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AUGUST 12, 2014
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Vol. 119, Issue 124
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PROUDLY SERVING THE COMMUNITIES OF ROSSLAND, WARFIELD, TRAIL, MONTROSE, FRUITVALE & SALMO
Teachers ready to picket this week
Historic plane returns home to Trail
BY SHERI REGNIER Times Staff
Local teachers will be back to the picket lines this week if bargaining talks with the province stall in the next few days. Salary bumps aren’t the centre of the ongoing dispute between the BC Teachers Federation (BCTF) and the Ministry of Education, says Andy Davidoff, adding that a pay scale agreement between both sides is within one percent. What remains at an impasse is classroom size and composition, maintains the Kootenay-Columbia Teachers’ Union President, and the chronic underfunding for all of B.C.’s students including the lack of sufficient support for at-risk youth or those with special needs. “The bottom line is that nothing has changed since the end of June,” said Davidoff. “Talks will continue today (Monday) so hopefully that’s good news. But locally we’ve passed resolutions to commence picketing this week and next week if provincial talks break down.” Although he remains hopeful for a resolution to the full scale strike, Davidoff noted that the BCTF is due back in court this fall for a hearing about the union’s lawsuit against the government regarding the stripping of “language” from the teacher’s contract. He said in 2002, the government took away the teacher’s collective agreement clause that delineated the maximum class sizes at different grade levels and the number of support workers and teaching specialists each school should have based on that population. See CLASS Page 3
SHERI REGNIER PHOTO
Jim Partridge, from Pacific Coastal Airlines, was one of the few lucky ones to watch an 80-year old plane, historic to Trail, fly into the city’s airport for the first time since 1958. The Puss Moth was owned by Cominco in the 1930s and used for mineral exploration in the northern regions of Canada. BY SHERI REGNIER Times Staff
An iconic symbol of Trail history made a brief stopover at the city’s airport late Thursday afternoon, much to the delight of onlookers and staff. Ben Cox and his partner Anne Marie Liszczyk, both aviation aficionados from England, flew a 1934 Puss Moth onto the Trail airstrip in a mission to return the aircraft home for the first time in 50-plus years. The de Havilland DH Puss Moth, previously owned by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada Ltd. (CM & S, later Cominco Ltd.), was a modern wonder in the 1930s when the company used the three-seater for min-
eral exploration in the country’s northern regions. The plane was bought by a gentleman from Spokane in 1958, and since that time, it’s been housed south of the border. After Cox became the Puss Moth’s owner a few years ago, the U.K. duo have booked summer vacations together to travel the Pacific Northwest and Alberta via the light utility aircraft. “I’d known about it (Puss Moth) for 20 odd years,” said Cox. “I became friends with the previous owner who’s gotten elderly and wanted to sell it a couple of years ago. So I bought it, and this year we wanted to see where it lived.” When the couple first landed at the Trail airport, Liszczyk felt
uncertain about her surroundings – but her apprehension was brief. “I wasn’t sure where we were, so we went around to the terminal right after we landed,” she explained. “An elderly gentleman, inside, was nudging his wife, saying “Oh my gosh look, there’s a Puss Moth, there’s a Puss Moth,” Liszczyk laughed. “We were only here for a short while before someone recognized it.” After parking the aircraft off the runway for the night, the couple returned to the airport Friday morning with plans to fly back to Spokane by noon. Before that happened, a handful of airport workers, Pacific Coastal Airlines employees and a
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few locals, were treated to an upclose-and-personal look at the historic airplane and a chat with its new owners. “I’ve done a lot of work to make it useful for trips like this,” said Cox. “It’s pretty conventional to fly and very capable because it carries a lot of fuel, has lots of room for bags and can go a long way.” The de Havilland DH.80A Puss Moth is a British three-seater high-wing monoplane designed and built by the de Havilland Aircraft Company between 1929 and 1933. It flew at a speed approaching 200 kilometres per hour, making it one of the highest-performance private aircraft of its era. See PUSS, Page 3
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