This post was submitted by Rory M., one of our summer students, who continues his association with the museum even as he is back attending classes at Brandon University.

In the museum workshop, beneath the original WWII era chalkboard artifact created by Greenway school in Winnipeg, lies the in progress fuselage of an aircraft known as the Fairey Battle – carefully assembled by thousands of hours of work by dedicated volunteers at the CATPM. While for many, the Battle is not an aircraft associated with WWII such as the sleek Spitfire, reliable Tiger Moth, or imposing Lancaster; the aircraft has an interesting history, and today it is one example of living history at the CATPM.

Beginning its service in the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, the Fairey Battle was a hallmark of a modern transition of new aeronautic innovations into the war. A single engine, all metal light bomber powered by the Rolls-Royce Merlin Engine (which would be used in aircraft such as the Hawker Hurricane, the Spitfire, Lancaster, and Mosquito), the Fairey Battle was designed for daylight bombing with a crew of three, however functionally lacking the requirements of speed, altitude, and general power.

The hope for this aircraft to be successful was soon shattered in combat over France in 1939-1940, in which the aircraft suffered devastating losses. Slow compared to many developing enemy fighters, the aircraft lacked basic protections for even low-risk attacks. Though hopes were high for this aircraft, it was quickly withdrawn from combat.


However, the story of the Fairey Battle was far from over. As the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan began to sprout across Canada in schools such as #12 SFTS in Brandon, nearly 740 of these aircraft were sent to schools to be re-utilized as trainers. Utilized for the training of navigators, pilots, gunners, and bombers, like many training plan aircraft the skills that were acquired on the Fairey Battle were applied on many combat aircraft overseas. While at first considered as a complete failure for combat, many RCAF service members gained vital skills on these aircraft that made them successful through the plan.

Ultimately, like many of the aircraft from the war, very few aircraft remain today. Most Fairey Battle were scrapped, because unlike aircraft such as the Harvard they had no functional use for the RCAF, and most of their parts and plans were either repurposed or destroyed, only surviving in the photographs. This scarcity is ultimately what makes the build of this replica at the CATPM so fascinating. In the workshop – volunteers are recreating a replica Fairey Battle from the ground up, using their own experience in engineering, teaching, and handy work with models, drawings, and research to hand create every structural component. This labour intensive process is not as streamlined or efficient as when these aircraft would have first been built, however the hard work that they put into restoration is just as thorough as wartime engineers and tradespeople, to build beautiful works of wartime innovation. 

Visitors who enter the workshop at the CATPM therefore not only get to witness an exhibit of the museum, but rather the recreation of history. Facing the same challenges of aircraft assembly nearly 90 years ago, the friendly volunteers are happy to share their processes of the Fairey Battle with you, or your students. While this aircraft was not a legendary and successful bomber, it is a way of appreciating the history of the Training Plan and the hard work of the CATPM’s volunteers.