04/11/2026
🚨 He Had 60 Kills and Commanded the Most Feared Squadron in the Air War. Canada Gave All the Credit to Someone Else. 🚨
Spring, 1917. The Ypres Front. The air was controlled by the Germans and everyone knew it.
The Red Baron's Flying Circus was at its peak. Allied pilots were dying faster than they could be replaced. The Sopwith Triplane was a new British fighter, nimble and fast, but there weren't enough of them and most squadrons didn't yet know how to use them.
Then five pilots painted their planes black.
Meet Raymond Collishaw — born November 22, 1893, in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a fisherman's son who went to sea as a cabin boy at 15, worked his way to First Officer on the Canadian Fisheries Protection Service, and traded his ship for a cockpit in 1916.
He would finish the First World War with 60 confirmed aerial victories. 🍁
Only Billy Bishop, with 72, topped him among all Canadian pilots of the war.
Collishaw's "Black Flight" was an all-Canadian unit within No. 10 Naval Squadron. He named each plane himself: his own was Black Maria. The others flew as Black Death, Black Prince, Black Roger, and Black Sheep.
These five Canadians, in their black Sopwith Triplanes, operated on the same front as Richthofen's Flying Circus throughout the spring of 1917. In one remarkable six-week stretch, the Black Flight was credited with 87 enemy aircraft destroyed.
Collishaw himself shot down 27 aircraft in that single summer. He was also the first pilot in the war to claim six aerial victories in a single day.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Order, and the Distinguished Service Order and Bar — among the most decorated aviators the Royal Naval Air Service produced.
The war ended. Collishaw stayed in the Royal Air Force. He went to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. He went to Persia. He took command of what would become the Desert Air Force in North Africa in WWII, where his outnumbered squadrons destroyed an estimated 1,100 Italian aircraft while he himself slipped into Hurricanes to fly operations before being grounded — told he knew too much to be captured.
He retired as an Air Vice-Marshal in 1943.
He came home to British Columbia and lived quietly.
Raymond Collishaw died in West Vancouver on September 28, 1976. He was 82 years old.
The airport terminal in Nanaimo was renamed in his honour in 1999. Very few Canadians noticed.
Billy Bishop got the statues and the Heritage Minute. Raymond Collishaw got an airport terminal on Vancouver Island. History can be deeply unfair. 🇨🇦
Did you know about Raymond Collishaw? Drop a 🍁 in the comments and share this story so his name is never forgotten. 👇
