halem, in the Cowichan district of British Columbia.

The aerial vigil for smugglers is a continuing operation.

Several times in the past decade R.C.M.P. planes have spotted tell-tale tracks in the snow and put ground searchers on the trail of gangs which periodically bring bargain-priced cigarettes and elec- trical appliances across the United States border in Quebec and the Maritimes.

Many a car has been seized simply because it left tire marks on a little- traveled country road.

Varied Cargoes

R.C.M.P. planes have doubled as courtrooms, cells, hospital wards and dormitories. Cargoes have ranged from fuel to frozen fish and from mental patients to police dogs.

The freight manifest on one trip carried the cryptic notation: “one unidentified corpse.”

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TWENTY-SEVENTH EDITION

Duty-bound, dog and master about to take off with R.C.M.P. pilot.

There’s nothing dull about this work. Every flight is an adventure. Sergeant R. J. Harries set some sort of a record in northern Saskatchewan when he was asked to search for a suspected suicide.

The search took 30 seconds. During the take-off he discovered the man’s body dangling from a tree on the fringe of a pasture that was his land- ing field.

These versatile policemen-pilots may find themselves doing a lengthy patrol of the Northwest Territories to inoculate or destroy animals with rabies, or perhaps seeking bank bandits such as three now completing 10-year terms in a federal prison.

‘They'd taken $40,000 from a Sas- katchewan bank and got clean away. A police plane was summoned from Regina. Before nightfall it had picked up the trail and guided ground searchers to their quarry.

The R.C.M.P.’s first interest in the airplane as an extension of the law’s long arm was fostered by the late Commissioner Sir James MacBrien. As a young general in the First World

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War he frequently mapped tactics from the air. In 1926, as chief of the Canadian General Staff, he became an R.C.A.F. recruit at Camp Borden and passed a military pilot’s course.

As early as 1931, a bushplane figured in one of the R.C.M.P.’s most celebrated cases, that of Albert John- son, the so-called Mad Trapper of Rat River. (See full story on page 7 of this issue.)

In 1932, the R.C.A.F. began conducting air searches for rum runners, with R.C.M.P. officers as observers. Sightings were radioed to fast patrol boats.

Sir James MacBrien used aircraft extensively. He made his 1936 in- spection by air and covered 11,000 miles. The following year the Air Division, then called the Aviation

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Page Thirty-seven

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