Keith Hopkinson

Born in Pembroke, Ontario, in September 1915, Keith Sandling Hopkinson’s flying career began at the Hamilton Aero Club in 1936. He took to aviation instinctively, earning his private pilot’s license in 1938 and his commercial license a year later. He aced his flight instructor’s certification in 1940.

Already working at the Waterloo Flying Club when the Second World War began, he soon moved to Goderich’s Sky Harbour airport, where he became a founding instructor at the flying school established there in June 1940 as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). Marion Orr (CAHF, 1982) worked at No 12 Elementary Flying Training School as well, in her case as the second woman licenced as tower operator in Canada. Hoppy’s certification as an instructor set him apart from other civilian BCATP pilots, many of whom were considered by the Air Force to be lacking in skills compared to those in the RCAF. When Flying Instructors were no longer needed at Sky Harbour, he became Chief Ground Instructor. As head of the ground school, he developed a new training aid that used large model aircraft instruments linked to a wind tunnel. Students manipulating model airfoil or aircraft in the tunnel would see how changes in air speed, bank and turn, altitude, and heading, registered on the tool’s instruments.

When the war ended Hoppy remained in Goderich. With many wartime aircraft declared surplus, he recognized that a need to move them presented a new business opportunity. Soon, Hoppy’s Sky Harbour Air Services was formed to ferry aircraft across Canada and abroad. The company transported over 400 in 1948, many of them Harvards, which were brought to Goderich for service and delivery. But Hoppy’s vision extended far beyond ferrying surplus aircraft. He opened a flight school and provided interested students with summer work and free flying lessons to promote the growth of aviation. A charter service was another successful venture, which was soon carrying passengers and cargo across North America. He began operating an air ambulance service and somehow also found time to be an aircraft dealer. His business expanded again in 1961 with purchase of the Goderich Airport. In a little over a decade Sky Harbour Air Services had become involved in aviation in a myriad of ways.

Hoppy’s love for aviation went far beyond his success at Sky Harbour and he worked tirelessly to promote flying and the aviation community generally. Despite his busy schedule, he found time to take on leadership roles – helping to found the Experimental Aircraft Association in Canada and to organize the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA), which was honoured by Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame with its Belt of Orion Award for Excellence in 1993.

However wide his influence around Goderich, and it was wide indeed, Hoppy’s greatest contribution to Canadian aviation was his support for homebuilt aircraft. While there had been interest amongst aviation enthusiasts for small-scale and homebuilt aircraft in Canada between 1909 and 1939, the number of machines constructed during this period was small and interest had declined after the Second World War, perhaps because surplus aircraft, such as the famed Tiger Moth, were so readily available. By the 1950s, Hoppy and his friends noticed that people had again begun to consider homebuilding an aircraft. They were lucky that Hoppy took notice.

Hoppy’s journey down the homebuilt path began in the early 1950s, when he began building a Stitts SA-3A Playboy out of a purpose-built addition to his family home in Goderich. Working with Paul Poberezny of the newly established EAA, Hoppy convinced the federal Department of Transport (DOT) to agree to allow the construction and registration of his homebuilt plane. He and friends assembled the aircraft over the next year. At each stage of construction Hoppy kept transport officials informed. The low-wing monoplane took some 1200 hours to complete. Its total cost was about $1,000, an accomplishment that heralded the early age of affordable aviation. After receiving DOT flight permit 001, Hoppy flew his plane’s maiden flight on 1 October 1955.

Weighing 850 pounds empty with a top speed of 145 mph and with a range of 500 miles, Hoppy’s Playboy, dubbed ‘Little Hokey’, may not have been the fastest, biggest, or sleekest on the field, but it was a major accomplishment in Canadian aviation all the same, paving the way for countless Canadian homebuilders in the decades to follow. He flew that little plane across North America, winning many awards along the way. Hoppy also started a second homebuilt plane, a two-seat, fast, cross-country Whittman Tailwind powered by a 100 hp engine with a top speed of 175 mph and weighing less than 1000 pounds; it was completed after his death.

Why was he enamoured of building his own plane? It might have been, as he once explained, because it satisfied “the individual's inner creative abilities to create a product of definite value. It is a sense of accomplishment. What further flying achievement than to take to the air in a plane you built yourself? You know every piece of that machine intimately”.

Having become a walking (and flying) encyclopedia of technical knowledge, which he gladly shared for the asking, Hoppy dedicated many hours helping others with construction problems, and he soon became the recognized Canadian authority on private aircraft development programs. Anyone wanting to build an airstrip, to promote an airshow, or interested in aviation in general had Hoppy’s attention. As an advocate for homebuilt aircraft, it was fitting that Hoppy helped found the Ultralight Aircraft Association in 1956. He served as president and his friend, Gus Chisholm, who completed the second registered homebuilt in Canada, was vice-president. He continued to advocate for the sector and in 1963 the DOT regulations were overhauled to increase their gross weight.

In addition to helping to start the EAA in Canada and being a founding director of COPA, Hoppy was a member of the American Aviation Historical Society, the OX-5 Club, the International Flying Farmers, and the Antique Airplane Association, among others. He was just as free with his time for his wider community, serving on the boards of the Alexandra Marine and General Hospital and the Goderich Public Utilities Corporation. No doubt he would have done much more had he not been sadly killed in a plane crash on final approach into his Sky Harbour airport in 1964.

Hoppy’s Little Hokey now resides at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, alongside another homebuilt: Robert McDowall’s monoplane, the oldest surviving plane in Canada. They are fitting companions, since it was Hoppy who acquired Robert’s plane in 1958. It hung in the Sky Harbour Air Services hangar until being sold to Ottawa in 1968.

Keith Hopkinson’s contributions to Canadian aviation have been well recognized, both during and after his lifetime. In 1955 he received the first COPA silver tray presented “to the person who contributed the most in the advancement of private flying in Canada.” A year later he was awarded the EAA’s recognition for outstanding workmanship on his Stitts Playboy. Trans Canada Airlines honoured Hoppy in 1960 for his promotion of sport flying and amateur building. Posthumously, in 1988 COPA honoured him with a memorial award, as did the EAA in 2016.

Homebuilding is today a vibrant part of aviation in Canada that owes its popularity to the work and passion of Keith Hopkinson – a true pioneer whose organizational know-how, enthusiasm, leadership, and hands-on expertise represents an unparalleled legacy in the history of Canadian aviation.