In March 1954 the company Canadair Limited acquired from a British company a license to manufacture a Bristol Type 175 Britannia aircraft. Initially, on the basis of this airliner, a version of a marine reconnaissance vehicle for the Canadian Air Force began to be produced, the first such model was delivered in the autumn of 1957. under the designation CL-28 Argus. It differed from its predecessor by a redesigned and leaky fuselage in which it was possible to place weapons compartments, and also was equipped with an economical piston engine with a turbo-supercharger to provide long range or duration of flight. The Canadian Air Force also had a need for an airplane that could be used as a transport vehicle for the transport of goods and troops. The proposed Canadair aircraft had an increased wing span, an elongated fuselage and alternatively proposed powerplants that included the Bristol Orion, Pratt Whitney T34 or Rolls-Royce Tyne turboprop engines. With the latter it was designated as Canadair CL-44D, and 12 copies were built for the Canadian Air Force, in which they were in service as SS-106 Yukon, the last of which was delivered in 1961. These aircraft had conventional side cargo doors in front and behind the wing, which was convenient for that time. While the CL-44D was at the design and engineering stage, Canadair engineers offered a revolutionary idea at that time for easy and quick loading: to make the rear fuselage rotatable, capable of shifting to the side along with the tail unit, which would give direct access for loading / unloading . This made it possible to transport large-sized cargoes or cargo platforms that could be placed in the cargo hold directly from the trucks, and the CL-44D-4 became the world's first cargo plane, which had this capability in the serial version. The first CL-44D-4 aircraft took off on November 16, 1960. One of the customers was the Icelandic airline Loftleidir. The ordered three planes were made in a civilian passenger version with seats for 178 passengers. To ensure low operating costs on the trans-Atlantic lines in 1966, these three machines were supplemented by a fourth aircraft. It differed from the first three elongated by 4.62 m, in order to ensure the placement of 214 passengers, the fuselage. Designated CL-44-J, also known as the Canadair 400, the plane made the first flight on November 8, 1965. After that, the company's three 178-passenger airliners were converted to the CL-44-J standard. Another option was obtained as a result of the acquisition of the CL-44D-4 from Flying Tiger by Conroy Aircraft Corporation (USA) for re-equipment into a heavy transport aircraft. Designated CL-44-O, the aircraft had a maximum internal height of 3.45 m and a maximum width of 4.24 m, and also retained the ability to load through the tail. The total serial production of civilian CL-44 had 27 copies, and SS-106 Yukon Air Force Canada also gradually entered the civilian market. A small number of aircraft remained in service as long ago as in 1990.
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