Dowty Canada Limited

At the beginning of World War II, Dowty, a British landing gear manufacturer established a factory in Montréal, which later moved to Ajax, near Toronto, to support the war effort of the Allies. The company I arrived at, called Dowty Canada Limited, had been modernized and expanded.

The print room area at the time was in a brick annex to the left of the building, apparently during the war it had been used to manufacture ordnance and exploding stuff.

In the early 1980s, Canadian aircraft manufacturer de Havilland awarded the then Dowty Equipment Ltd in Ajax a contract to design a landing gear for its new Dash-8 turboprop commuter aircraft. In addition they were working on the Canadair (Bombardier) CL600 and 601 aircraft which were also called the Challenger.

The new project I had been recruited for was a derivative of the Challenger, they were incorporating a tailcone tank which changed the weight of the aircraft and shifted the aerodynamic envelope.

It was my first career exposure to developing ground loads, although Dowty had an impressive array of programs already in place to help.