Flying the Secret Sky (review)

William VanDerKloot's award-winning documentary Flying the Secret Sky is a tale of often-neglected heroism in World War Two that departs from the usual retellings of "history-as-we-know-it." The opening shots of this story of aviation history are not of a wide, blue sky but the dark, trashing North Atlantic Ocean currents and ripping whitecaps, and its central figure is not a dashing young aviator, but Winston Churchill.

As the film's narrative explains, this is the history of the Royal Air Force's Ferry Command. The director begins his tale with the very first powered flight across the ocean, an event that began Churchill's long relationship with the Ferry Command. The year was 1919, and the plane was piloted by two English flyers whose achievement was formally celebrated by Churchill, a successful politician and amateur flying aficionado. The years that followed saw Lindberg's solo flight between the two shores, and the ensuing popularization of transatlantic flight. But the routes across the North Atlantic, especially the ones closer to the Arctic, were still considered very dangerous by the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, beginning in November of 1940, these routes became the paths that allowed Britain to be quickly resupplied with desperately needed warplanes.

VanDerKloot's story is told in three major sections, but the greatest attention and affection are seen in the first, the creation of the initially clandestine team of civilian daredevil flyers, mainly from America and Canada, and the last, the adventures of the director's father as commander of a special VIP transport that most famously carried Churchill throughout the war.

The Command was not a secret organization. In fact, its adventures were featured on the screen in the popular 1941 film Yank in the RAF, in which the title character, played by matinee idol Tyrone Power, made one of the Command's deliveries to England. The operation had to balance the need to recruit with necessary security. The real-life flyers — a collection of crop dusters, barnstormers, airline captains, and young men, often only 18 or 19 years old, from the US, Canada, Poland, France, and elsewhere who had learned to fly before the war — were initially given jobs as employees of the Canadian Pacific Airways and remained civilians. Many were small-town lads who suddenly had money to spend. They were quartered in Montreal's posh Mount Royal hotel, and spent the war years enjoying the nightlife of a cosmopolitan city, while facing death over the ocean every few weeks.

The RAF deemed the Command's initial mission so hazardous that it would not allow any of its pilots to participate. Despite these warnings, the civilians took their fresh-from-the-factory planes for test flights from the city's Duval Field, and then embarked on an eight-hour trip to Gander, Newfoundland. From there, they still faced an additional 2000-mile nighttime journey across the frigid ocean, using the stars for navigation, in planes that were not designed for such long trips or such hostile weather. Despite the odds, all seven Lockheed Hudsons made the 3000-mile flight to the UK.

In late 1941, the RAF formally took over the operation and re-named it Ferry Command, militarizing the operation and even putting the flight crews into special uniforms, though many were still civilians and receiving substantially higher pay than their RAF compatriots. The Command's missions also expanded from the North Atlantic re-supply shuttle to moving planes, important people, and materials to outposts across the globe. Brightly colored home movies, shot by some of the crewmembers, illustrate these changes, showcasing the Command's exotic new destinations, and the change from worries about ice forming on their wings to those about catching malaria. The middle section of the film focuses on this period, and on the impact of both the United States' entrance into the war and improvements in aircraft technology on the now military-run operation.

The...