Aviation documentary about as interesting as Prairie train ride

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/10/2009 (5903 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One might rightly assume that a documentary series celebrating Canada’s 100 years of aviation would take viewers up, up and away, but the sad fact of the matter is that the CBC/Doc Zone feature Canada Above and Beyond never quite takes off the way it should.

The four-part series, which begins tonight (8 p.m., CBC) and continues through the next three Doc Zone instalments, seeks to examine this country’s love affair with airplanes by exploring aviation’s history and measuring the way our lives have changed since the first Canuck took flight.

To reach their documentarial destination, the series’ makers dispense with the usual chronological approach to storytelling and focus instead on a series of personal tales, hoping that the sum total of these mostly folksy forays will be a satisfying overview of Canadian aviation.

It works only sometimes; many of the stories are more flighty than focused, leaving the viewer with a sense of disconnection that’s vaguely reminiscent of the feeling you get in an airport waiting lounge when the word delayed pops up on the departures screen beside your flight number.

Canada Above and Beyond begins promisingly, with a quick transition from a scene depicting a six-year-old boy’s excitement about his first airplane trip to an examination of Canadian aviation’s beginnings, on the frozen surface of a Cape Breton lake on Feb. 23, 1909 — the day the legendary Silver Dart made its first faltering flight aloft.

The magnitude of the achievement is underscored by footage of what happened when a group of aviation buffs tried to mark the Silver Dart’s 50th anniversary by taking flight in a replica of the original wood-framed plane (it crashed), and by the perplexed expressions on the faces of a group of retired engineers and aviators trying to re-create the Dart in time for the first flight’s 100th anniversary earlier this year.

But then the series’ flight path gets redirected, first to Canada’s "Top Gun" fighter-pilot school in Cold Lake, Alta., then to an airfield in the Arizona desert where civilians are invited to live out their dogfight dreams, and then back in time to the beginnings of Canada’s commercial/passenger airline business.

Despite some interesting characters and pithy anecdotes, there’s a decided lack of cohesion to Above and Beyond‘s first hour — a story about nine-year-old Emma Houlston’s 1988 attempt to become the youngest pilot to fly across Canada is interesting, but adds little to the overall narrative, and a snippet describing how air travel delivered young Bruny Surin from war-torn Haiti to a life in Canada that led to Olympic glory is far too much of a stretch.

The series’ second instalment, which focuses on pilots who fly in extreme conditions, fares slightly better, but still grounds itself from time to time by veering too far off topic.

The final two episodes deal with emergency-service aviation and folks who dabble in the daredevil aspects of flight.

For hardcore aviation buffs, Canada Above and Beyond will no doubt merit a must-see notation in the weekly TV schedule. But for the average ground-bound viewer, this series — despite its lofty intentions — is a bit like a train trip across the Canadian Prairies — several scenes that inspire awe, many drawn-out stretches that might make one inclined to nod off, and the overall feeling that the whole thing went on a bit longer than it should have.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca