Warbirds pilot grew up inspired by veterans

Jeff Bell is responsible for flying eight wartime aircraft in Brandon.

The chief pilot at the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, Bell leads a team of volunteer pilots who take oldies like the 1943-built Boeing Stearman Kaydet to the air. His main responsibility is to ensure the wartime planes stored in Brandon are in good condition, follow regulations, and are flown properly.

“I consider myself lucky to get to come here and do this,” Bell told the Sun.

It’s been 10 years flying wartime planes. When asked why he does it, Bell said he grew fascinated for the period as a boy, living in a Winnipeg community with many war veterans.

His family home was in the Charleswood area of Winnipeg, where veterans had received special loans to purchase land and build homes. And so in living with neighbours, Bell said he heard stories all the time about the Second World War fighting and technology.

The neighbourhood barbershop was an example: it was a military barber behind the chair, and “his place was like the informal Charleswood legion,” Bell said. Going for a haircut, he would speak with men who had returned home from the frontlines with stories to share.

“I heard about what they did and it always seemed amazing to me,” Bell said. “The veterans that ran this program, I grew up on their stories.”

The program that kept popping up in conversation was the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, he said. Having grown up in air cadets, Bell was interested in these stories, and often heard them from a particular man on his street, a paralyzed veteran in his 70s, named John Riordan.

“All the kids in the neighbourhood kind of knew he was an airplane guy,” Bell said.

Riordan told of how he lied about his age, 15, to get into the program with his older brother and work in the ground crew in Brandon. He spoke of being caught and having to bow out for a year, and then participating in anti-submarine patrols off the coast of Newfoundland. The reason he was in the wheelchair, he said, was due to being electrocuted while working on a tower in Newfoundland and falling down, breaking his back.

The friendship planted the seed for a lifelong fascination with wartime aviation, Bell said. And the two visited Brandon’s Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum when Bell was 16, and Riordan was in his 70s.

The museum was located in a hangar that had once been operational as a military base, where pilots were trained to fight in the skies of the Second World War. Riordan had worked there as ground crew when he was teenager, and had even carved his name on the wall of one of the five hangars at the time.

Today, the museum in Brandon is devoted to that period. And the story lives on in Bell, who now spends chunks of time educating others about the program and flying aircraft that were used as part of it.

Before taking a seat in the cockpit of the musem’s Harvard Mk II plane in October, Bell commented that his wife’s grandfather had flown the plane in Gimli — not just the same make and model, but the very same plane that was sitting there.

Zoe McQuinn, director general of the museum, said she is extremely happy with Bell’s leadership for the seven volunteer pilots.

“His crew, all our pilots, love to joke but when he turns around and it’s time to be serious they all fall into place,” she said.

The reason he fits the role is because he has passion as well as professionalism, she said.

“He hides it a little bit, but he’s so good at sharing his passion for this,” McQuinn said. “He knows those planes inside out and backwards.”

Going forward, Bell said he plans to continue volunteering at the museum as long as he can, whether that’s 10, 20 years into the future. As a middle-aged man, there’s room for many more projects.

“As long as I’m able to,” Bell said. “We’re not done. We’re still acquiring airplanes.”

Next on the list for work is getting the museum’s incoming plane, a Noorduyn Norseman, which is in flying condition but stored in Flin Flon, back to Brandon and maintained.

Bell said he looked for Riordan’s name in the still-standing hangar door in Brandon, but to no avail, finding other names from the 1940s instead. He believes Riordan’s name was lost at the fifth hangar, which was torn down along with the other three. He attended Riordan’s funeral after the man passed in 2008.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com