By Ragnar Haagen

Historical airshow takes flight next summer

Sep 29, 2011 | 11:45 AM

Prince Albert is set to host an airshow of historic proportions next summer.

The city will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the first airplane that took off and landed safely at the city's Summer Exhibition of 1912. The event is called “Centennial of Flight” and will coincide with other centennial events planned for the summer.

“It was 100 years ago that the first aircraft was flown out of the exhibition grounds,” said Harris May, chairman of the Historical Society. “It was a Curtis Golden Flyer. They assembled it on the exhibition grounds and flew it off and made a circuit of the city and landed back in the exhibition grounds.”

In keeping with the tradition of that first flight, the airshow will only have historical planes from the 1930’s through 1960.

“It is a historic flight airshow,” said May.” There will be no air racing, there will be no aerobatics. These are historic aircrafts – we don’t want to stress the aircraft or the pilots.”

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Aside from the airshow itself, there will be many other events throughout the three-day event.

The library will host a film festival on the early days of flight and there will be a gala event at the E.A Rawlinson Center. The Historical Museum will show off the fuselage of an airplane and they will also have a flight simulator, created especially for this event, that will take show you how Prince Albert looked in the 1920’s.

“The topography of the area will include the military training base here as well as a couple other landing fields in the area,” said Debbie Honch, executive director of Prince Albert Tourism. “You’ll be able to fly over and basically see what the land was like in the early days.”

The event will run from Aug. 4 to 6 with planes coming from as far away as Wisconsin.

rhaagen@panow.com