A wartime plant looking for an owner

In southern France, when a forest burns, people do not say a water bomber is on its way. They say the canadairs are coming. The yellow-and-red amphibians skimming the Mediterranean to scoop up water have made a Montreal company’s name into an everyday French noun. The company began as a problem. In wartime, Canadian Vickers ran a government-built plant at Cartierville Airport in Saint-Laurent, turning out Canso flying boats, the Canadian PBY. Building ships and aircraft at once was more than Vickers could fund, so in 1944 it asked Ottawa to take the plant off its hands. The government created a new company, Canadair, to run it.

Merlins on a Douglas airliner

Its first president was Benjamin W. Franklin, at the head of a small group of former Canadian Vickers managers. The new firm finished the Canso contract and took on a bold conversion: the Douglas DC-4 airliner re-engined with four Rolls-Royce Merlins, the same engines as the Spitfire and the Lancaster. The result, the North Star, first flew on 15 July 1946 and was faster than the standard DC-4 — and, in service, reliable but famously noisy. Seventy-one were built for the RCAF, Trans-Canada Air Lines and others. That September the American Electric Boat Company bought Canadair, and when Electric Boat became General Dynamics in 1952, Canadair went with it.

Sabres for NATO

The Korean War made Canadair a fighter factory. It built the North American F-86 Sabre under licence, later fitted with the Canadian Orenda engine, and between 1950 and 1958 1,815 Canadair Sabres rolled out of Cartierville. They equipped the RCAF in Europe, the RAF and the West German Luftwaffe, and Pakistan’s Sidewinder-armed Mk 6s were still the backbone of its air force in the 1971 war with India. Then came 656 Nene-powered CT-133 Silver Star trainers, 200 CF-104 Starfighters for Canada plus 140 F-104Gs for allies, the CP-107 Argus maritime patroller and 240 CF-5 Freedom Fighters.

The Tutor, the Yukon and the tilting wing

Canadair also designed its own aircraft. The CL-41 Tutor began as a private venture; Ottawa ordered 190 in 1961, and the Tutor trained RCAF pilots for decades and has flown with the Snowbirds display team, scheduled to keep flying until November 2026, 66 years after its first flight. The CL-44 freighter, developed from the Bristol Britannia, could swing its entire tail aside for loading — though the prototype could not at first be pushed out of the hangar because its fin was too tall for the doors. The CL-84 Dynavert tilted its whole wing and engines through 100 degrees to take off vertically; four were built, and two crashed without loss of life.

The plane that became a word

The CL-215 began as an idea for a floatplane transport and became something new when Quebec’s forestry service asked for a better way to drop water on fires. It first flew on 23 October 1967, and Flight International noted it was the first aircraft designed to fight fires as its primary role. It scoops water while skimming a lake or the sea, so it can attack a fire again and again without returning to base. Canadair built 125, and from 1993 the turboprop CL-415 followed, 95 in all. The line passed to Viking Air in 2016 and lives on as the De Havilland Canada DHC-515.

The Challenger gamble

The bet that nearly killed the company came from Bill Lear, creator of the Learjet, who drew a wide-cabin business jet called the LearStar 600. Canadair backed it at the end of 1975 and bought the whole project in April 1976, the year the federal government nationalised Canadair from General Dynamics. Renamed Challenger, it first flew on 8 November 1978. A test aircraft crashed on 3 April 1980, deliveries ran three years late, and by mid-1982 only 54 had been sold against 150 planned. Canadair wrote off C$1.1 billion of development costs, which the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine called the largest corporate write-off in Canadian history.

Bombardier’s foundation stone

In December 1986 the Mulroney government sold Canadair to Bombardier, the Quebec snowmobile-and-railway group, for C$120 million. It proved one of the great bargains in aviation. Bombardier returned Canadair to profit and used it as the base for buying Short Brothers, Learjet and de Havilland Canada. The Challenger it had nearly gone broke over was stretched into the CRJ regional jet, which first flew in 1991, and by 2018 more than 1,000 Challenger 600-series jets had been built. The Canadair name has since faded from Bombardier’s branding, but Plant One still stands in Saint-Laurent, though Cartierville Airport itself has been redeveloped.

Továrny

• Plant One · Cartierville Airport, Saint-Laurent, Montreal — Government-built wartime Canso plant; the building survives though the airport has been redeveloped
• Dorval · Montreal-Dorval (now Trudeau) Airport, Quebec — Production location; later final assembly of Challenger jets
• Mirabel · Mirabel Airport, Quebec — Production location

Lidé

• Benjamin W. Franklin · first president, 1944 — Led the group of former Canadian Vickers managers who formed Canadair
• Bill Lear · Learjet founder — Conceived the LearStar 600 that Canadair bought in 1976 and turned into the Challenger
• Brian Mulroney · Prime Minister of Canada — His government privatised Canadair by selling it to Bombardier in 1986

Rekordy a prvenství

• CL-215: first aircraft designed from the outset as a water bomber, per Flight International (c11)
• CL-44D: first production aircraft able to swing its entire rear fuselage aside for loading (c1)
• CL-89 and CL-289: among the first surveillance drones to enter service with several armed forces (c1)
• Tutor: flown by the Snowbirds and predecessors since 1967, with retirement scheduled for November 2026 (c10)
• Challenger write-off of C$1.1 billion, described in 1984 as the largest corporate write-off in Canadian history (c6)