Ernest Lloyd Janney

Ernest Lloyd Janney was the Provisional Commander of the Canadian Aviation Corps between 1914 and 1915. Janney pushed for the establishment of a Canadian flying corps during the First World War.

Career
Janney managed to convince Minister of Militia and Defence, Sir Sam Hughes, to commission him as captain and to grant him $5,000 for a flying corps. Janney purchased a floatplane in Massachusetts, United States, a Burgess-Dunne AH-7, then went to England with the pilot, Lieutenant W.F.N. Sharpe, in October, 1914. Janney's aircraft was criticized for not being airworthy, effectively grounding him. He then went on an unauthorized tour of British flying fields and aircraft factories and was listed as absent without leave.

In Novermber, 1914, he made an appeal to the federal government for a grant of $116,000 to form a squadron. Janney was then ordered to return home, was stripped of his commission and forced to resign in disgrace.

In May 1918, he was mentioned in an Admiralty dispatch as a member of the staff of the newly formed Royal Canadian Naval Air Service. Later in 1918, Janney was piloting a Curtiss flying boat that crashed into Toronto Harbour. In 1921, a news bulletin from Edmonton reported that Captain Janney was organizing a dirigible air service from Peace River, Alberta to Fort Norman, Northwest Territories. However, no records exist of such a service. A month after Charles Lindbergh completed his solo trans-Atlantic flight on May 20, 1927, the New York Times announced that an E.L. Janney would attempt an Ottawa to London, England flight on July 11. No record of that flight has been found either.

Janney started a hunger strike in protest against his arrest on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses in connection with the public float of an aircraft company. In January 1932, he was reported to be working as a businessman and aviation pioneer, a Montreal newspaper described him as the "first Canadian to volunteer his services and be accepted as a war flier". He then dropped from sight. Reportedly, in September 1939, he sent a message to Ottawa: "Am still full of the old pep— let me know what I can do."