Flight

The NFB's 27th Oscar®-nominated film.

Director Bill Mason's short film focuses on his friend and fellow filmmaker, Blake James. In his never-ending quest for freedom, Blake pilots his own plane. This film is Mason's view of his friend as a "hobo of the skies," but it is also an adventure that beckons the viewer to come along for the ride.

This documentary is about Bob Diemert of Carman, Manitoba, and his dream of building the world's next great fighter plane. His worldwide reputation as a genius at restoring "warbirds" enables him to finance his dream. The Defender is a lively, sometimes wild and funny, tale about a remarkable, modern-day folk hero.

For more background information about this film, visit the NFB.ca blog.

A small prairie town has few secrets but in Balgonie, Saskatchewan, Bill Gibson had one. Each night, when most folks were home asleep, Bill was busy in his workshop. You see, Bill had a dream. He was building a flying machine. This short puppet animation tells his story.

This feature documentary follows the development of Canadair's super-executive jet. A totally new type of aircraft, it is faster, cheaper to fly, and more comfortable than any other business jet. Would it make it off the drawing board and into the air? The film captures the spirit of the Canadian air transport industry and its attempt to compete with its American counterparts.

For more background info on this film, visit the NFB.ca blog.

This short 1944 documentary is an account of the development of air transport during wartime and a review of issues to be solved in regulating international civil aviation. The film traces air routes established to connect Russia with Canada and the United States and highlights the contribution of air transport to world unity.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

This short documentary invites us to Göteborg, Sweden, where the 23rd world championship match for builders of free-flight model aircraft was held in July 1971. The film follows the successful flights and the failures, as competitors, including a Canadian team, attempt to get their fragile handmade craft airborne by whatever means.

This short documentary celebrating a half-century of flight (the first human flight, powered by the Wright brothers, took place on 17 December 1903) examines the state of aviation in the late 1950s. The question, at that juncture, no longer was whether men could fly, but how fast and how far, and the film describes and reviews the top aircraft of the day: turbo-jets, stratocruisers, and missiles that outstrip the speed of sound. Part 3 of Salute to Flight, a 3-part film series about aviation.

This documentary short takes you on a tour of Trans-Canada Airlines’ maintenance shops in Winnipeg before taking off for a trial flight on the British-built Vickers Viscount airplane, the first propeller-turbine airliner.

This short film takes a look at Saskatchewan’s air ambulance service, organized and operated by experienced flyers who provide speedy hospitalization and treatment to the ill and injured. Within 15 minutes of receiving a desperate phone call for help from a remote area, a plane is on its way, guided to the patient with the help of landmarks such as a coal bin or a thin column of smoke on a northern lakeshore.

In this short documentary, Fred Davis visits the De Havilland Aircraft factory in Toronto, circa 1954. He interviews two test pilots, talks to one of their wives, and goes for a ride in a new Beaver airplane.