Global Air Routes

This short documentary offers a reflection on the development of the North, where towns are increasingly being remade in the image of the South and bush pilots are slowly becoming obsolete.

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

This short animated film is about Wop May, one of Canada's leading bush pilots in the 1920s.

This documentary from the Salute to Flight series links the barnstormers and bush pilots who explored Canada's vast hinterland with the aviation heroes who flew the Bolingbrokes, Ansons, Mosquitoes and Hurricanes of World War II.

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.

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.

This documentary paints a vivid portrait of the bush pilots who soar daily above the boreal forests and tundra of Quebec's Great North. Who hasn't dreamed of flying? Head in the clouds, light-hearted giddiness, a surge of adrenaline, exhilarating freedom. Bush pilots of northern Quebec, the last of a dying breed, experience these sensations every day aboard their hydroplanes. Lakes, rivers, forests: this majestic North of open spaces and infinite silence is all theirs.

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.

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 wartime documentary describes Canada’s airmail service in 1944. Every night, Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 6 crossed Canada from Vancouver to Montreal with its load of blue and yellow airmail bags, playing an important role in Canadian life and business. Three times a week, cargoes bound eventually for London, Moscow, Lisbon and Paris were flown to Scotland. Letters and parcels for prisoners of war, diplomats, business executives and soldiers went into a thirty-ton Lancaster. When decisions were vital and information had to travel quickly, Canada's air service proved its value.

This installment in the Canada Vignettes series depicts the Canadian Forces Air Demonstration Aerobatics team at work.