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Shorty - An Aviation Pioneer: The Story of Victor John Hatton

by James Glassco Henderson

147 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-1705; ISBN 1-4120-3897-9; US$16.95, C$23.95, EUR15.95, £10.95

Victor John "Shorty" Hatton started his aviation career in a near fatal crash of an Avro 504K and ended it with another Avro aircraft, the Arrow. The story of his working life, from the First World War to the Cold War, is the history of aviation.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

Having survived the First World War in the trenches, Shorty Hatton started his aviation career in a near-fatal crash of an Avro 504K and ended it with another Avro aircraft, the Arrow.

In the intervening years he was a military pilot, bush pilot and test pilot. He taught fledgling aviators at Camp Borden. He survived forced landings on frozen lakes. He was the first to fly new air mail routes in an open cockpit plane. He tested newly-built Hawker Hurricanes before they joined the Battle of Britain and an early version of the "flying wing".

He may well have been the only person to work on all three of the only fighter aircraft ever developed in Canada: the FDB-1 Gregor, the CF-100 Canuck and the CF-105 Avro Arrow.

Six of the aircraft he flew are in the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa. Others are in museums in Canada, the United States and Great Britain.

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About the Author

Jim Henderson was born in July, 1929 in Burlington, Ontario, too late to enjoy the affluence of the Roaring Twenties but in plenty of time fo learn about the Great Depression from his stockbroker-turned-chicken farmer father. His adolescence was spent in Brantford, Ontario where he joined the Militia. A Reserve Army commission while still in school led, after employment as a broadcaster at CKPC in Brantford, to full time military service with the Regular Army.

Early in 1950 he became editor of the Stoney Creek News, near Hamilton, but in the autumn of 1950 the far distant trumpet prevailed and he joined the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery bound for Korea. In Korea he was granted a regular commission.

During his military career he served in various artillery, staff and United Nations appointments. He comanded 2nd Surface Missile Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery and 2nd Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. He is a graduate of the British Army Staff College, Camberley, Surrey and the United States Armed Forces Staff College, Norfolk, Virginia. He also served on the faculty of the Canadian Forces Command and Staff College, Toronto.

On returing from the Canadian Forces in 1978, he joined the news staff at CHAY FM radio in Barrie, Ontario eventually becoming the station's News Director and Operations Manager.

From 1994 to 1999 he produced a quarterly publication, Military Digest, which was circulated by subscription. He has contributed regularly to two military publications, and is a member of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies and the Canadian Aviation Historical Society.

This is his second book to be published by Trafford. His first, The Nuking of Happy Valley, is a collection of amusing anecdotes from his military career.

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Excerpts

    The bright blue June sky was reflected in the huge lake that seemed to stretch forever, like an ocean, outside the left window of the tiny aeroplane as it droned along, hugging the shore line. At times the land beneath hardly seemed to move at all as the single 200 horsepower engine fought the strong prevailing westerly winds which buffeted the small machine and made it difficult for the pilot to handle the metal cup half full of tea, poured, with some spillage, from the large thermos tucked behind the seat. He glanced at his watch and confirmed his suspicions that, with Kingston just behind him, the flight from Montreal was taking longer than he had calculated. Still there was no cause for concern. Even though it would take more than four hours to deliver the mail in the bags tucked in the cabin behind him to the Canadian Express Airport in the north part of Toronto it would still be much faster than the train.
    The man at the controls was happy, never happier than in the cockpit and his concerns about future employment seemed to be behind him. At the age of 30 he had been through the war, a severe period of unemployment and a career as a military pilot during which he had survived a major crash. Now his fortunes had taken a turn for the better. He could not completely envision the future in this strange, large country which was just beginning to be opened up by civil aviation but he knew that it would be exciting. On the 15th of June, 1929, Shorty Hatton was at peace with the world.

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    Shorty eased CF-ACO, a Fairchild 71, lower and lower over the Franquelin River just north of the village of the same name. As she slowed and dropped into the valley with the mountains looming on either side, Emile Patraud, just behind him in the aircraft, struggled the mail bag to the window he had just opened and waited for the signal. As they came out of the valley Shorty banked steeply in a sharp right turn, straightened out and then, right over the village, called out to let it go. Patraud pushed the bag out and, before he could get the window closed to shut out the bitterly cold winter slipstream, Shorty made another sharp turn, this time to the left, taking the machine out over the St. Lawrence just in time to avoid the mountains looming up on the west side of the settlement. Once out over the water another turn to the east pointed them on the next stage of their mail run to the villages along the north shore of the St. Lawrence.

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    On a cold, crisp day early in the new year of 1940, Shorty climbed into a sleek, modern fighter aircraft at Bishop's Field in Fort William and, after carefully checking everything, ran up the powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin III engine and roared off into the Northern Ontario sky. For thirty minutes he crossed and circled over the heavy bush that grew almost to the edge of the airfield and then, satisfied, brought this wonderful aeroplane back to earth. It was January 10th and the plane was P5170, a Hawker Hurricane Mark I; the first of 1,451 that would be built in Canada over the next four years.

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Catalogue Information

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