"Eye-witnesses to the crash told how F-for-Freddie's rubber dinghy dropped out, inflated automatically and landed, as neatly and naturally as though something had gone wrong over the North Sea" so the local newspapers reported. Except it wasn't over the North Sea. It was in the middle of a cattle pasture and not far from a poultry farm on the prairie near Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It was certainly nowhere near anywhere a rubber dinghy would have been of any conceivable use. It was also thousands of miles away from the hostile skies of Europe where this particular aircraft had flown a record 213 missions before the war there had officially ended just two days before.

A few hundred yards away, what was left of the battle weary de Havilland Mosquito, nicknamed 'F' for Freddie, was still burning while the unimpeded prairie wind scattered the black smoke to nothingness...

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On February 19th, 1959, Władysław ‘Spud’ Potocki was test flying the sparkling white Avro Arrow RL-201 in the fair but chilly skies near Malton, Ontario. On that particular flight, the World War II veteran fighter pilot was testing the Arrow’s roll rates at Mach 1.7. While fast, it was still well below the nearly twice the speed of sound the sharp, delta-wing aircraft had already achieved on previous test flights. As aeronautical engineers like to say, the Arrow had ‘flown off the drawing board’. The celestial expectations for the all-new, Canadian-designed and built supersonic interceptor were being met or exceeded with each passing day …

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Building an off-world colony a few feet above the street.

The science fiction staple of abandoning a less desirable place for another, more desirable one has been around almost since the beginning of science fiction itself. After all, who can deny the appeal of a fresh start in a brighter, better place? It’s often a cautionary tale, the result of not having entirely thought through the consequences of environmental neglect or outright abuse. Lacking the ability, or will, to put that right it’s just easier to start over again in low earth orbit or better yet, another planet either real or imagined. This notion of the future was truly brought to life in Ridley Scott’s original Bladerunner in 1982...

Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was published contemporaneously. (photo: The CORE of the Plus 15 in Calgary, Canada, taken by the author.)