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The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan
(BCATP) was an agreement signed in Ottawa on
December 17, 1939, soon after World War II
began, by the governments of Britain, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand. The instruction
scheme was centered in Canada, which provided
infrastructure and a pool of potential
trainees, as well as paying the lion's share of
the costs. The plan's schools in Canada graduated
131,553 personnel (72,835 of them homegrown),
almost half the total pilots and aircrew
employed on British and Commonwealth flying
operations during the war. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt called Canada the "aerodrome
of democracy."
Relative to population, the Prairie Provinces
made an enormous overall contribution
to the BCATP. Two of the four training command
headquarters were situated there: No. 2
in Winnipeg and No. 4 in Regina. The region
was well suited to flight training because of
climate and terrain. "Pilot factories" were
heavily concentrated in the southern parts of
Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, where
there were thirteen Elementary Flying Training
Schools and twenty Service Flying Training
Schools. Saskatchewan had some fifty
schools, bases, and training facilities of various
kinds; that province alone trained onefifth
of all BCATP pilots and as much as 30
percent of some categories of aircrew. The influx
of people and resources had a positive
effect on local economies emerging from the
Depression–by encouraging housing starts
and small business, for example. Social interactions
between localities and the BCATP bases
in their midst were characterized by complex
levels of integration and friction.