Last week as we dabbled in Timmins history, we talked about the first airplanes flying into the mining camp and landing on Porcupine Lake.
Today, Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann tells us that the first president of the Porcupine Flying Club, Ed Ahr, gave flying lessons for ten dollars an hour. Locally born Eric Robinson took him up on it in the early 1930s, and got his own pilot’s licence.
“He then subsequently went to England and he’s the man who flew Neville Chamberlain to see Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, when they were still trying to negotiate things prior to the war,” Bachmann narrates. “Three weeks after that, he was killed in a flight just off of the coast of England and is buried somewhere in England.”
A tragic end, but a local connection to world history.