This month marks two anniversaries for The Royal Canadian Air Force—the first non-stop flight from Vancouver to Halifax on Jan. 15 1949, and the  first round-the-world flight which took off Jan. 2, 1950, to take Lester B. Pearson, then foreign affairs minister, to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to attend the Colombo Conference of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers, coincidentally launching Canada’s foreign aid program.

The RCAF North Star transporting Pearson left Ottawa on Jan. 2. The send-off included a band of pipers and crowd of well-wishers. The trip out took five days, with stops in Gander, the Azores, Gibraltar, Malta, Suez and Karachi.

Commanding the  flight was Edward William Smith, DSO,  whose flight career  began with two tours with Bomber Command in the Second World War, during which time he ditched once and was shot down once.  He flew almost 80 types of aircraft, including gliders in the Arctic, before he retired.  He died in 2000.

Passengers and crew flew for 125.2 hours  in an unpressurized, four-engine aircraft that could  fly comfortably no higher  than 10,000 feet. On the return leg of the trip, both tires burned up when the aircraft ran out of runway in Hong Kong and an engine conked out over the Pacific Ocean roughly 160 kilometres from San Francisco. The roar was deafening, the cabin shook violently and Pearson was prone to motion sickness, “but no one complained,” writes Andrew Cohen in While Canada Slept, How We Lost Our Place in the World.

How times have changed.  In 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper flew to Asia twice in the space of two months and was able to visit four Latin American countries in six days in 2011.