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Welcome to The Pilot Project Podcast, your premier source for stories and insights from pilots in the RCAF and mission aviation - brought to you by Skies Magazine! Whether you're an aspiring aviator, navigating flight training, or simply fascinated by the world of military and mission aviation, this podcast is your guide. We sit down with pilots and aviation professionals to hear their thrilling experiences, lessons learned, and expert advice on resilience, training, and the skills needed to succeed in this exciting field. Strap in - we’re ready for departure!
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Bryan:Alright. We're ready for departure here at The Pilot Project Podcast, the best source for stories and advice from RCAF and Mission Aviation Pilots brought to you by Sky's Magazine. I'm your host, Brian Morrison, and today, I'm joined by CH one forty nine Cormorant pilot and helicopter instructor at three CFFTS, captain Troy Clarke. Troy, welcome to your old basement, and thanks so much for joining us today.
Troy:Thanks for having me, Brian. I love what you've done to my my office.
Bryan:Just for context for the listeners, they may find it interesting that we are sitting in my basement right now in Portage La Prairie recording this, but it's also Troy's old basement as we bought their house in 2019 as he and his family were leaving Portage. But we will get to all that in good time. In today's episode, we'll be exploring Troy's early passion for aviation growing up in Newfoundland, the challenges he faced trying to break into the industry, his path through military flight training, and the in flight incident that forced him to completely change career paths. But before we get into any of that, let's go through Troy's bio. Captain Troy Clarke was born and raised in a small outport community in Newfoundland where his interest in aviation began at a young age.
Bryan:Growing up near the coast, he was captivated by anything that flew, from commercial airliners arriving in nearby cities to helicopters and seaplanes operating in and around his home community. At 16, he completed a co op placement with a local bush flying operation where working around aircraft like the de Havilland Beaver solidified his goal of becoming a pilot. After high school, Troy initially enrolled at Memorial University but struggled to stay focused, often finding himself more interested in watching aircraft at the nearby airport than attending classes. He eventually left university to pursue flight training, enrolling in Gander flight training in September 2001. Just one week later, the events of nine eleven brought the aviation industry to a standstill, forcing him to pause his training due to financial constraints and a lack of opportunities for new pilots.
Bryan:In 2002, he completed a fifty hour bush flying course on float planes, an experience he still considers some of the most enjoyable flying of his career. However, with limited prospects in civilian aviation at the time, Troy joined the Canadian Army Reserves as a logistics officer. Through that experience, he discovered opportunities within the Canadian Armed Forces and ultimately transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force as a pilot in 2004 under the continuing education officer training plan. Troy completed pilot training on the Slingsby Firefly, Harvard two, and Hawk, earning his wings in December 2007. Shortly after, while undergoing fighter lead in training, he experienced an in flight decompression that resulted in a serious ear injury and a prolonged medical grounding.
Bryan:After multiple attempts to return to fast jets, he made the difficult decision to transfer to helicopters. He He completed helicopter training in 2010 and was posted to one zero three search and rescue squadron in Gander, Newfoundland flying the CH one forty nine Cormorant. Over several years, Troy flew numerous SAR missions in the challenging conditions of the North Atlantic, working alongside highly skilled crews and partner agencies to conduct rescues in some of the most demanding environments in Canada. In 2,013, Troy was posted to three Canadian Forces Flying Training School in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, where he began instructing on the jet ranger. He later moved into a standards role helping train and evaluate instructor pilots.
Bryan:In 2019, he returned to Gander and was soon placed in a leadership role serving as wing flight safety officer and acting wings operation officer contributing to operational oversight during the COVID nineteen pandemic. After nineteen years of service, Troy left the Canadian Armed Forces in 2021 to fly air ambulance missions with STARS in Saskatchewan. There, he flew the Airbus h one forty five as part of a critical care team responding to both scene calls and interfacility transfers across the province. After two years with STARS, he returned to the RCAF in 2023 and is currently serving as a standards training officer and instructor at three Canadian Forces Flying Training School. Now in his twenty fifth year in aviation, Troy continues to contribute to the training and development of the next generation of military pilots.
