In 1932, the Fokker Universal C-FAHJ, embarked on it’s first ever medical flight. It was a plane with no navigation, no communication, and no GPS — only equipped with a compass and an old school map. It was equipped with floats.
It flew in and out of Cooking Lake Airport, the oldest operating airport in Canada and was a major staging point for bush pilots during the early pioneering days of aviation in Canada.
Jim Johannsson, a board member with Cooking Lake, said the plane was special.
“It was made of metal tubing, fabric and plywood, and a little aluminum. Towards the front of the airplane, the pilot sat outside the airplane, higher than the passenger compartment and the passenger sat below and behind the pilot in a very tiny compartment used for passengers or freight,” Johannsson said.
The historic plane transported its very first patient 90 years ago this summer.
Gladys Hill was an expectant mother who was close to delivery. She and her husband Walter Hill, a pharmacist owner, were about to have their second baby and due to some complications, they needed to hitch a ride from their home in Fort McMurray to Edmonton.
Johannsson said the remarkable story deserves to be shared.
“There is so much history here,” Johannsson said.
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“Walter and Gladys Hill were running the pharmacy in Fort McMurray in 1932. They were starting a young family and they were advised from their doctor to travel to Edmonton for more advanced medical care.”
The flight was an eventful one.
“The flight was going well until they ran into bad weather,” Johannsson said, noting the pilot’s position exposed to the elements partially outside the fuselage. “Just when you didn’t think things could worse, the excitement started.
“Walter is in the back cargo area with Gladys and he yelled through peephole to the pilot that Gladys as starting to experience pains and could he hurry up. The pilot, Lewis Leigh, put the throttle to the wall and sped up the airplane, landing at the nearest dock at Cooking Lake and a young baby was born about 10 minutes after landing,” Johannsson said.
Historians with the Cooking Lake Airport spent time to track down the baby, hoping they would be fortunate enough to find him.
“It was an amazing stroke of luck we were able to track him down. Ninety years is a long time.”
That “baby” is Ken Hill. The soon-to-be 90-year-old lives with his wife, Diane, in Calgary.
“I was born nearing mid-afternoon on Aug. 29, 1932. And Aug. 29 happened to be on a Monday — this Monday is my birthday,” Hill said.
He likes to reminisce about his unusual welcome to the world, recalling stories he’s heard from his parents and reading about his own birth in the flying memoir And I Shall Fly written by pilot Lewis Leigh.
“He and Linny had a cabin on the south shore and he gunned the plane straight to the dock,” Hill said. “Dad and Linny, and Gertrude (Silke) and my mother went into the cabin. The ladies and my father delivered me. Because there was nothing to attach or tie off the cord, dad pulled a hair out of mother’s head and tied the cord.”
They had made the baby’s first clothes from pillow cases.
The Leigh family became a special part of the Hill family.
“Lewis became by godfather and Lynn (his wife) became my godmother, and I was named Kenneth Roland Leigh Hill,” Hill said.
Hill will have a special celebration for his 90th birthday on Aug. 29 with friends and family.
“I thought it was nice to be a little unique, which it was,” Hill said.