When I was a child, more than 50 years ago, our next-door neighbour in the village drove a pickup truck that started life, circa 1930, as a Model A Ford. Mr Boyd, a retired farmer, used to pick me up in that old truck and take me wherever I wanted to go when he saw me walking on the road, and on one of those trips he told me about the very first time he saw an aircraft: a Curtiss Jenny that buzzed his family's barn. It probably took off from Rockcliffe, east of Ottawa, which was one of exactly two aerodromes possessed by the then newly formed Royal Canadian Air Force.