Bryan:Troy is married to the love of his life, Kimberly, and they have two wonderful children, Jake and Brynn. So let's talk about your early days in Newfoundland. Growing up in Newfoundland, when did aviation first grab your attention?
Troy:It happened early. One of my earliest memories was taking my dad to the airport. So he worked he worked on the Mainland, as we call it, in Newfoundland. He actually worked in your neck of the woods. He worked on Canada steam ships, think, is what what they called it.
Troy:So on the Great Lakes in Ontario. So we would very frequently bring him back and forth to the airport. And, one of the closest airports was Gander. And at the time, Gander was quite quite a hub for transoceanic flights. And, I remember, you know, just being completely smitten by these big flying contraptions including the Concorde.
Troy:I saw the Concorde flying one day.
Bryan:Oh, wow.
Troy:Very cool stuff. And I planted the seed back in my hometown. I'm from a very small outport town in Newfoundland and aviation isn't big. Don't see too much of that stuff around. But once in a while, the coast guard would fly through with their helicopter or the RCMP would land in the local somewhere locally Or somebody, a seaplane would land in front of my house out on the bay.
Troy:You know, so all of these things, if it flew, it captured my attention and I just, you know, some of my earliest memories. So I I can't really tell when but it goes way back.
Bryan:Yeah. So it's just sort of something that naturally happened as you witnessed all these different forms of aviation.
Troy:Yeah. Absolutely. And, it's yeah. It's just a natural passion that yeah. I don't I don't know where it came from, but it's it's in there.
Bryan:So you mentioned that you grew up in a small outport community.
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:Can you just sort of explain what an outport community is? I actually had to Google that term when I was writing this up and, and just sort of explain how aviation is important to those communities.
Troy:Yeah. I'll see if I can get it right. So Newfoundland is very sparsely populated. Most of the population is around St. John's on the East Coast, the Avalon Peninsula.
Troy:There are a few fairly bigger communities across the province. You've got Corner Brook on the other side. It's a third city in the province with St. John's and Mount Pearl on the East Coast and so on. Outside of that, have a lot of smaller towns.
Troy:Basically the further away you go from these metropolitan areas, you get into just very small tiny communities. Locally we call them out ports. Now I do call my town an out port but we're still very connected to the next town over which would be our major business center with the banks and grocery stores and stuff. My town was a small town of 600 people. Some out ports are completely closed off from Well, basically the only accessibility to the town is to take a boat or a helicopter in there.
Troy:So a true out port town would be one of those where aviation is paramount. If it doesn't go by boat, it has to go by helicopter or if somebody needs to leave there in an emergency in a hurry, usually it's a helicopter because it's the only way to get on and off these islands. Some of them are on islands or in and out of these communities. So they're just not overly accessible.
Bryan:Is there road access?
Troy:Some of them would have road access. Yeah. But in the far reaches of the province, right? So not easily accessible, not quickly accessible. So, these are the places where helicopters would really come into play.
Troy:My town wasn't like that. I was a little more I'll use the word urban but it wasn't urban but in comparison, we were a little more urban. My town, about 600 people, the neighboring town, 600 or 800 people and so on. There's a chain of communities in that area, the whole area probably a few thousand people and we were accessible by road. We could get to, like I said, to the neighboring community or town, bigger town that had grocery stores.
Troy:And we could also get to the city as well fairly easily within, two or three hours. Okay.
Bryan:So, fairly small rural area, but, yours specifically decently connected. But an out port community traditionally would be a place that's quite isolated and the only way in is either by boat or helicopter.
Troy:Yeah.
Bryan:Okay.
Troy:That's exactly right.
Bryan:You ended up doing a co op placement with Thorburn Aviation. How important was that in shaping your goals?
Troy:So growing up there, you know, I spent my time trying to learn as much as I can about aviation. Once in a while, a seaplane would land on the bay in front of me and and again, like I said, I was just captured. I was smitten by it. But being in that small town with very little aviation around us. My information came from either books.
