In 1929 the federal government bought 960 acres of farmland near Trenton for a Royal Canadian Air Force station. The location was chosen for being midway between Ottawa and Toronto, with the added possibility of working seaplanes off Lake Ontario. The base opened in August 1931 and the Governor General, Lord Bessborough, laid the cornerstone under the motto "Per Ardua ad Rem". It was meant to be a supporting station to Camp Borden, which was then the home of Canadian military aviation. By June 1937 it had replaced Borden as the primary flying training centre and Borden was pushed towards technical and trades training.

The first flying units at Trenton were No. 1 Fighter and No. 3 Army Cooperation Flights, on Siskins and Tiger Moths. Then the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan arrived and Trenton became its largest training centre: the RCAF Central Flying School, No. 1 Air Navigation School until 1942, No. 1 Flying Instructor School and No. 1 Composite Training School all worked here, with No. 6 Repair Depot alongside them and a relief landing field at Mohawk.

That inheritance is still on the ground. Eight buildings or groups of buildings at Trenton are on the Register of the Government of Canada Heritage Buildings, including the 1930s administration building, headquarters buildings 22 and 23, the officers’ mess, Hastings Hall and four hangars. Trenton looks like what it is: a 1930s air station that kept being given more to do.

After 1945 the base turned to transport and search and rescue. Aircraft from Trenton flew the Korean airlift, and through the 1960s the station became the training home for the CC-130 Hercules, the CH-113 Labrador, the CC-115 Buffalo and the CC-137. No. 102 Composite Unit became a rescue unit after the war and eventually merged into the reactivated 424 Transport and Rescue Squadron in 1968, the year unification renamed the station CFB Trenton.

Four transport squadrons and a rescue squadron sit under 8 Wing. 429 "Bison" Squadron flies the CC-177 Globemaster III, the strategic heavy lift; it was reactivated in August 2007 for the purpose, having been disbanded in 2005. 436 "Tusker" Squadron flies seventeen CC-130J Super Hercules, serials 601 to 617. 437 "Husky" Squadron operates the CC-150 Polaris and its Airbus CC-330 Husky replacement. 426 "Thunderbird" Squadron trains the crews, and 424 "Tiger" Squadron holds the search and rescue standby with Hercules and CH-146 Griffons.

The Globemaster changed what Canada could do without asking. Before 2007 the country routinely chartered Antonovs to move its own equipment. The first CC-177 was delivered on 8 August 2007, and the fleet grew to five. On 12 October 2018 the lead aircraft, CC-17701, passed 10,000 flying hours while resupplying the forward operating locations in the north, and 8 Wing held a ceremony for it.

436 Squadron’s lineage is the more interesting one. It was assembled at Gujrat in India on 9 October 1944 and flew its first official mission on 15 January 1945, when seven Dakotas carried 59 tons of supplies for 33 Corps of the Fourteenth Army in Burma. Its aircrew voted to eat dry rations between sorties rather than lose time to cooked meals, and its engineering officer cut engine changes from three days to two. By the time it moved to England on 31 August 1945 it had logged over 36,000 flying hours and moved more than 29,000 tons of supplies and 15,000 troops, casualties and passengers. It arrived at Trenton on 11 August 1971 and has not left.

Two national functions also live here and are almost never mentioned. The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Trenton, jointly staffed by the air force and the Canadian Coast Guard, coordinates aircraft and marine rescue across central and Arctic Canada. The Canadian Mission Control Centre monitors the Cospas-Sarsat satellite system for emergency beacon transmissions anywhere in Canada’s search and rescue area of responsibility. Neither flies anything; both decide who does.

On 18 April 2002 four Canadian soldiers were killed near Kandahar when an American F-16 dropped a bomb on their night live-fire exercise at Tarnak Farm: Sergeant Marc Léger, Corporal Ainsworth Dyer, Private Richard Green and Private Nathan Smith. They were the first Canadian combat deaths in Afghanistan, their repatriation at Trenton was broadcast live, and people began gathering on the Highway 401 overpasses to watch the hearses pass.

The pattern that followed was fixed and formal. Remains were flown into 8 Wing, usually aboard a CC-150 or a CC-177. A ramp ceremony was held on the tarmac, with the family present and a bearer party carrying each casket from the aircraft. The convoy then drove about 170 kilometres west along Highway 401 to the Office of the Chief Coroner in Toronto for autopsy. Veterans, serving members, firefighters, police officers and families stood on the bridges, often in red, with flags. Nobody organised it.

