Hadfield to bring unique blend of music, flight stories to Bushplane Museum (4 photos)

Tickets are still available for a Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre 30th anniversary dinner and performance by pilot/singer/songwriter Dave Hadfield (brother of Canadian astronaut/singer/songwriter Chris Hadfield), to be held at the Bushplane Museum Saturday, June 22.

Hadfield’s family is a musical one.

To this day, he, along with brothers Chris and Phil and two sisters, still fill the living room or the campfire scene with music when the family gets together, Hadfield said, speaking to SooToday in a telephone interview while sailing on Georgian Bay Wednesday.

Ticket holders for Saturday’s dinner/performance will hear Hadfield sing and play guitar, sharing songs from his latest album entitled Climbin’ Away.

The album, Hadfield’s fourth, consists of 14 flying songs written over the course of a 40-year flight career and over 100 different types of aircraft, two of the album’s songs written by brother Chris, past Commander of the International Space Station.

Dave’s song ‘In Canada,’ performed with Chris, was released as a music video in 2014, pulling in over 2.5 million views on YouTube.

Dave also contributed to the Chris Hadfield album ‘Songs from a Tin Can,’ the first recording ever made in space.

“All last fall and winter I’ve been touring with a ‘Songs, Slides and Stories’ presentation, a multimedia presentation where I put up slides from family albums and history, talk about the song and then perform it. It’s a lot of fun for me and the audiences seem to enjoy the story part. It’s been going pretty well,” Hadfield said.

“It’s hard to write songs about a technical subject like flight, so the best thing to do is to tell stories about people, so with the experiences myself and my family have had with flight, there’ve been all kinds of stories I’ve been able to turn into songs.”

Other Hadfield albums cover a variety of topics, including wilderness stories.

“Music has been a wonderful balance to the technical world of aviation. It’s a real ‘left brain, right brain’ change that’s good for you as a person. Writing and playing music is such a wonderful change to a technical life.”

No stranger to the Sault, Hadfield visited the city when his son Austin studied in Sault College’s aviation program, (Austin now an Airbus A-320 pilot with Air Canada).

“It (the Bushplane Museum) is a terrific link with the past, being on the original site of pretty much the first professional, commercial use of aviation in Canada right after World War I,” Hadfield said.

Part of the original plan for Hadfield’s visit was for him to test fly a restored de Havilland Fox Moth aircraft built by a team of Bushplane Museum volunteers over a 20-year timespan.

“Unfortunately, the paperwork for an old airplane to be restored can be really complicated when it comes to getting the documents we need for flight from Transport Canada, so I don’t know if it’s going to fly, probably not, but at least we’ll get it out on the dockside, fire up the engine, I’ll be sitting in it and people will be able to get a feel of what flying that aircraft was like,” Hadfield said.

In addition to astronaut brother Chris and pilot son Austin, Hadfield’s brother Phil is an Air Canada B-787 captain and former bushplane pilot, father Roger is a retired airline pilot, while wife Robin is a pilot who serves as a director for the Ninety-Nines: International Organization of Women Pilots.

“There are lots of flying families but it’s unusual to have six family members involved in flight, and between the six of us we cover the whole gamut in aviation, from bushplanes to World War II fighters to space ships,” Hadfield said.

He began his own lifelong fascination with flight with Air Cadets before starting a 39-year career in civil aviation.

He retired from Air Canada in 2017, his last airplane a B-777, flying over the North Pole to China.

For the past 15 years, Hadfield has also been a volunteer pilot with the Mike Potter Aircraft Collection in Ottawa, flying many historic fighter aircraft, such as the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, Mustang, Hurricane and Lysander.

“Last year I flew a Spitfire, the only Spitfire left flying in Canada, a Mark IX, and flew it from Ottawa out to Vancouver Island and back in a program called ‘5,000 Miles in a Spitfire.’”

“It’s wonderful from two perspectives,” Hadfield said.

“The first is history. It’s an honour and a privilege to fly that airplane which was so pivotal when England was standing alone against Nazi Germany. From a pilot’s perspective, many World War II aircraft had ‘gotchas’ which you had to be very careful about, but the Spitfire has very few of those. It’s like the best horse in the world. It’s big, strong, powerful, but trying to look after you all the time.”

“I’d have to say getting that Spitfire out to Vancouver and back...I was very proud of that,” Hadfield said when asked to share his most memorable flight experience.

Born in Galt, Ont. (now part of Cambridge), Hadfield, a 61-year-old father of two, now resides in the Barrie area.

Depending on weather conditions, Hadfield hopes to fly into the Sault on his own plane Friday (stating he’d drive if flying conditions weren’t favourable).

The event, one of several marking the museum’s 30th anniversary throughout 2019, includes cocktails at 6 p.m., dinner at 6:30 p.m., with Hadfield’s performance beginning at 8:30 p.m.

Tickets to the dinner/concert are $35 and are available until 12 p.m. Friday by calling the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre at 705-945-6242 or by dropping into the Bushplane Museum at 50 Pim Street.

Those wishing to attend the concert only may do so by purchasing a ticket for $10 by 4 p.m. Saturday.