Troy:This was pre internet days. So any books that I could get my hands on, anything that I could find at the school, I just I craved learning about aviation or seeing airplanes. I would watch movies and I'd pause on on the parts that were that had airplanes and so Fast forward to high school and I was in a co op education program. And as part of the class, the teacher was trying to place us in the community in a job or following along with somebody doing a job that you could probably see yourself in down the road. Now I had no idea at the time, but about a half hour away from my community, there was a small bush flying operation called Forborn Aviation, run by a father and son, Gene and Steve.
Troy:And they're fantastic guys. My teacher arranged for them to let me tag along and it was was great what it did for me. Well, first of all meeting these guys, were so encouraging and inspirational, motivational. You know, this little kid from small town Newfoundland who, getting into aviation was so such a far fetched idea. Well, showed me that it possible because it was right there on my doorstep all along and I didn't know it was there.
Troy:They also let me get my hands dirty, let me touch the airplanes, touch the motors, pretend that I was fixing something. They probably came in behind me and repaired whatever I did. But it was just great to be around aviation and they had, you know, the the legendary de Havilland beaver was one of their machines. And that thing was just a a beautiful beast, you know. When that engine started up, the, the old radio engine, it was it was just amazing.
Troy:So what it did, it just solidified, you know, this passion that kind of grew. This solidified that, oh yeah, this is more than a passion. This is this is something that I I need to do. And despite growing up in such a small town where where kids normally didn't go and do that, well, I had to
Bryan:find a way. So you ended up starting your flight training in 2001. Can you tell us about where that was and what you remember about those early days?
Troy:So after I left high school, I you know, there was no clear entry for me into, into aviation. I did at this point find out that there were a couple of schools. At the time there were two prominent flight schools in Newfoundland, one in Gander, one in St John's. But there were also barriers to entry. I came from a family that was not overly well off.
Troy:Education funding wasn't really there. We really didn't have any savings for me to go to post secondary. So like a lot of kids that graduated with me, we just went to university. So I enrolled in Memorial University. Oh, and the reason I did is because there were student loans available.
Troy:So that was my funding for post secondary education. But those weren't available for flying at the time. And as good and exciting and interesting as that was, at MUN I found that I was just struggling. I realized that I am probably the most terrible student out there and I couldn't focus, I couldn't do the studies that I was there to do and then instead of attending classes, I would find myself either sitting in the student center watching the airplanes approach into St. John's International Airport there.
Troy:Or I'd just be at the airport watching the airplanes when I probably should have been in class. So long story short, I realized I wasn't in the right place. I had to find a way do flight training. So I went to work for a little while, saved up money. Traveled across Canada doing different jobs, putting some money away, securing some funding.
Troy:In 2001, four years after I graduated high school, I made my way back to Gander, enrolled in Gander flight training and yeah, there started the career or what would become a career after a bunch of hurdles but that was the start. And it amazing, it was surreal. Was great to I finally made it or I made it that far anyway and taking that first flight in the little Cessna 01/1952 was as good as flying the Concorde that I saw there a few years prior.
Bryan:Yeah. That must have been a pretty amazing moment to take that first step towards this goal. Like, it's crazy to me to think about, you know, you being in university and cutting class to go watch airplanes. Like, obviously, this is where you were meant to be.
Troy:Yeah. There's there's no doubt. And even now, k, twenty five years later, we have these phones with YouTube and so on. I'll be sitting and looking at a video and my wife will come by and say, what are you looking at? And it's an aviation video.
Troy:So twenty five years into the business and I'm still doing it. It's You know, it was, it was exciting to finally be able to make that passion become a reality.
Bryan:Yeah. Most flying students have a few moments that scare them a bit Yeah. In their early days and you definitely had a few. I did. Can you walk us through getting caught on top of a cloud layer when you were a fairly low time student?
Troy:Yes, I can. And I'll I'll preface this with, So the majority of my flight training in the civilian world was fairly unremarkable and that's the way it should be. It's fairly straightforward. You do what's required for the syllabus. You get your ratings and you move on.
