Aviation Memorabilia Newsletter

Terry Baker, co-founder of the NetLetter scours the internet for aviation related Trivia and Travel Tips for you, our readers, to peruse.

Further to the article regarding the homebuilt aircraft in NetLetter #1380.

Chinese teenagers from BC built their own aircraft. Extracted from a Vancouver Sun article dated July 24, 1936.

Boys built own plane. Talent shown by BC Chinese brothers.

Vancouver’s most ambitious aviators are Robert and Tommy Wong, of 124 Market Avenue, BC born Chinese brothers.

They have built their own airplane in their spare time, and done it so well that it has been licensed by the government as a safe aircraft.

Yesterday I found them in the loft of the Boeing Aircraft, putting together the wings and fuselage to their gleaming silver bird, a little Pietenpol monoplane with a 27 foot wingspan.

At first it was hard to believe that Robert was a 17 year old student of Vancouver Technical High School but that faded into significance when beside that Tommy was only 14 and a pupil in the Strathcona Public School. It was the plane which made them seem much older.

Here is part of the latest information.

Built in Chinatown in '30s, piece of aviation history found in a trailer. From an article by Kevin Mitchell, Vancouver Sun issue November 17, 2023.

A small, single-seat built by the hands of two teenage brothers, touched clouds more than 8o years ago. Then it went on a long & strange journey, down back roads and prairie fields.
It rebounded from owner to owner, travelled western Canadian highways in a series of trucks spent several years in the ceiling of a sawmill, and the last quarter-century in the inky blackness of in a 53 foot trailer, in a compound, on a field outside Saskatoon.

In the airplane world it’s an ultimate barn find," says Campbell Harrod, an airplane restorer from Hamilton who recently purchased the Pietenpol Sky Scout long believed to have been lost, with plans to someday return it to the sky.

The Pietenpol is significant because it built by the Wong brothers, Robert and Tommy, using mail-order instructions in their Vancouver Chinatown apartment in 1935 and 1936.

The brothers later established and ran Canada's largest flying school in Toronto, training more than 8,000 pilots and sending them into the sky.

Harrod was able to buy that long-hidden airplane because of the efforts of Don MacVicar a Hamilton man who's always relished a good mission.

The lost machine caught his fancy after he learned of its possible existence from Harrod, while they worked on a project involving a 1956 Piper Apache, which once belonged to the Wong brothers.

The ever-tenacious MacVicar searched everywhere. Phone calls, emails, gumshoe detective work. He traced a path from Vancouver to Saskatchewan, doing all of it from his home over a span of a few years.

It was an impossible task, the proverbial needle in the haystack, until the day it was exposed to the light, battered but vivid. The original registration CF-BAA is emblazoned in big letters across the fuselage and on the wings. MacVicar saw the photos sent by somebody connected to the owner, and he felt the chill.

"It was the shock of the century" says MacVicar. "A container under the snow in Saskatchewan. What a story" says Evelyn Wong, Robert’s daughter.

Harrod, for his part, has a marathon restoration in front of him. He still can't fully believe the plane was found. It's a little winged miracle: a thing to savour.

Additional Info:

canadianflight.org/content/the-wong-brothers-and-pietenpol

thestarphoenix.com