A few thoughts if I may.
The story of the one and only piloted aircraft capable of flying built in the workshops of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) began in 1942. That year, Geoffrey Terence Roland Hill became the scientific liaison officer between the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Aircraft Production and a Canadian counterpart, the Department of Munitions and Supply.
Fascinated since the early 1920s by the development of tailless aircraft, some of which were manufactured during the 1920s and 1930s, under the name Pterodactyl, this aeronautical engineer obtained from NRC that his most recent concept, a transport aircraft, the Pterodactyl VIII perhaps, be tested in a wind tunnel. At this time, indeed, efforts to maximise the performance of aircraft of various types was sparking renewed interest in tailless aircraft, or flying wings, in the United States and United Kingdom.
In early 1943, NRC considered carrying out Hill’s project using a scale model capable of flying. The British engineer succeeded in convincing it of the usefulness of building a piloted glider to study the flight characteristics of the new tailless aircraft. Since the project did not have a very high priority, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) was opposed to an aircraft manufacturer building this prototype. The NRC Associate Committee on Aeronautical Research approved in November 1943 the construction of two two-seater wooden gliders that reproduced on a 1/3 scale the transport plane imagined by Hill.
Manufactured in Ottawa, in the NRC’s Structures Laboratory during the summer and fall of 1945, the NRC Glider or NRL (National Research Laboratories) Glider only flew in the spring of 1946, at Namao, an RCAF station near Edmonton, Alberta. Construction of the second glider appears to have been abandoned before it even began. That said, in September 1948, a transport plane towed the NRC Glider from Namao to Arnprior, Ontario, with a few stops along the way - a 3,700 km (2,300 mi) flight that was among the longest ever. With the craze for tailless planes drawing to a close, the glider was put away over the next few weeks, before being scrapped in the mid-1950s.
Stay safe.
