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UPDATED: Sopwith Pup “Betty” arrives back in Langley

A pair of Sopwith aircraft from the Canadian Museum of Flight had their trip cut short.
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Al French brought the replica Sopwith Pup in for a flypast at the Langley Regional Airport Saturday, its return home from Vimy Ridge. (Matthew Claxton/Langley Advance)

Betty and Happy are back home again.

The two replica Sopwith Pup aircraft, which the Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley sent over to France for the 100th anniversary of Vimy Ridge, have arrived back in the Lower Mainland. But they’re here much sooner than expected.

The aircraft, nicknamed Betty and Happy, were constructed from specially ordered parts – essentially giant kits – by volunteers at the museum. They stitched on fabric wings, installed engines, and made the planes flightworthy over late 2016 into early this year.

Now the first of the planes has been reassembled after an overseas adventure and come back to Langley.

The first aircraft, nicknamed Betty (though the name Phyllis is painted on the other side of her fuselage) was flown to Langley by Al French. The plane was reassembled in Abbotsford.

He brough the Sopwith in for a low pass above the runways, skimming the tarmac, before circling and landing.

“Aerodynamically, it’s a 100 year old airplane, so it doesn’t have any of the refinements that make it easier to fly,” French said.

“The early aviators were almost like the earliest explorers,” French said. They didn’t know you needed oxygen at higher elevations, for example. “They really didn’t know very much about flying in the upper atmosphere.”

Despite that, young men with as little as eight hours of flight time were sent into combat on the Western Front during the First World War.

The Pups were expected to head overseas to Vimy Ridge for a flypast in April this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Corps’ victory there. They did get shipped over to France, but were unable to fly in the Vimy ceremonies because the existing engines didn’t have enough recorded flight time.

Following the failure of the first engines, and a hasty rebuild, the planes had just 10 hours of flight time each before heading to France, said Dave Arnold, a director of the Flight Museum.

Nevertheless, the trip wasn’t a total waste. They were well received as a static display at Vimy, said media relations officer Carla Deminchuk.

Arnold said about 8,000 Canadian students and teachers visited the exposition at Vimy Ridge and saw the Sopwiths, as well as the museum’s replica SE5A, which did fly over the monument to the battle and Canada’s war dead.

On their way home, the two replica war planes were going to be dropped off on the East Coast and spend the summer making their way cross-country with multiple stops across to help mark the country’s 150th birthday and raise awareness about the anniversary and the museum.

Ongoing mechanical issues, however, forced them to cancel from those plans, Deminchuk announced Wednesday.

“They are temporarily hangared at Abbotsford airport, undergoing repair,” she said.

It’s less a repair job and more of a reassembly, said Arnold. The planes had to be taken part to be shipped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.

They’re now being put back together, and all their systems tested for flightworthiness again.

“It’s not a trivial project,” said Arnold.

• Stay tuned for more details on this story in the online and print editions of the Langley Advance

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The “Vimy crew” of volunteers who worked on the project gathered for a photo with the returned aircraft. (Matthew Claxton/Langley Advance)
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Al French brought the replica Sopwith Pup in for a landing at the Langley Regional Airport Saturday, its return home from Vimy Ridge. (Matthew Claxton/Langley Advance)
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Al French brought the replica Sopwith Pup in for a landing at the Langley Regional Airport Saturday, its return home from Vimy Ridge. (Matthew Claxton/Langley Advance)
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Ray Fessenden and Dave Arnold checked out a piece of the aircraft’s wing on the Sopwiths months before they departed. (Langley Advance files)


Roxanne Hooper

About the Author: Roxanne Hooper

I began in the news industry at age 15, but honestly, I knew I wanted to be a community journalist even before that.
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