The single most confusing thing about Winnipeg is that the air force base and the international airport are the same aerodrome. The Air Board established a station on the site in 1922 as a winter base, and RCAF Station Winnipeg opened officially in April 1925, making it one of the first air force bases in Canada. The civil field grew up alongside it as Stevenson Field, named for Captain Fred Stevenson, and the two have shared concrete ever since.

The consequences are practical. There is one ICAO code, CYWG, for military and civilian traffic alike. Runway 18/36 is 11,000 feet long and 13/31 is 8,841 feet; a third strip, 07/25 at 4,500 feet, is closed. A Hercules taxiing out for a search and rescue tasking shares the movement area with scheduled passenger jets, and the military ramp sits on the far side of the field from the terminal. Nobody would design it this way now, but it has worked for a hundred years and saves the Crown an airfield.

The second confusion is geographic. Air force flying training in Manitoba mostly happens at Southport near Portage la Prairie, which is a separate aerodrome with its own code and is home to 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School under 15 Wing Moose Jaw. Winnipeg trains people too, but in classrooms and simulators and in the back of a Dash 8, not on a runway of its own.

The base is also physically split by history. After unification in 1968 the old RCAF station became CFB Winnipeg (North) and was merged with the army’s Kapyong Barracks as CFB Winnipeg (South). Kapyong closed in June 2004 and its land became the subject of a long negotiation with Treaty One First Nations. What is left is a base of more than 2,900 people, about 650 of them local civilians, on the north side of an international airport.

1 Canadian Air Division has an odd history. It was formed on 1 October 1952 in Paris as the operational command for Canada’s air forces in Europe, growing to four fighter wings across France and Germany on the Canadair Sabre. It was disbanded on 31 July 1994 as the European commitment ended, and reactivated exactly three years later, on 31 July 1997, in Winnipeg, gathering several separate air command groups into a single operational-level formation.

What it does now is command the Royal Canadian Air Force in action. Eleven of the thirteen wings report to it. It is simultaneously the headquarters of the Canadian NORAD Region, the Canadian half of the binational air defence command, which means the same staff that generates a maritime patrol sortie over the Atlantic also runs fighter alert against an aircraft approaching the Arctic. Its headquarters staff numbers about 600 regular and reserve members, and the Combined Aerospace Operations Centre on the base is where the tasking is actually done.

Alongside it sits 2 Canadian Air Division, which owns individual training for the air force: the flying training schools, the ground schools and the Canadian Forces School of Survival and Aeromedical Training on the base, where aircrew learn to survive an ejection over the prairie in January and are put in the altitude chamber. There is a logic to putting both divisions in the same city, and there is also an accident of geography: Winnipeg is in the middle of the country and has the runways.

That concentration is why 17 Wing looks unimpressive from the perimeter fence and matters a great deal. The aircraft on the ramp number a handful. The people in the buildings run everything the air force does, and a personnel shortfall that the Chief of the Defence Staff has described publicly as a crisis is felt here first, because headquarters posts are the ones that get left empty when squadrons have to be filled.

435 Squadron formed at Gujrat in India in November 1944, flying Douglas Dakotas over Burma in support of the Fourteenth Army. Its badge carries the chinthe, the half-lion, half-dragon figure that guards Burmese temples, and its motto is Certi Provehendi, Determined to Deliver. It was disbanded in April 1946, reactivated three months later at RCAF Station Edmonton, and moved to 17 Wing Winnipeg in 1994 when Edmonton closed.

What made it unique was fuel. From 1992 the squadron took delivery of CC-130H Hercules fitted for air-to-air refuelling, and from 1993 it was the only Canadian unit able to put fuel into a fighter in flight. The first operational mission, on 11 February 1993, was to support the interception of a hijacked Lufthansa Airbus A310. After that came Operation Southern Watch from Kuwait in 1998, the 79 days of Operation Allied Force over Yugoslavia in 1999, Operation Noble Eagle continuously since 2001, and Operation Mobile over Libya from Sicily in 2011.

