1929 De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Downsview Head Quarters
Image Credit: De Havilland Aircraft of Canada
Major Geoffrey de Havilland was a prominent designer of British military aircraft during the First World War. He spent the postwar years (1920s) trying to stay in business by modifying military planes for civil use in the London suburb of Edgeware.
In February 1925, de Havilland flew a small two-seat biplane for the civil market designated the D.H. 60 Moth powered by a four-cylinder engine. The aircraft was called the “Moth” because of de Havilland’s interest in entomology. The Moth was the right aircraft at the right time, and it proved an instant success. The aircraft caught the public imagination and started the flying club movement throughout the world. The Moth established de Havilland as one of world’s leading aircraft manufacturers. When fitted with a D.H. Gipsy engine, the DH.60 became known as the Gipsy Moth.
In 1927, de Havilland Aircraft of England sold seven Moths to its Canadian customers. These aircraft airplanes were shipped from England directly to the customers for local assembly, but the company recognized it needed to establish a facility in Canada that could support sales, aircraft production and aftersales support.
The De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited (DHC) was established on March 5, 1928 with R.A. “Bob” Loader from DH in England as its first General Manager. He opened an office in the Stirling Tower at 372 Bay Street in downtown Toronto and met with Frank Trethewey, a member of the newly formed Toronto Flying Club, about using part of the family’s estate in Weston to assemble Moth aircraft.
An agreement was quickly reached and on March 30, the first two Moth’s arrived in a crate from England for assembly in shed beside the CPR and CNR mainline tracks. An airfield was established on the north side of Holmsted Drive (later named Trethewey Drive) was named De Lesseps Field in honour of Count de Lesseps, who made the first flight over Toronto from the field in 1910.
On April 27, the Toronto Flying Club and Toronto businessman Leigh Sheppard received DHC’s first two flyaway Moth deliveries.
Early Canadian customer input led the British company to replace the wooden fuselages of the Moth with welded steel tubing faired with wooden stringers covered with fabric which was better suited to Canadian operations and climate.
As sales grew in 1928, it soon became obvious that De Lesseps Field was too small to accommodate future growth as it received major aircraft orders from the Ontario Provincial Air Service, Royal Canadian Air Force, Department of National Defence (for allocation to flying clubs), commercial airlines and private customers.
In September 1928, a new site was selected for the company on level farmland in Downsview, about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) northeast of Weston at the corner of Sheppard Avenue and Dufferin Street, alongside the mainline CNR tracks. The company purchased a 70-acre (28 hectare) lot in April 1929 and contracted with the architects Mathers & Haldenby to build a new brick and steel office and hangar.
In anticipation of the move to Downsview, Mathers and Haldenby designed the second wooden hangar constructed in Weston in sections so it could be moved to Downsview in 1929 which had the word “Moth” painted on its roof to distinguish the de Havilland Airport from three other airfields also fronting Dufferin Street (Canadian Air Express, Toronto Flying Club and Barker Field) that were also active in the 1930s!
The sales boom that sustained DHC for its first three years began to taper off in 1931 as a result of the Depression and government budget cutbacks.
In 1937, the company won a contract to build an “all-Canadian” version of the DH 82 Tiger Moth trainer to meet RCAF specifications which included an enclosed cockpit and a heater for flying in cold Canadian winters. The Tiger Moth was the first complete aircraft DHC built in Canada.
To support Tiger Moth construction, DHC doubled the size of its brick and steel hangar and office building at Downsview to accommodate the increased work.
All totalled, DHC delivered 439 new aircraft of 18 different models – including 28 Canadian-built Tiger Moths – between 1928 and 1939 which firmly established the company as the largest single supplier of civil and military aircraft in Canada prior to the Second World War. Pre-war employment peaked at 195 people during the pre-war Tiger Moth contract.
– 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.