On 22 May 1946, in a hangar at Downsview Airport just outside Toronto, a small all-metal trainer painted in pale yellow finished its last ground checks, taxied to the runway, and lifted off into Canadian spring weather. The pilot was Russ Bannock, chief test pilot for the brand-new de Havilland Aircraft of Canada company. The aircraft was the DHC-1 Chipmunk — the first aircraft designed and built entirely in Canada, and the type that would go on to train more pilots in more air forces than almost any other postwar trainer in the Western world.

Eighty years on, more than a thousand Chipmunks built between 1946 and 1956 are still flying somewhere in the world. King Charles III learned to fly in one. The Royal Air Force trained generations of pilots in them. Half the Commonwealth’s air forces flew them. And the design has aged so gracefully that there is still — quietly, in pockets of Canada, the UK, and Australia — a small new-build cottage industry producing parts and reconditioned airframes.

The first aircraft Canada ever built itself

To understand what the Chipmunk meant in 1946, you have to understand that no aircraft had ever been designed and built entirely in Canada before. Canada had built licence-produced Tiger Moths and Lysanders during the war. Canadian factories had assembled American-designed Hurricanes. Canadian engineers had improved British designs. But no aircraft — not one — had been conceived, designed, prototyped, and put into production in Canada under purely Canadian leadership. The Chipmunk was the first.

The decision came from de Havilland Aircraft of Canada’s general manager Phil Garratt and the company’s board, who in 1945 looked at the postwar aviation market and concluded that the existing Tiger Moth biplane trainer was finished. The future of pilot training was an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with a tandem-seat cockpit, an enclosed canopy, and the kind of handling that would prepare a student for the modern aircraft they would graduate to. The Tiger Moth could not be that aircraft. Something new was needed.

A Polish émigré and a Canadian factory

The design work was led by Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, a Polish aircraft designer who had been chief engineer at the PZL state aircraft works in Warsaw before the war. Jakimiuk had escaped occupied Poland through France and arrived in Canada in 1942. He had spent the war years at de Havilland Canada working on Mosquito wartime production. When Garratt asked who could design the new trainer, Jakimiuk was the obvious choice.

The result was a clean-sheet design that took every lesson the wartime trainers had taught and applied it. All-metal stressed-skin construction (instead of the Tiger Moth’s wood-and-fabric). Low-wing monoplane (instead of the biplane). Enclosed cockpit (instead of the open one). Tricycle landing gear? No — Jakimiuk kept the tail-dragger configuration because it forced students to develop proper rudder discipline. Fixed pitch propeller. Simple, reliable Gipsy Major engine.

What he achieved was an aircraft that handled like nothing else of its size — light on the controls, responsive in roll, predictable in stall, and forgiving enough that a student could fly it solo within 10 hours of instruction yet sophisticated enough that an aerobatic display pilot could find genuine performance in it. The Chipmunk could spin, roll, loop, hammerhead, and snap manoeuvre. It could also land safely on a 400-metre grass strip in the hands of a 17-year-old on his first solo.

A trainer for half the Commonwealth

The Royal Canadian Air Force placed the first major order. The Royal Air Force followed in 1949, ordering 735 aircraft to be built by de Havilland England at the Hatfield and Hawarden factories. The Portuguese Air Force licence-built 60 at OGMA. The Royal Thai Air Force, the Royal Belgian Air Force, the Egyptian Air Force, the Iraqi Air Force, the Lebanese Air Force, the Royal Saudi Air Force, the Irish Air Corps, the Burmese Air Force, the Cypriot Air Force, the Israeli Air Force, the Jordanian Air Force, the Sri Lankan Air Force — virtually every postwar Western-aligned air force that needed an elementary trainer in the 1950s and 1960s bought, leased, or operated the Chipmunk.

The RAF flew the Chipmunk as its primary elementary flying trainer until 1996. Every RAF pilot from the late 1940s through the 1980s — fighter pilots, bomber crews, transport pilots, instructors, station commanders — began their flying training in a Chipmunk. King Charles III, the late Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince William all flew Chipmunks at some stage of their RAF training. Thousands of civilian pilots learned to fly in the same aircraft after it became surplus to military requirements.

The Chipmunk in 2026

Eighty years after first flight, the Chipmunk is one of the busiest interwar designs still flying. The civilian register lists over 500 active airframes worldwide — a survival rate of roughly 40% of total production, which is extraordinary for any aircraft type. The British Civil Aviation Authority counts more than 120 active Chipmunks on its register alone. The American FAA counts another 80. Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands each support active fleets.

The aerobatic community loves the type — it is cheap to operate, simple to maintain, and capable of a proper aerobatic display sequence. Vintage aviation groups treasure it as the perfect “first warbird” — easier to fly than a Harvard, cheaper than a Spitfire, more honest than a Yak-52. There are now several restoration shops in the UK and Canada producing newly manufactured Chipmunk parts to keep the fleet flying for another 80 years.

The DHC-1 was Canada’s first aircraft. It taught half the Commonwealth to fly. It is still flying. And on 22 May 2026 — eighty years and one day after Russ Bannock’s first flight from Downsview — somewhere in the world, a 17-year-old is climbing into one and learning to taxi, take off, and land. The lineage goes on.

Sources: de Havilland Canada company archives; Royal Air Force Museum historical records; Aeroplane magazine archives; This Day in Aviation.