RCAF Station Sea Island began as a Second World War British Commonwealth Air Training Plan station. No. 8 Elementary Flying Training School (EFTS) began operation here on July 22, 1940. After the war the station was renamed RCAF Station Vancouver.
442 Squadron was re-activated as 442 "City of Vancouver" Auxiliary Fighter Squadron at Sea Island 15 April 1946, but was later re-designated an Auxiliary Transport Squadron. 123 Rescue Flight and 121 Composite Flight (KU) were also formed at Sea Island.
On 1 December 1951, 442 Squadron was split in half to form 443 "City of New Westminster" Squadron.
RCAF Station Vancouver closed on 31 March 1964.
Famous quotes containing the words station, sea and/or island:
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,
beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)