at the time, although one invasion of France later really changed their tune on that one in particular. Yeah, in both wars the Americans show up late, so you know. As they do. It alongside the UK, Australia, and New Zealand agree to jointly train aircrew for wartime service through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
00:43:22
Speaker
Popular with the William Line Mackenzie King government, popular with him at the time, it was seen as a boon to keeping as many Canadians at home during the war effort. In addition to training pilots, it also included the training of engineering, maintenance, radio, gunnery, and bombing to the tune of 130,000 total persons.
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, they weren't going to skip on maintenance. They saw what happened to the guys in the last episode. Yeah, they knew it was going to happen. They're not bowing. Yeah, they don't want to make their lives faint. This also resulted in training for persons outside of ANZCA UK, not Anzac. Anzcock? Oh, no, that doesn't roll off the tongue. This stuff doesn't roll off the tongue well. Isn't it usually like Canzac?
00:44:09
Speaker
No, it was, um, I haven't, the thing I was reading said ANZCA UK. That's so cursed. I know it looks so awful. We'll just say, um, the English speaking Commonwealth. So the outside of the English speaking Commonwealth, including, um, sorry, it included like countries as well as Belgium, France, Finland, the Netherlands and the United States. Yes. But, but, but no, no, no, but let's talk about some good guys. Okay. Let's talk about the troops.
00:44:43
Speaker
Billy Bishop! He's back! He's back. He's making a return for another episode. Who now dies as he fight this time? He does not. He is now an air marshal for the RCAF. Because of his clout, he led a clandestine operation to recruit Americans, while the United States was still politically neutral.
00:45:05
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was an avenue for a lot of Americans who went to fight early in the war was like hooking up with the RCAF or hooking up with expeditionaries. No, I don't know how to don't know really how to talk about that subject in particular, because that this is sort of like this sort of stuff is really foreign to me because I never really spent a lot of time studying around
00:45:30
Speaker
like military stuff. It's not, it's not my strong suit. But what I was going to mention is, and this is something I'd love to talk about and find an excuse for, and historical canon will never do a moment about this. But Kleine-Stein operations, while the Americans were neutral, also happened in the First World War. And one famous example is where the British Columbia government bought, I think it was like two or three submarines from a wharf in Seattle that were originally supposed to go to Chile.
00:46:00
Speaker
And so for a brief period of time, the provincial government of British Columbia illegally had a military. Ah, yes. Bring back the fucking British Columbia militia Navy. Well, so I don't know the specifics off the top of my head, but there was like a lot of- We could station the Minnesotias.
00:46:26
Speaker
Pray tell, how do you get a summary to a Soyuz? Eyes more referencing our new story. I know, but how would you get into these? They're not small. Yeah, but one of our listeners is now Googling, can you get to a Soyuz from the sea, technically? Yeah, really? Climate change and a bunch of comet sitting in the ocean, possibly.
00:46:51
Speaker
That's an applicable large portion of the way, but you hit a problem when you hit the assuius part of the journey. If you can get a submarine through Fraser Canyon, I will give you a million dollars. Well, you would go through Fraser Canyon, we'd go up the Columbia.
00:47:06
Speaker
Is the Columbia even deep enough to have a proper submarine? Not underwater, no. But these aren't submarine submarines. These are like Entrezé boats. These are boats that can go underwater. Good fucking lord. I'm pretty certain that you're going to run across. No, there's actually one big reason why you'll never get a submarine up the Columbia. What?
00:47:32
Speaker
There's like too many fucking dams on it. Oh, yeah, there's a bajillion dams, but we're there in the 1930s. I guess, yeah, that's that would have already been New Deal shit. Yes. So anyway, Billy Bishop had, you know, done what he had done.
00:47:50
Speaker
So going back to what we were talking about, many were trained on the previously mentioned Tiger Moth planes before graduating to more modern aircraft. Canada was the primary focus of the project due to its hospitable climate, being neighbors to the American industrial centers, lack of enemy aircraft being able to get deep into the country, and also being close enough to the European theater of war.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yeah, being able to train like in Southern Ontario in Northern Ontario and also crucially in the prairies was a huge boon because it covered most of what you would come across in the European theater. Yeah. And also Australia is too fucking far to go do any of this work.
