History Television Canada and Military Channel in the U.S. have commissioned Toronto-based Cineflix Productions to deliver Air Aces, a six-part 60-minute series telling heroic stories of airborne combat missions, as reported by realscreen.

According to Simon Lloyd, Cineflix Productions’ CEO, History Television came on board the documentary series first, before Military joined.

Channel 5 in the UK will also broadcast the program.

“We all love big budget shows, but the problem with big budget shows is getting the finances together,” Lloyd says.

“This show is about a million dollars an hour, so trying to pull all that financing together and getting everyone synched up is always a problem. We managed to pull all that together in three months, which is quite quick for something of this scale,” he says

Air Aces boasts the use of vintage planes such as Spitfires, Lancaster bombers and Phantom fighters, as well as state-of-the-art cameras, to reproduce the daring feats of pilots charged with fighting enemy forces during World War Two and Vietnam War.

“We’ll be shooting 500 frames a session. The whole photography, the scale and the stunts… I don’t think anyone’s done that in television or in the air before,” says Lloyd.

The series will include rare archival footage and interviews with the last surviving veterans of the wartime battles in the sky.

Ian Russell and Nick Godwin executive produce the series for Cineflix.