Hi, and welcome to my website.
My name is John and I was born in Bermuda in 1956.
In 1958 we moved to Curaçao, then to Aruba in 1960, and back to Curaçao in 1961 until 1968.
In early 1968 we moved to Canada, and I grew up in Toronto (Etobicoke) & Sudbury, both in Ontario.
When I left school, I got a job as an aircraft mechanic for a small commuter airline in northern Ontario called norOntair, which flew Twin Otters, initially operating out of Sudbury and then Timmins... and no, I never met Shania.
During my above time as an aircraft mechanic, although the Twin Otter was my main responsibility as an aircraft mechanic, the following are also aircraft that we had, and that I was an aircraft mechanic on:
Beechcraft | Model 18 |
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Cessna | Model 310 |
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Model 337 Skymaster |
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Model 402 |
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Consolidated | PBY Canso (Catalina) |
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De Havilland Canada | DHC-2 Beaver |
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DHC-3 Otter |
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DHC-6 Twin Otter |
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Douglas | DC-3 |
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1974-1975 | Various training bases in Canada | ||||
1975-1979 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Shearwater, Nova Scotia, Canada |
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1979-1983 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Baden-Söllingen, West Germany with NATO |
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1983-1984 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Portage-la-Prairie, Manitoba, Canada |
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1984-1984 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada |
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1984-1985 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Greenwood, Nova Scotia, Canada |
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1985-1989 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Comox, British Columbia, Canada |
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1989-1990 | Canadian Forces Base CFB Greenwood, Nova Scotia, Canada |
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Canadian Armed Forces bases undergoing training:
Deployments in Canada:
Deployments in the USA:
Deployments in Europe (while stationed for 4 years in West Germany):
I retired early from the Canadian Armed Forces & moved back to Bermuda in 1990, to start a second career in IT... as there's not much call for hunting Soviet submarines on civvie street.
I was in Bermuda for more than 31 years, working in IT for various companies, including 13 years with IBM Bermuda (a division of IBM Canada) servicing (repairing) ATM cash machines.
Although in the 1990s I had a part-time job flying a local Bell JetRanger, taking people on helicopter tours around Bermuda. But the helicopter was sold in 1998 due to no business, and I spent the remaining decades in Bermuda flying a desk .
I retired in August 2021, having reached age 65, and as it was too expensive to retire in Bermuda (according to some sources, Bermuda is the most-expensive place in the world to live), I relocated back to Canada, and am living now in Burlington, Ontario,
Canada.
That's me in the pic... Capt. John - Bermuda Helicopters Ltd. (in civilian flightsuit, NOT military flightsuit).
That's about it for me...
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![]() Canadian Decoration medal |
![]() NATO Special Service medal |