00:48:31
Speaker
While Australia is also filled with flora and fauna that want to kill you. Eh, it's not that bad. This resulted in thousands upon thousands of buildings being built for aerospace use. That included things like fuel tanks, new water mains, and sewage systems as well. And a lot of other supporting infrastructure.
00:48:51
Speaker
Now, going back to what you were just talking about, one airport of note for Tamaric and I is Boundary Bay Airport. That was actually built to train pilots on Tigermoss and as well, Adversary International Airport. Yeah, that's what exactly this is like. How do we train people to fly near like really tall, jaggedy mountains? I always build a fucking airport for training out in like the Frasier Valley.
00:49:15
Speaker
Home defense was split between two commands, Western and Eastern. The Eastern command was to protect the coast of the Atlantic, including defending against German U-boats and keeping shipping lanes open. So remember in our Blue Nose episode, we were talking about German U-boats. That's what I was making reference to.
00:49:33
Speaker
Yes, they're very dangerous to all of your schooners. The Western Command was lighter until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the attack had occurred, it resulted in a larger squadron being deployed to the west, including defense of the Aleutian Islands. Defense with an asterisk on it. Yeah, the Aleutian Islands in World War II were, um, yeah.
00:49:57
Speaker
What if there's a war going on, but only one side participates at a time? Well, that's actually kind of where we get into the Japanese fugo balloon bombs, which actually were a problem. Only one of them was ever successful. These Japanese fugo bombs were basically hot air balloons that were
00:50:19
Speaker
Were they hot air or helium balloons or hydrogen? There was something anyway. These were just sent across the ocean and only one was ever successful and that was when they killed people in Florence, Oregon, somewhere in Oregon in 1945. That said, there's probably a whole bunch of them kicking around in BC. There was one found in Lumbee in 2014 and another one in McBride in 2019. And it's a little terrifying because McBride and Lumbee are fairly inland.
00:50:48
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's that would have been their fate if they didn't actually if they didn't actually like detonate or like activate as they should have they probably would have just drifted until they hit something. Yeah. And like Lumbee is like McBride is like an hour's drive from the Alberta border and Lumbee is like what 30 minutes outside of Kelowna. Yeah, it's like deep in the interior actually little ways north of Soyuz.
00:51:14
Speaker
There you go, you can take a submarine to Lumbee. No, you can take a fugo to Lumbee. Your submarine's probably going to get stuck at one of the dams in the Columbia. That's fair. When the Soviet Union, this new country that we haven't mentioned at all in this episode, that's suddenly rather cool with everyone in the West,
00:51:33
Speaker
Needed assistance, the creation of the Northwest staging route permitted support to the Soviets from Americans with assistance from Canada via landing strips and communication towers in British Columbia and Yukon. This is the same program that led to the construction of the Alaskan Highway.
00:51:49
Speaker
Yeah, and obviously this would be a bridge that we would build to our comrades in the Soviet Union that would be everlasting and result in a prolonged peace between our peoples after having faced this common foe. Hey, how's that bridge being built across the Bering Strait going? As good as every other Soviet makeup project. Actually, the Bering Strait Bridge was us, wasn't it?
00:52:17
Speaker
Uh, no, the Russians tend to propose it every once in a while. And some of the Chinese, the Chinese wanted to, like about 10 years ago, build a maglev system over it. Oh, were we going to get roped into Belt and Road? That would have been sick. I don't know how I feel about a maglev being built through the Arctic Circle.
00:52:37
Speaker
Okay. All right. Look, listen to me, like, like, I'm going to make your point. Okay. Final listen. I'll make my argument. Uh, train from Vancouver to Bruges via the trans Siberian railroad. You realize there's gauge changes that have to happen, right?
00:52:56
Speaker
Oh, at least like 20 of them. Yes. Yeah, sure. No, I was going to make the counterpoint is that the idea of building a maglev is stupid because that should be what you build after you run out of space to build high speed rail.
