Fifteen jet airliners sat on the apron at Saskatoon for close to two decades, going quietly to pieces in Saskatchewan winters. They were Fokker F28 Fellowships, and they had once belonged to Canadian Regional Airlines.

As of this week they are gone. aeroTELEGRAPH reported on 12 September that the fleet has now been completely dismantled — with the exception of three aircraft that enthusiasts managed to get out first.

It is a small story about a forgotten aeroplane, and it happens to sit at the centre of one of the most consequential accidents in Canadian aviation history.

The Jet That Could Land Almost Anywhere

The F28 was built for a job that barely has a name now: jet service into small, rough, short-runway airports that had previously only seen propellers. Fokker gave it a high-set tail, engines mounted on the rear fuselage away from debris, and airbrakes that split the tail cone open like a clamshell. It could get into places a 737 could not touch.

That made it ideal for Canada, where the distances are continental and many of the destinations are small towns with modest infrastructure. Canadian Regional Airlines — the regional arm of Canadian Airlines — built a substantial F28 operation, reportedly at one point the largest in the world.

Then Air Canada acquired Canadian Airlines in 2000. Fleets get rationalised after mergers, and the F28s were surplus. They were flown to Saskatoon and parked. They never flew again.

Dryden, 1989

The F28’s place in Canadian memory is not really about route networks. On 10 March 1989, Air Ontario Flight 1363 — an F28-1000 — took off from Dryden Regional Airport in Ontario with snow and ice on its wings. It stayed airborne for 49 seconds, could not climb enough to clear the trees past the end of the runway, and came down. Twenty-four of the 69 people on board were killed.

What happened next mattered more than almost any other Canadian accident investigation. The federal government appointed Justice Virgil P. Moshansky as a commissioner of inquiry at the end of that March, and he declined to treat the crash as a pilot error case and stop there.

Moshansky’s report traced the accident outward: competitive pressure following commercial deregulation eating into safety standards; an aircraft scheduled to refuel at an airport that lacked the proper equipment; and Transport Canada permitting Air Ontario to expand into larger, more complex aircraft without catching the deficiencies in how it already operated.

The result was a wave of change to Canadian air safety regulation, including new de-icing procedures. It is one of the clearest cases in aviation of an inquiry deciding that the organisation, not just the crew, was on trial.

Three That Got Away

Which is part of why volunteers cared enough to save some. The Time Air Historical Society in Alberta has been working for years to repatriate F28s from the Saskatoon line, hauling them overland by flatbed. One F28-1000 was brought to Lethbridge; another was moved to a society board member’s property in Vulcan County, where it sat in a field while restoration was planned.

Those efforts predate this week’s news, and they are the reason the number is three rather than zero. The rest of the fleet has now been cut up.

There is no great tragedy here. These aircraft were never going to fly again, and a row of decaying airframes is not a museum. But the F28 is now one of those types that has slipped out of the public mind entirely while still being, briefly, the reason a small Canadian town had jet service at all.

Period footage of a Canadian F28 getting airborne from Toronto in 2000, the year the merger sealed the fleet’s fate:

Sources: aeroTELEGRAPH (Benjamin Recklies), Commission of Inquiry into the Air Ontario Crash at Dryden, Global News, CTV News Calgary, Lethbridge Herald, Time Air Historical Society.