1939-1942 Made Canada a powerhouse of aircraft construction

MacGill worked for the Canadian Car and Foundry Company (CanCar) in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay). The company primarily manufactured railway boxcars but now the Allies needed Hawker Hurricane airplanes and quickly. The 35-year-old Canadian was one of the country's top aeronautical engineers. In 1940, she had to turn CanCar into an airplane assembly line. Thousands of aircraft blueprints were brought in from Britain. From them MacGill designed the machines that would manufacture 60,000 different parts. Each part had to be perfect. "They were designed so the parts would fit together like a childs mecanno set (like legos). Parts from one airframe are interchangeable with those of another. You can see how useful this would be when they are repairing an airplane damaged in action." Under MacGill's direction, it took only a year for CanCar to produce the first Hawker Hurricane. Soon the company was building three or four planes a week and had become a wartime success story.

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Category:
Aviation - Production

Completion Status:
yes

Patent Number:
N/A