Documenting Saunders Aircraft Gimli - Dehavilland DH114 Heron

One of the hurdles we face in telling the Saunders Aircraft Gimli story is "official" documentation. On the internet, we find this photo of a DeHavilland Heron DH114 taken by Erik Frikke with a Canadian aircraft  registration C-GCRN, and the previous registration painted out.

The online Transport Canada historical registrations at Transport Canada historical aircraft registration search provide no information as the online records only go back to 1976, so I've emailed Transport Canada and hope I get some information back and we have to remember that Canadian aircraft registrations were used over and over again and thus is not a perfect method of tracking aircraft history.

We can presume that this Heron is coming to or leaving Canada and maybe there is a copy of the import / export permit or ferrying in a cardboard box somewhere in a basement corner.

These are photographer's Erik Frikke's web notes for the above photograph "ex CX-AOR, G-APKT, 9L-LAG. On its way to Canada for conversion to ST-27 standard, but was broken up instead."

How do we verify this information, I've contacted Erik Frikke and hope to hear back from him.

If we do believe that the above photograph is of G-APKT Dehavilland Heron DH114 serial number 14019 then a search of UK aircraft registrations give us the following (and UK aircraft registrations are only used once and not re-issued) that G-APKT is Heron serial number 14019.

Then the task to verify that the Heron with Canadian registration C-GCRN is actually serial # 14019 and we have a small lead to follow that in 1964 this Heron # 14019 is off to Sierra Leone, the story on Heron #14019 to be continued.................