Troy:Now these couple of stories that we'll get into, they are stories that I tell not to to make them sound like like I was a cowboy because I wasn't I wasn't a risky kid. I might have thought that I was a little bit invincible, but, I certainly didn't, go out of my way to find danger. However, I tell these stories because everybody There's the old adage, there's those who have and those who will Or to grow on from that, there's those who don't have to when they learn from other people's mistakes. And that's why I tell these stories. So, yeah, this particular day, I'm doing a cross country.
Troy:It's part of my, somewhere in the program, a cross country from Gander to Deer Lake. Deer Lake is about 110 miles, West of Gander. As I remember, the day was was fine. Gander's weather was good. There might have been a few clouds in the sky, but, nothing to be concerned about.
Troy:So I departed. Now I might have looked at Gander's weather and I might have looked at Derelict's weather, but I'm not sure I really did a proper route study. Because as I'm flying along and these are in days of paper maps with lines on them, compass, you know, this is pre Gucci kit that we have these days and, if anything, you might have had a handheld GPS, but that day I did not. So so I'm going, I'm looking at my map, I'm focusing on the map, looking outside, I see a few clouds but I'm above the cloud. I won't even call it a layer, the few clouds but I'm well above them and I'm continuing on.
Troy:At some point those clouds got a little bit thicker, but I wasn't worried. I could still see the ground and I wouldn't at this point, I don't even think they were a broken layer, not yet. So I get back to my root and my instruments and of course trying to keep the aircraft at 4,500 feet or wherever I was, and not really paying attention that the clouds were actually starting to close in underneath me and getting a little thicker ahead of me and terrifyingly getting very thick behind me. I didn't notice this until at one point it dawned on me, I can no longer see the ground. So I'm above this solid layer.
Troy:I can't see anything below the clouds. I can't see anything ahead of me or behind me, and, I'm trapped and I don't have a VFR over the top rating. I've never flown an instrument rating. At this point, I probably only had twenty hours, of flying under my belt.
Bryan:Right. And and just for listeners who maybe haven't done any flight training before, the significance of this is that when you're flying VFR or visual flight rules, you have to maintain visual reference to the ground. That's the law. There is a rating, as Troy mentioned, called a VFR over the top rating where you can get a rating where you can fly over the clouds, but that was not the case at this point. So not only was he in a situation where he was no longer VFR, it's dangerous because how do you navigate and and how do you handle this with Yeah.
Bryan:Very little experience or or training?
Troy:Very little experience and very little instrumentation. And and what I had my navigation, materials was a paper map that required me to see the ground.
Bryan:Yeah. Right. No GPS.
Troy:No GPS. So the best I could do was put a heading, you know, my my map would have said Deer Lake is in this direction, plug that into my heading and hopefully it would work out or turn around. I could have turned around and went back to Gander. What I did do, the same time, one of my classmates was doing the same trip, but she had an instructor with her. So, called them up.
Troy:I'm not sure if it was on 126.7 or if we had an interplaying frequency at the time, I don't recall. But I In the blind, I I tried to radio them and thankfully, they heard me and they came back and I I explained my situation, got myself in a pickle here and I don't know what to do. Panic. I was I was panicking Mhmm. To say the least.
Troy:So they were a little bit ahead of me. He did have an over the top rating, and they were hoping that Deer Lake was gonna be clear when they got there. His root study or his weather study told him that it was going to be fine. We later found out and I'll get to it. We later found out it wasn't.
Troy:But he said, okay, don't go back because Gander might be socked in as well. So try and find us and see if you can get close to us. Eventually I did find them, they were just a little speck on the horizon. They slowed down for me, I sped up, I got there. He said, you know what, get as close as you can, but not too close.
Troy:Stay maybe half a mile back to a mile and we'll get through this. Okay. All right. That gave me a little bit more peace. But I remember being very envious of my course mate.
Troy:She was in the airplane with her instructor, but I was still up there alone and pretty scared at this point. So we got a little closer to Deer Lake and we realized that no, Deer Lake wasn't going to be clear enough to do a landing. So what are we going to do next? Well, at one point we did see a hole in the clouds. It was a pretty dark hole.
