Spartan Air Services Ltd. - A Brief History

Robert M. Stitt

Towards the end of the Second World War, a group of RCAF aircrew engaged in photo survey operations began to discuss the idea of forming a commercial aerial survey company. John Roberts spearheaded the project with the support of Russell Hall and Joe Kohut and in August 1946 they formed Spartan Air Services Limited of Ottawa, Ontario. Spartan opened for business on January 1, 1947, and was to become, during its relatively brief heyday, one of the largest and most active aerial survey companies in Canada.

Spartan began operations with a trio of former RCAF Avro Anson Mk Vs fitted with vertical cameras. They were initially employed on forest inventory projects. The company soon began to diversify, expanding its fleet to include more Ansons and, later, Lockheed Venturas for SHORAN surveys, Consolidated Cansos for magnetometer surveys, Douglas Dakotas for transportation and two former RCAF Avro Lancasters for airborne profile surveys. Spartan also acquired a number of Avro Yorks to take advantage of the transportation needs of the massive Dewline construction project.

The early forestry surveys for private companies were flown at around 8,000ft (2,340m). However, the federal government required maps to a scale of 1/2-mile to the inch which dictated flying at 16,000ft (4,875m) above ground level, an altitude beyond the capability of the Anson. In addition, most of the federal survey activity of the previous two decades had been focused on the more southerly, central and eastern regions of the country, leaving huge tracts of northern and north-western Canada virtually unmapped. This left a pressing requirement for more efficient ways to conduct aerial surveys, a need that Spartan filled by acquiring Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.

Modifications to the Lightning were developed under the direction of Spartan's flight operations manager, Welland 'Weldy' Phipps, a highly talented pilot and licensed aircraft maintenance engineer who was very much the driving force behind Spartan's subsequent operational success. His innovative ideas were turned into working hardware by Bill Law, an aeronautical engineer who worked with Spartan from 1950 to 1957 and who would later join de Havilland Canada to work on the company's pioneering STOL and rough field projects.

Early operations with the Lightning revealed an unexpected shortcoming that would eventually contribute to Spartan's decision to find a replacement. In order to maximize 'on line' time, Spartan had intended to equip its Lightnings with two 137 Imp gallon drop tanks. The additional fuel capacity was expected to give the Lightnings an endurance of around six hours but the pilots found they could only achieve the required altitude with great difficulty and then the aircraft was so nose high the camera operator could not take photographs. The result was that the drop tanks were only used for ferry flights and the Lightnings were limited to about 1 hour 40 minutes 'on line' during a typical 2 hour 45 minute photo mission. Maximum endurance was later stretched to around three hours but this left reserves of just 15 to 20 minutes, making fuel management a critical task for the crews.

Apart from being 'short-legged' in the high level survey role, the type proved to be a very complicated, high-maintenance aircraft and was both challenging and expensive to keep operational. And there was also a customer-driven reason for replacing the Lightning. There was now a new generation of survey cameras available that rendered the earlier wartime equipment obsolete. The new cameras, which also incorporated a drift sight and automatically adjusted for drift, were larger, sturdier and much heavier than the Fairchild units and could therefore not be accommodated in the Lightning's nose compartment.

As early as December 1954, Spartan had selected the Mosquito B.35 to replace the Lightning, although the P-38 soldiered on with the company until early 1956, the principal areas of activity having been northern Ontario and Alberta and the mainland of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.

Of the other types in Spartan's fleet - apart from the Mosquito whose story is told elsewhere - the Anson proved to have the longest life with examples serving in the magnetometer and electromagnetic survey roles until the late 1950s; two were still on strength with the company in 1962 as support aircraft when Spartan retired its Mosquitoes. The Cansos proved to be valuable workhorses but the Ventura was an unpopular aircraft, being underpowered and challenging to maintain and was withdrawn after just a few years of service. The Lancasters had an even shorter span with the company while most of the Yorks imported by Spartan were written off in quick succession across Canada's North.

Following completion of the large-scale surveys in the early 1960s, Spartan changed hands several times until it finally faded away in the mid-1980s. However, the Argentine arm of Spartan, founded in 1964 and built on single examples of the Cessna 310 and Mosquito imported from Canada, grew to become the largest photogrammetric organization in South America. The company was renamed Servicios Tecnicos Spartan S.A. in June of 1980 and did not finally close its doors until around 2000.

In his original article describing Spartan's P-38s and Mosquitoes, Robert Stitt cited the following articles which appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society: Yukon Aerial Survey by Lightning by Bob Fowler, Spartan Air Service Mosquitoes and Canada's Only Sea Hornet; and Kevin Grantham's book on surviving Lightnings, P-Screamers.