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Seventy-six years after he last flew it, Calgarian Gordon Hill reunited Wednesday with the aircraft he piloted to guard Canada’s West Coast.

Sitting near the newly restored Hawker Hurricane Mk XII in its camouflaged metal skin, the 95-year-old was at first nonchalant about the reunion.

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“They were all similar,” he said of Squadron 133’s Hurricanes he piloted on Vancouver Island, on the watch for any Japanese incursions following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I flew this one apparently nine times. I got that information from my logbooks.”

But as he moved slowly over to the warbird known as Hurricane 5389, marked with its telltale yellow, red, white and black roundel, he warmed to the wartime memories summoned in unlikely physical form.

“Actually, this was easy to fly and easy to land, with a nice, wide undercarriage,” said Hill.

“That’s a nice airplane … I never flew one in anger.”

But after a one-year stint on the B.C. coast piloting Hurricanes, he was transferred to northwest Europe, where he flew Spitfires against the retreating Germans in the final months of the war.