Troy:So we didn't really know what was underneath it. I personally didn't know where we were because I'm still on a map with no fore flight, no GPS, nothing like that. But he said, okay, Troy, stick close, follow, try not to lose me. We gotta go down through this hole. And that's what we did.
Troy:The reason the hole was so dark is because it was over open ocean and not too far from land, but the land was actually fairly high cliffs. Oh, wow. So as we poked down through this hole and I saw what we're contending with, oh, that it didn't make the day much better. No. No, not at that point.
Troy:But I'll I'll fast forward to it. We did make it underneath the hole. It was it was raining, but it was it was good enough for us to fly in. We didn't make it to Deere like that day. We turned back, went to Gander and, yeah, lived to tell the story.
Bryan:How did you feel once you got on the ground?
Troy:Elated. Yeah. It was, Oh, I'm pretty sure my legs are wobbly. It was one of those, you know, we always joke, oh, I kiss the ground. I might have.
Troy:I don't know what I did, but yeah, I remember being so relieved when I got on the ground. And just looking back at that and just thinking man, how did I get myself into it? Did you learn from that? So much. A lot of lessons are learned hard way.
Troy:What do you take from that? It's about decision making. It's about preparation. Now, how sure I might have looked at Gander's weather and Dierlix weather but did I do a proper study of what's in between? It's 100 miles, a lot of stuff can happen.
Troy:This is Newfoundland where the joke is if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes. Things change, right? I was not properly prepared. And again, that I said a little bit earlier, maybe I was 21 years old, maybe I was feeling invincible. What's the worst that can happen?
Troy:That sort of thing. What did I learn about it? I learned you cannot, put yourself in a situation that you can't get out of. Right? Don't ever back yourself in a corner.
Troy:Always have a way out and that's okay. That's applicable to now as a professional and qualified pilot. But back then, don't even put yourself near anything like that. I was not qualified to be over clouds. Be more aware of what your surroundings are.
Troy:Don't get complacent. Always teach in aviation instruction, heads out, get your head out of the aircraft. Well, if I had got my head of the aircraft and was a little more aware, I probably would have saw the clouds closing in underneath me a little bit sooner than I did. I might have been able to turn back to Gander before it closed in back there, who knows. A lot of lessons learned that day.
Bryan:Yeah, for sure. Another big learning experience you had that, was probably pretty scary for you at the time was, an unstable approach with passengers on board. Can you tell us about that one?
Troy:Yeah. So this was after I'd gotten my private pilot license. Of course, I'm really excited. Now I am a pilot, I'm not just a trainee, I've got a license to show that I'm a pilot. Not commercial but I can carry passengers.
Troy:So one of the first things I wanted to do was bring my family, friends for a flight. There's an airstrip fairly close to my hometown. It's used basically or predominantly for air medevacs but you're free to fly in and out of it in a town called Clarendonville. So I arranged to go out to Clarendonville. I called my brother, said round up anybody who wants to go flying, meet me at the Clarendonville Airstrip and we'll just make a fun afternoon out of it.
Troy:So, I did, I showed up and I don't remember how many people I took but I took a few people flying it was fun for them. It was also a sense of pride as well for me or a sense of accomplishment that I pretty proud to have done that. So, it was good. I was feeling good And I would take them, we'd do a little tour of the area, we'd come back and land and one after the other after the other. What I didn't notice was that the winds were slowly changing.
Troy:When I got there, the wind stock was down the runway, but I probably again not being aware of my surroundings, being aware what's going on environmentally. I might not have noticed the wind sock was starting to change and on this, the last flight, the one we're gonna talk about, I took off. I noticed in the takeoff that we're you know, it's even the takeoff itself was a little bit more unstable. Again, being very junior in flying, I didn't really have the wherewithal to realize that now I'm taking off in a tailwind and that's why it's not feeling good. I did my flight around the area.
Troy:The passengers on board were my brother's wife, my sister-in-law, and my cousin. They loved it. They're pretty adventurous. They're full of smiles. They loved seeing their hometown and their house and and so on.