00:53:09
Speaker
Uh, yeah, but I'm assuming it was probably part of the whole like Chinese like mega project blitz that gave them all their high speed rail. Yeah. They just had to do something with all the money they had. Right. Otherwise the money train would run out. Yeah. Capitalism is kind of a weird system like that. Yeah. The RCAF ended up playing an important role in the battle of Britain, where in the summer and early autumn of 1940, the Germans attacked the United Kingdom.
00:53:36
Speaker
in an effort to force an early peace. This does overlap with the Blitz, but the Battle of Britain and the Blitz are kind of separate. That's a whole thing. The Blitz was when they just gave up and stopped sending fighters. Yeah, they just started bombing the shit out of London practically.
00:53:56
Speaker
The previously mentioned protection of shipping routes in the Battle of the Atlantic, which included many fights over the Mid-Atlantic, the Battle of Normandy, which ended German occupation in Western Europe in the summer of 1944, and they also provided support in North Africa, Southern Europe, as well as India and what is now Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. The RCAF were bombing the shit out of the Germans quite heavily by just two years into the war, thanks to the number six group, which is based out of Allerton Park in North Yorkshire.
00:54:26
Speaker
At its peak, they had 14 squadrons scattered about in all of Yorkshire across 10 different RAF stations. Like they were really close to each other. Like they were barely like 20 minutes drive from each other.
00:54:37
Speaker
On one particular campaign in 1944, 147 bombers were ordered to take off, but three could not. 17 were turned back just as they were over the North Sea, and nine were shut down. The next night, 125 bombers were then ordered to do the same. 11 failed to take off, 12 turned back, and 24 were shut down. And this is with all that money spent on maintenance that, like, reliability is an issue still? It's worse hell.
00:55:06
Speaker
Well, I mean, like the fail to take off is just like maintenance concerns, safety check fails, stuff like that. Yeah. And plus, like, you know, you only have so many airplanes, you're going to take risks and hope that nothing bad happens. Right. Yeah. It's like if if there's a risk that a door is going to blow off when you're just carrying, I don't know, a bunch of passengers on a commuter flight versus, you know, a bunch of high explosive bombs, you want to err on the side of safety.
00:55:31
Speaker
Poor leadership was cited as the reasons for the failure of the campaign and the obvious lower morale. So new leadership was brought in and the group changed its tactics to target France, which was much closer than to fly to than Berlin. I noticed earlier I did not mention that the campaign was to fly all the way to Berlin, but that's what they were doing.
00:55:49
Speaker
It was actually going back because I realized I messed up what I was trying to say is that they changed their taxes to just go and bomb France and not fly to Berlin. But this allowed Canada to lay the groundwork for Operation Overlord, which was the Battle of Normandy as previously mentioned. You mean it wasn't Canada didn't lay the groundwork for Operation Overlord by getting massacred at DF?
00:56:14
Speaker
I thought it was DF that did it. Historic of Canada, you cowards, do a DF episode. The DF raid was two years prior, though. Yeah, so by the end of World War II, nearly 10,000 Canadian bombers were dead. However, the world was finally at peace. And since it was now peacetime, we did not need a big pesky military occupying a large portion of the Canadian budget. This is definitely the last time that this thing that has already happened will happen.
00:56:41
Speaker
Canada was the fourth largest air force in the world just to put things in perspective.
Post-War Military and Cold War Beginnings
00:56:46
Speaker
It was also one of the largest navies too at this point. We were like the second or third largest navy also, but most of that was like small ships that we inherited from various surrendered nations and like a lot of convoy escorts. Like it wasn't a powerful like empire projecting navy, but it was very big.
00:57:05
Speaker
Spoils of war. Why was it spoiled so much? Because I think a lot of them were like retired, like, like surplus British ships that they couldn't bother to maintain at war time, stuff like that. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, as mentioned earlier, which was used to train all of these pilots and everybody associated with them, was discontinued. All ranks of the RCAF were initially cut by 25%, but then by 90%.
00:57:30
Speaker
By 1947, the RCAF went from 250,000 persons strong to 12,000. That's a bit of a downsize. That's a bit of a cut. Then again, this is post-war Canada, so all those people got good union factory jobs and probably did okay.
