The original Canso #9754 in service with the RCAF.
Image Credit: Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum
Knox Hawkshaw was born in rural Ontario on December 11, 1924, and served as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Postwar, he earned an engineering degree from the University of Toronto, then started a forty-year career with Field Aviation Inc. as an aeronautical engineer during which he shared his knowledge and expertise with people in over sixty countries.
In the late 1950s, Hawkshaw took the waterbomber concept developed by the Ontario Provincial Air Service to refill external water tanks mounted on the floats of the single engine DHC-2 Beaver and DHC-3 Otter and applied it to the much larger PBY-5 Canso amphibious aircraft. Hawkshaw designed a retractable scoop that filled a pair of water tanks installed in the hull of the PBY with 800 gallons of water as the aircraft “skimmed” the surface of a lake at high speed and the water dropped through a series of “bomb doors” in the aircraft belly. This meant that the aircraft could reload at the nearest water source.
The success of the “scooper” firefighting concept resulted in Field selling almost 40 PBY’s waterbombers to the Governments of Quebec, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and France and private operators in Canada, the US and overseas. In the mid-1960s, Hawkshaw began working with the OPAS (now OMNR) to develop scooper systems that were installed within the EDO and CAP floats on the DHC-2 Turbo Beaver, DHC-3 Otter, and DHC-6 Twin Otter to fight forest fires.
Then in the late 1960s, Canadair developed the CL-215 waterbomber and contracted Field Aviation and Hawkshaw to design the firefighting aircraft’s water scoops. Hawkshaw played an important engineering and development role at Field through a critical period in the company’s growth. As a recipient of the CASI McCurdy Award he was recognized by his peers as one of Canada’s pre-eminent aerospace engineers.
– Kenneth Swartz
Today, students from Centennial College, Toronto Metropolitan University, Queens University, McMaster University, York University and the University of Toronto are working together on collaborative DAIR projects, developing skills and helping to build an even stronger aerospace industry for Ontario and Canada.