Troy:So we come back, it's time to land. I set up on the same runway I've been using the whole day and on final So this runway, it's just a simple airstrip, It's surrounded by trees and in the distance probably 10 or 15 miles away, there's some pretty significant mountains. So you get some of the effects of the winds flowing over the mountains. And this tailwind that I had was coming from the mountains. So it was just very disturbed air that getting.
Troy:I got on approach, the first part okay, feeling a little different but it's okay. We got below the tree line and I'm not sure if it was a gust of wind, some wind shear, decreasing performance. I'm not sure what happened really, but something happened. And there was a burble and then my wing dropped very significantly that I remember looking out scared that it might contact the ground. Of course, I panicked, leveled the aircraft, pushed full power, started to go around.
Troy:But in my panic and not having my brain where it needed to be, I raised the flaps right away, lost all that lift at that very slow slow speed and we sank even further. The aircraft bounced off the ground two, three times, bounced airborne. I struggled to get it going, and we just basically limped our way over the trees on the end of the runway to a point that, okay, we're we're safe now. I, got the aircraft under control and we gotta try this again because I need to get these passengers off the plane. The humorous part about it is that while I'm white knuckled and still sweating bullets, because I realized what happened, I looked at my passengers and they're still full of smiles because they're adventurous spirits.
Troy:Well, they thought I was just playing around and making the trip sporty, But I wasn't, because I wasn't that kind of a risky pilot. It just not aware again, not aware of my environment. I, put myself in a predicament that could have been a lot worse. Mhmm. Yeah.
Troy:When you came back,
Bryan:did you realize eventually there was a tailwind? Did you line up on the same runway or
Troy:No, I started to clue in. Why is this happening? So I did the proper procedure, went back, flew the runway, looked down, I saw the wind sock. It had turned basically 180 degrees from where it was earlier. I clued in and did a proper approach next time.
Troy:They got off my aircraft. I canceled the rest of the familial flights or the fun flights that I was gonna do and brought the aircraft back to Gander. And I remember the whole way back, that's that's when I really contemplated, okay, what am I doing here? Is this really the job that I wanna be in? This is some scary stuff sometimes.
Troy:But I eventually calmed down, probably well after I landed the aircraft and was home. But I calmed down and realized the reason that happened again is from my own doing. I put myself in that situation not being properly prepared, not following proper SOPs, standard operating procedures, not really being aware of what the winds are doing. Again, I talk myself down off that ledge as well. But the important thing to come out of it and this is why I keep telling these stories, a successful flight starts with the right preparation and then not putting yourself in a situation that you shouldn't be in.
Bryan:Yeah. Yeah. We used to go through all these different, scenarios like, oh, if this happened, what would you do? If this happened, what would you do? And a lot of the time the answer was like, well, this is what I would do but also I would make sure that I was never in that situation to begin with.
Troy:Yeah. Absolutely.
Bryan:Yeah. Everybody has those moments early on where they scare themselves in some way and and it's a real gut check for like, holy cow, is this for me?
Troy:It is. Yeah. And and again, I reemphasize that my whole training was not like this. These are just two or three incidents that happened during my training, which was, pretty low key for the most part, straightforward. But there were some things, some places where I found myself, some situations I found myself in that, yeah, we can learn from this and get these stories out and, the more that we can learn from other people's stories, the better prepared we are to not get ourselves into those kinds of stories.
Troy:Yeah, for sure.
Bryan:Let's shift gears a little. So you, as we said, you were, doing your flight training in Gander, in Was it 2001 where you started in Gander?
Troy:I did. Yeah.
Bryan:So, of course, Gander 2001 Yeah. Was a big part of of 09/11 and the events, on that day. You were in Gander that day. What do you remember about it?
Troy:Boy. Yeah. That was a big day. So, yeah, I I I started flight training in Gander on 09/04/2001, exactly one week before the, the nine eleven World Trade Center attacks. Gander that day, so that morning, as a lot of stories start, it was a morning like every other morning.