00:57:52
Speaker
And also, they went from 50 squadrons to five. As you'd expect. I mean, it's peacetime. Yeah. In the same year, the RCAF got their first helicopters, which served in training and search and rescue operations. We haven't mentioned helicopters simply because they just didn't really exist until this point. And fundamentally, they work the same way as airplanes. The RCAF also provided support for expeditions to the Arctic, which is still kind of their job.
00:58:19
Speaker
Yeah, the Arctic is such a fucked up topic. Canada's Arctic, where Tamarack is the most land back they ever have been about land back. However, by 1948, it was obvious that the Soviets, you know that really cool country became friends with in the war.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, that we're going to have a forever peace with because we faced a common enemy and like truly came together in our mutual humanity. Yeah. Well, we're not going to be long term pals with them. And in 1949, Canada became a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, aka NATO, a group established to be the no Soviets and later Russians club.
00:58:57
Speaker
Literally, an unrelated tale, but one of the first things that like current and also previous Russian president Vladimir Putin tried to do when assuming power was join NATO. That's not the first time it happened. It almost happened. And I'm going to bring that up in the next episode. Well, it wasn't Russia the first time that it happened. Whatever. Who's the dominant group in the Soviet Union?
00:59:26
Speaker
That would be the Supreme Soviet, the legislature of all the peoples in the great union of Soviet social republics. You're positive about that one? Well, I mean, that's not how it says in practice. That's just what it says in the Soviet Constitution I have on my shelf. This would mean that we were embarking on the Cold War. And one of the reasons for-
00:59:54
Speaker
One of the reasons why Canada was not aligned with the Soviets actually has to do with the Igor-Gojenko affair, which is a lengthy topic, not for this episode, but to put it lightly, there's an incident that happens in Ottawa that reveals an entire Soviet spying ring. It just became out of the open. Long story short, we almost became a neutral party in the Cold War.
01:00:17
Speaker
except for the fact that our previous neutral stance ended up with us being heavily infiltrated by spies on all sides. But the Russians, but the Soviets got caught first. Yeah, it's the Igor-Kryzhenko affair is something we're talking about. And I might find an excuse to talk about it at some point. And of course, this means that this episode is over. And we have to wait until the next time to talk about the Cold War and why we went out of our way to build an intercepting aircraft to take on the Russians.
01:00:47
Speaker
Sorry, the Soviets. I'm going to keep correcting you on this one. We know as the fucking Russians. It wasn't just the Russians. Disproportionate about, you might have to cut this due to historical inaccuracy, but I'm pretty sure a disproportionate amount of their air force were actually like non Russians. Well, this portion of its program was out in a fucking Kazakhstan. Yeah. I know this.
01:01:14
Speaker
And I think the primary base of their air force and their recruiting regime was mostly done out of Ukraine, the Ukrainian SSR. Was it? I guess it sort of makes sense because Ukraine's terrain is fairly flat. A lot of their Russian pilots died in the Second World War. That's true. Russia really got its ass handed to it. Very much so. Yeah, and they're still paying for it today, demographics-wise.
01:01:41
Speaker
Yes, the demography of the demographic results of the Second World War still hitting us today. What are you talking about? It had no impact on geopolitics. Yeah, the defining moment in basically this unipolar era of American dominance was rooted in the Second World War. Pretty much. Well, I think that's a podcast for today. That is a podcast. What did we learn?
01:02:11
Speaker
What did we learn? Shit. I forgot to ask that question. We learned nothing. This is the middle episode. The learnings will be next episode. That's where we learn things. We learned that you can turn beaches into DC ports, which has nothing to do with the Avro Arrow.
01:02:29
Speaker
Um, yeah, so next episode will be on the, um, uh, on the average hour. We didn't even discuss in the last episode, what the next episode would be, but that's because we're just going to be talking. Wait, we did. We actually thought instead of we're finally going to talk about why we got a Dif and bunker. Yes. Uh, the next episode for realsies is about the time where Canada kind of did fault tech from fallout. Christ.
01:03:18
Speaker
Alright, well, goodbye everybody! Bye!