Flying Club celebrates 75th anniversary, community connections

July 22, 2021 · 0 Comments

By Rob Paul

Tucked on the countryside of McLaughlin Road in Caledon is a large area of land that doesn’t take long to figure out why it’s there. The buzzing in the air is a dead giveaway, and the planes lining the tarmac only cement the obvious.

The Brampton Flight Centre and Flying Club have been a linchpin in Peel for decades, helping to teach students how to fly and offering a space for those passionate about aviation to continue to master the art of flight.

This year, the Brampton Flying Club reached a major milestone in its history, 75 years of being in the community and committed to those with a love for cruising through the clouds.

Founded in 1946, the club has become one of Canada’s most well-known and connected aviation hubs. It owns and operates the Brampton-Caledon Airport, the largest privately owned airport in the country.

The non-profit cooperation is owned and operated for its members—which has grown to over 1,000—with 90 employees. It’s spread out over 240 acres with two paved runways and 162 hangars and approximately 200 private aircrafts.

Showcasing and encouraging interest in Canadian aviation history is one of the club’s biggest initiatives and it recently restored its de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth. Built in 1942, the British biplane served as the club’s first training aircraft.

Also on the club’s grounds it the Great War Flying Museum—whom they partner with and help fund—which houses one of the largest displays of WWI aircraft in Canada.

It’s grown plenty over the years, to the point it had to move to its current location as the Town of Caledon began to grow and Brampton Flying Club General Manager Allan Paige hopes to see that growth continue.

“A lot of people around here don’t even know there’s an airport, but we’ve been here (in the current location) since 1970,” said Paige. “We started in ’45 at Queen and McLaughlin and as the city started to grow around the airport, so they bought the land here and started building in ’69. It was really just a flying club with a small flight school, and it’s grown from there. The runways have been added to, we have more building—we own and operate an aircraft maintenance shop, pilot shop, aviation fuel facility, and a restaurant. We just keep building more buildings for our members. Now we’re one of the largest flight schools in Canada.”

When you see the infrastructure, planes, and students lining the runway, it makes one wonder how a flying club in rural Caledon grew to this point. Paige says it’s all about the standing and respect they’ve built in the aviation community over decades of existence.

“We’ve got a very good reputation for professional training,” he said. “We started to focus on not only private pilots who fly recreationally, but we started to focus on training for commercial. We do a lot of training for students who are getting their commercial license, so basically when they come out of here, they’re ready to start flying with the airlines.”

The Brampton Flying Club has become a key cog in the aviation system in Ontario. It is one of the premier flying schools and offers all kinds of opportunities for students to reach for the sky with their flying dreams.

“We’ve got self-pace—if you want to come to learn to fly either privately or for commercial you can do it at your own pace—or we have a college program that’s very structured over 14 months and they typically go from having zero experience to having 220 hours and can move right into the right seat of a regional airline. At any given time, we’ll have 300 or 400 students. We have about 25 of our own airplanes and two simulators. We actually have a partnership with Jazz and Porter, and we work with them and our top graduates are given interviews with them and have a chance to get hired by them.”

This type of long-term success doesn’t happen without supporting partners in the community says Paige. It goes beyond just relationships in the world of aviation, but ensuring they work with the Mayor and Council to be the best they can for Caledon.

“The aviation world is small, everybody knows everybody,” he said. “We’re involved with national organizations and work with them and other industry groups to make sure we’re all on the same page. Our relationship with the Town of Caledon is very good. Mayor (Allan) Thompson is a friend of the airport—his son actually learned to fly here and worked here for a while. Our local MPP Sylvia Jones’ husband flies here too, so we have very good local connections in the Caledon community. Our local Councillors Johanna Downey and Christina Early, have good relationships with us too. We work with the Town on planning things that will involve electrical towers—we work with them and the IESO (Independent Electricity System Operator) and they basically deal with all the electrical infrastructure in Ontario.”

Paige also notes the environmental efforts of the club to ensure the habitat and beauty of Caledon are upheld. They partner with local authorities on land-use planning to ensure the environmental safety of the surrounding community.

Striving to continue to be a key member of the Caledon community, the club helps promote the region through events such as youth flight camps, sightseeing tours, and it’s Airport Day. It also helps local organizations, including raising $120,000 for the Bethell Hospice Foundation.

“We try to be as community oriented as we can be,” Paige said. “In the past we’ve supported fundraisers with the Bethell Hospice—for years we had a light up the runway walk to raise funds for them. In the community, we’re often involved in local events with things like raffles for a free airplane ride. And typically, every September—not this year because of COVID—on the first Sunday after Labour Day, [Airport Day is] open to everyone in the community. People can go on a sight-seeing flight, there’s cars and motorcycles, face painting, all sorts of things.

“We like to bring the community in and make them aware of us and have fun. Let’s face it, airplanes are noisy, so, we try to work with the community and we’re really sensitive to the community around us. We want to be known as a positive influence in the area. We hope to keep going for another 75 years!”