Troy:I arrived at the school, we went flying. My instructor and I were the only ones that flew from the school that day. Halfway through our flight, air traffic control radioed us and said, hey guys, recommend you land the aircraft and put it in the hangar. We've got a lot of IFR traffic inbound. Now back in the day, Gander was a trans oceanic hub but at this point, 2001, wasn't that busy anymore.
Troy:So for ATC to say there's a lot of IFR traffic, This left us a bit confused, more so my instructor because he was very familiar with the area. He said, I wonder what's going on. Yeah, we better land. So we did, we landed. He went inside just to make sure everything was okay while I put the aircraft away.
Troy:Once I did that, I walked inside and he was running out to get me and said Troy you got to come in, come in and look at this. When I got in there, the whole school was standing around the television and right at that time, that's when the second airplane hit tower. We were like the rest of the world, were in shock, what's going on here? And then the pieces started to fit together. Okay, IFR traffic coming into Gander, World Trade Center was attacked.
Troy:American airspace is shut down. So Gander became the recipient, one of several, but became probably the most iconic in this story. The recipient of a lot of IFR traffic coming over the ocean en route to The US that couldn't get into The US because of the closed airspace. I think Gander got 38 heavy aircraft. We were watching them come in.
Troy:There were the old McDonald Douglas's, the 747s. There were some Antonov's and some larger military aircraft like the Globemaster and so on. All of them full of passengers. You got to imagine Gander's population is right around 10,000, a little bit under I believe, at the time anyway. And these airplanes when they came in, they brought 6,600 passengers.
Troy:So the entire population of Gander almost doubled within a couple of hours here. And it was again surreal. It was like you're in a whole different world. Again, this is a small town in Newfoundland, Gander, which is on this rock in the middle of the ocean. And that's what these people on the plane also realize.
Troy:We're we're on a rock and where are we? Mhmm. You know? So you can imagine from their perspective as well, they're on this airplane. They don't know why they landed here.
Troy:They're not being told what's happening in the world. And they were they were actually some some of the aircraft, they couldn't release their passengers or let their passengers off for, I believe more than twenty four hours. So it was quite a tough situation for them
Bryan:for
Troy:sure. Was most remarkable about Gander's part in this whole story is the response of the town, the people. Gander again is a very small town, not a whole lot of facilities. The available hotels got pretty full pretty quick. You can imagine with 6,600 people, Gander doesn't have that capacity.
Troy:So where are they going to stay? Well, schools closed down and opened their gyms, churches opened their doors, libraries. If it was a building that could house people, it did. And when they were to capacity, well people opened their doors, invited these plain people, that's what they came to be called. They invited the plain people in to give them a bed, some food, clothes, whatever they needed, nice warm shower.
Troy:The whole town just it changed in a few hours and it was just amazing to see. So much so that there's a Broadway musical made about the entire situation. Gander's part in the nine eleven story. The musical is called Come From Away. I saw it a few years ago.
Troy:Had me on the edge of my seat crying through the whole thing. And, I like to say, yeah, well, a lot of people have seen the show but I lived it. It was a very surreal eye opening experience for sure. Here's a fun quick story about it. My wife won't like me telling it but it is funny.
Troy:In the musical, there was a character named Oz and he was the town police officer, one of several town police officers but he's very well known. You mentioned the name Oz in Gander and they know who you're talking about. But the fun thing, fun story in my family is that my wife actually got a speeding ticket from Oz. When his character showed up on the on the stage, I don't know if she, I don't know if he was really her favorite character.
Bryan:How did this whole event impact your ability to continue flight training?
Troy:So the aftermath of nine eleven, one of the aftermaths. The world went into a spiral. Right? But one of the aftermaths is that, the aviation world came to I won't say a standstill but probably something close. People just weren't flying, they were afraid to fly remembering the hijackings and so on.