A 22-year-old from London, Ontario named James Forbes raised a petition asking the province to name the stretch after the dead. Ontario accepted it: the designation was announced on 24 August 2007 and the signs were unveiled on 7 September. The transport minister, Donna Cansfield, said there were no barriers to making it happen. Other provinces and territories later made similar dedications on their own roads.

The numbers should be stated plainly. One hundred and fifty-eight Canadian Armed Forces members died in the Afghanistan mission between 2002 and 2014, along with seven Canadian civilians. The last member killed, Master Corporal Byron Greff, died in Kabul on 29 October 2011 and was repatriated the following month. A Canadian National Railway overpass that pedestrians had used to watch the convoys was demolished on the night of 11 June 2011, and a second structure at Bowmanville followed in July, which caused more local feeling than a bridge demolition normally does.

Trenton’s operational record is mostly other people’s emergencies. In 2011 aircraft and crews from 8 Wing supported Operation Mobile, Canada’s part in the intervention in Libya; the commitment was large enough that Exercise Maple Flag at Cold Lake was cancelled that year to release the resources.

The hardest recent job was Kabul. Operation AEGIS, Canada’s contribution to the American-led air bridge out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, ran through August 2021 with CC-130J Hercules, CC-150 Polaris and CC-177 Globemaster III aircraft. By 26 August Canada had evacuated approximately 3,700 people from Kabul airport, in a matter of weeks, as one of thirteen nations flying the bridge. The aircraft, the crews and the air movements organisation all came from Trenton.

The pandemic arrived at the same gate. On 7 February 2020, 215 Canadians repatriated from Wuhan — 176 on one aircraft and 39 on a second chartered by the United States government — were brought to CFB Trenton for a fortnight’s quarantine. Another 185 arrived from Wuhan on 11 February. On 21 February, 131 Canadians from the Diamond Princess were screened at Trenton before going on to Cornwall, and on 10 March, 228 from the Grand Princess began a 14-day quarantine at the base. By 24 March, thirteen of the repatriated citizens at Trenton had tested positive.

The base also does disaster work at home, from British Columbia wildfires to international humanitarian airlift, and that has a cost. The Quinte International Air Show, revived in 2016 after a thirteen-year gap and drawing close to 80,000 people, was cancelled in 2018 because the wing could not spare the effort; it returned for the air force centenary over the Canada Day weekend in 2024 with an estimated 50,000 visitors and the Frecce Tricolori.

Colonel David Russell Williams commanded 8 Wing and CFB Trenton from July 2009. He was a decorated transport pilot who had flown VIP aircraft for heads of state. On 7 February 2010 he was interrogated by the Ontario Provincial Police and confessed over the following ten hours to the sexual assault and murder of Jessica Lloyd, and then to the sexual assault and murder of Corporal Marie-France Comeau, a member of 437 Squadron at Trenton. Investigators found detailed notes and photographs at his home and evidence of at least 82 break-ins to steal underwear.

On 21 October 2010 he was sentenced to two life sentences for first-degree murder, two ten-year sentences for the other sexual assaults, two ten-year sentences for forcible confinement and 82 one-year sentences for breaking and entering, all concurrent, with no parole eligibility for 25 years and no access to the faint hope clause. He was stripped of his commission, rank and decorations on the recommendation of the Chief of the Defence Staff, and his uniform and equipment were destroyed. It remains the worst thing that has happened to the Canadian Armed Forces’ reputation from inside its own officer corps.

The other is a death in the line of duty that is easy to miss. On 27 October 2011 two men were stranded in an ice field in a small aluminium boat about eight nautical miles southeast of Igloolik, Nunavut. A search and rescue CC-130 Hercules from Trenton dropped three search and rescue technicians to them. Conditions in the water were worse than the parachute drop allowed for. An hour after the Cormorant arrived, its crew located the unresponsive body of the team leader, Sergeant Janick Gilbert. He was pronounced dead at the health centre in Igloolik.

The flight safety investigation examined the personal life support equipment carried by search and rescue technicians and the regulations governing rescue activity, and made recommendations, several of which had already been implemented by the time it reported. Gilbert is commemorated by an annual memorial parachute jump. The two men he was sent to save were rescued.