Ottawa Commercial Photographer Blog

I’ve directed a number of fellow flight enthusiasts to VWC since discovering it in 2011. For the first time I’ve been engaged by a museum over a very prolonged continuum of time – and that’s coming from an artist, an historian, an architect, who knows museums! Its conception was just brilliant; every project on the agenda generates more interest and enthusiasm at a fairly “gut” level, for its niche group of followers. Imagine what it means to a young person, that she could actually fly off in one of these beautiful machines…it’s fairy-tale like! Most importantly, VWC’s “living” museum of actual flight is what constitutes the brilliance of its design as a museum of flight: flying itself is the source of inspiration for the young whom we bring to fully engage history itself. The museum’s success is in this visceral involvement – layering over familial stories, reminiscences; the names, the planes themselves, childhood memories: Harvards, Hercules, 104′s, the Beaver, in and around thour northern lakes. Visitors to the Gatineau hangar think of Dad as a teenaged LAC technician back in the 30′s, “doping” the canvas-covered wings at Aldershot, or Trenton. Many of us think again of those 9am Beaver River High School classes on a 30-below RCAF Cold Lake morning – it always had to be “Silent Reading” period, owing to the deafening roar as multiple planes warmed up on the tarmac – then heading up, over the DEW Line; whump, the 104′s shrieking past the Primrose Rocket Range. That’s only one vignette of many – bloody brilliant that Michael Potter!

I saw that, thinking, more of your prepared mind turning Chance to Fate