Meteorological Branch team members R.A. Shewchuck, E Stasyshyn and L. Goff discuss the mission during a flight in one of the C-54s.

Douglas C-54B CF-KAD (c/n 18356) has its four Pratt & Whitney R-2000 Twin Wasp engines run up at an unidentified location. The aircraft’s ice-reconnaissance work with the Canadian Department of Transport (DoT) was undertaken from Gander in Newfoundland, but there is no information on where our photographs were taken; it is more likely that it was at Downsview airport in Toronto. Note the Canadair Sabre cockpit mounted in the cockpit roof.

CF-KAD comes in to land on the 8,400ft (2,560m) runway at Gander having completed another successful mission. The C-54s were replaced by Lockheed 188 Electras CF-NAY and CF-NAZ, operated by Nordair Ltd of Montreal. The latter aircraft was also fitted with an observation dome similar to the Sabre cockpits fitted to the C-54s.

Navigator G. Bayliss takes solar observations during one of the long C-54 flights in 1968. Ten years later, sideways-looking airborne radar (SLAR) was fitted to the Electras and a de Havilland Canada Dash 7, enabling a 100km (60-mile) swath either side of the aircraft to be imaged and downloaded instantly via datalink to the icebreaker vessels below.

A member of the DoT’s Meteorological Branch team uses one of the C-54s’ starboard bubble windows to scan the ice fields stretching across the Gulf of St Lawrence during the winter of 1968-69. Kenting Aviation was established in 1947 as an aerial mapping and survey company using retired wartime bombers and transport aircraft specially converted for the role.

CF-KAE undergoes maintenance, probably in one of the hangars at Downsview. The transparent nosecone has been removed for access to the electronic navigation suite in the nose.

One of the two Kenting C-54s undergoes preparation for its next sortie, this view again showing the Sabre cockpit to good advantage. Today falling under the remit of the Canadian Ice Service, the “ice-spotting” task has been made considerably easier with the advent of satellite imagery, but a de Havilland Canada Dash 8 is still used.

Another photo of CF-KAD having its engines run up. The proximity of civilianised former RCAF Auster AOP.6 CF-NQC lends substance to the possibility that the series of photographs was taken at Downsview, as the Auster was based there during 1962-70.