Here you find a little bit more information on ‘Aurora’, - a plane, that was a subject in my post ‘Once upon a time: Cold War‘. I found a few better pictures of the plane, they were taken at the Abbotsford Airshow. A full official name of the aircrfat is ‘CP-140 Aurora‘.
Also, officially, the type of missions flown by Auroras is designated as maritime reconnaissance (MR). Those missions are typically quite long, and time in the air may be up to 20 hours.
It was so interesting to listen to the stories told by a former Aurora pilot that I flew recently with. Some ‘pieces of trivia’ about flying Auroras sounded incredible, - do you know, for example, that salt water spray picked up by a strong wind from the ocean surface can easily ascend to altitudes as high as 5000 feet? And yet it is so intense that you need to keep a windshield wiper to work hard all the time. Otherwise you can easily overlook your target 
Well, there’s a set of sophisticated electronic warfare installed on the plane to compliment ‘watching out by the human element’. It is funny to know how some Aurora crew members would put their bets in an improvised game ‘Tell your distance to a target‘, and how the guy with a most ’sharp eye’ would grab the bank, after all the assessments submitted by ‘players’ would have been checked against the radar readings..
The big problem is to preserve the plane from corrosion caused by exposure to aggressive environment, which is sort of norm during this type of operation. And they have their ways to do this.
And, how some sources say, “The Canadian government wants to keep the maritime reconnaissance variant in service until 2025″.
So, guys should do the best as they look after their planes..
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