I have known Michael for over 20 years and photographed him on various occasions, both for personal family images and for business. It was great to spend time at Vintage Wings shooting for a local magazine. The place was full of history and showed his love of flight and pilots.
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Yes...Elizabeth, Michael is truly a gift to Ottawa. His high flying career was but a stepping stone to the heights this facility reaches. If you are ever in Ottawa, we must go by together...
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!
My my...that pretty well describes me to a tee...lol
I saw that, thinking, more of your prepared mind turning Chance to Fate