The equipment is a pair of Cobham Mk 32B-751 pods that pass fuel at up to 1,136 litres a minute down a hose extending 78 feet. The squadron offloads two to three million pounds of fuel a year, mostly to Canadian fighters on exercises, and at one point its refuelling crews were away from home 32 weeks out of 52. The squadron marked 25 years of the role in 2018, and in 2019 its commanding officer was openly describing the end of the CC-130H tanker capability as the loss of what made 435 distinctive.

The other half of the job is search and rescue, and it is the bigger one. The Trenton search and rescue region, which 435 shares with 424 Squadron, is the largest in Canada: from Quebec City to the British Columbia and Alberta boundary and from the American border to the North Pole. The squadron holds 30-minute readiness on weekdays and two hours at nights and weekends. It was the first Canadian unit to land an aircraft at Jacmel after the Haiti earthquake of January 2010, and it is now converting to the CC-295 Kingfisher, having already acted as the swing force that helped convert Comox, Trenton and Greenwood to the type.

402 Squadron began at Stevenson Field on 5 October 1932 as No. 12 Army Co-operation Squadron, was renumbered No. 112 in November 1937, went to Europe in June 1940, became No. 2 Squadron RCAF in December 1940 and finally No. 402 Squadron at RAF Digby in March 1941. It flew Hurricanes, then Spitfires from 1942, and finished the war having claimed 49 and a half aircraft destroyed, including nineteen in April 1945 alone and five V-1 flying bombs.

It reformed at Winnipeg on 15 April 1946 as a reserve fighter squadron, received the City of Winnipeg title in September 1950, and flew de Havilland Vampires and Canadair Silver Stars before becoming a transport squadron in 1957. In the late 1980s it took on the de Havilland Canada CT-142 Dash 8, a navigation trainer with an enlarged nose radome that earned it the name Gonzo, and it has been teaching airborne navigation ever since.

The modern role is air combat systems officers and airborne electronic sensor operators — the people in the back of a maritime patrol aircraft or a helicopter who run the radar, the sonobuoys and the electronic support measures. It also does ab initio training for Commonwealth and NATO partners, and in 2015 it absorbed 1 Canadian Forces Flying Training School. The squadron is a reserve unit with regular force members, which is an unusual arrangement for a training organisation of its size.

Its aircraft are the next to go. Under Future Aircrew Training, 402 Squadron at 17 Wing is one of the three sites named in the SkyAlyne contract of 29 May 2024, and its CT-142s will be replaced by Dash 8-400s fitted with a modern mission training system. That is the last piece of the Winnipeg flying picture to change: a Hercules squadron becoming a Kingfisher squadron, and a 1980s navigation trainer becoming a networked classroom with wings.

Winnipeg’s claim on Canadian aviation is older than the RCAF. Western Canada Airways flew from Stevenson Field in the 1920s, opening the bush routes north; the field is named for Captain Fred Stevenson, a First World War pilot who died in a crash in 1928. When the Air Board put a station here in 1922 and the RCAF opened its own in April 1925, the military and the bush pilots were using the same ground and often the same people.

The war made it a hub. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan trained more than 130,000 aircrew in Canada, and Winnipeg was one of the places where the paperwork, the supply, the repair and the ferry inspection happened, as well as flying training. No. 2 Air Observer School and the Central Navigation School carried on afterwards, graduating over 5,000 foreign aircrew, and Winnipeg’s speciality in navigation training has never really lapsed: it runs directly into 402 Squadron’s work today.

17 Wing as a designation is older than its current incarnation. It was first formed as RCAF (Reserve) Wing Winnipeg on 1 October 1950 to administer 402 Squadron, was redesignated the following year, and was folded into the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve in 1968. The wing was reborn at CFB Winnipeg on 1 April 1993, and 435 Squadron and 1 Air Movements Squadron arrived in 1994. The base received the Freedom of the City in October 1992.

The heritage is kept on site and next door. The Air Force Heritage Museum and Air Park at 17 Wing holds the wing’s collection, and the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada on the airport took a Cobham refuelling pod from 435 Squadron on 31 May 2018.