Troy:So, people weren't flying, airlines weren't making money, they had to cut back and pilots were being laid off. Less than a year into this happened seven days after I started flying, but less than a year into flight training and I'm looking around and I'm surrounded by unemployed pilots I'm surrounded by instructors in our school that have no prospects outside of teaching and yeah, it really changed things. On the financial side, I was also running out of money and, the ability to fund my further training because people were very reluctant to give students money for the more advanced commercial training sort of thing. So where did it lead me? Well, I don't know, about nine or ten months into my flight training, I left flight school and I had to go back to work and just try and figure out what the next step was going to be.
Troy:Was I going to be a pilot? Was I going to have to find something different?
Bryan:Right. And that is about the time you joined the army reserve, right?
Troy:I did. Needed something stable. I bounced around from small job to small job. They came and went but I needed something that was stable and that also paid and provided opportunity. So I joined, it was thirty six Newfoundland Service Battalion at the time in St.
Troy:John's. I joined them, as a logistics officer and that's what it did. It provided that stability. It me It was part time work, but it gave me work to go to and something to always fall back on as I tried to figure everything else out.
Bryan:And then how did you end up going from there to joining the air force full time as a pilot? So, again,
Troy:growing up in small town Newfoundland, I'm the first person to ever join the military in my family. Even in my community, are very few of us that have gone on to have this kind of career. So, I really didn't know anything about the military other than what I saw in movies. So, I didn't know what opportunities the military had. Joining the reserves, it was out of necessity because I needed to be employed.
Troy:But what it did was show me that the Canadian Armed Forces has a world of opportunity for everyone. And it just so happened that they were recruiting pilots. Fast forward a couple of years later, I had put in my application. I never really considered being a military pilot. I saw myself flying airlines.
Troy:I saw myself potentially flying in the bush. But military wasn't really on my radar until I joined the reserves. And yeah, I'm really glad I did. I put my application in probably a year into my reserve, my time in the reserves and it was fairly quickly picked up, sent to aircrew selection and thankfully I passed aircrew selection after a whole lot of stress. And, on 03/31/2004, I signed up for full time service.
Bryan:So you get through aircrew selection, you go to primary flight training, and you ended up being the last course to fly the Slingsby Yeah. Firefly before they transitioned to the Grove, which is flying now and will soon be transitioned out for the Super Grove, I believe, is the new one. Right? So what did that feel like? I'm sure some of the pilots now are starting to feel this way.
Bryan:Was it, like, the end of an era, or did you feel like, oh, man, if I was one course later, I could be flying the Grove? You know, probably a little bit of both.
Troy:End of an era it definitely was an end of an era. I I witnessed the end of an era from, you know, the perspective of of the guys still there flying. These these guys who were working for Bombardier at the time had been there for years flying this very cool machine. And I could see the emotions that they were going through as they were retiring this machine. And right after my course, they they went and I don't know what it was, maybe a 10 ship, and delivered all of these, Slingsby Fireflies down to Texas, I believe it was.
Troy:So, I got to see it from their perspective a little bit. From my perspective, once I was hired to be a, an air force pilot, I of course, I had to do my research and see what machines I was gonna be flying and I come across this one called the Slingsby and I I did as much research as I could to find out what the Slingsby was and I thought, man, that's that's a really cool machine. So, it was it was a very neat experience for me to be able to fly that machine and knowing that nobody else would fly but knowing that it was the machine that for the previous ten or fifteen years, it trained all the aviators before me, you know, and that was that was very cool experience. I was a little sad that I didn't get to fly the Grove because that one also looked pretty cool, little more had a little better performance, had retractable gear, things like that. A bit more of a flashy Gucci cockpit.
Troy:But I wouldn't trade the opportunity for flying to Slingsby. Think it's a fun part of my story to say that I was on the last cadre of students. It's funny as well when every day we would come in and there were fewer and fewer things in the classroom. You know, pictures were taken off the wall, chairs, desks were being removed and I was one of the first ones to make it through the course. But one of my friends at the time, she ended up being the last remaining person on the course and I remember talking to her a few weeks after I had gotten back home.
Troy:And I said, so how's everything going? And she said, well, they're tearing the building down around me. And I came in to work this morning and all I had was one chair and one table and there's absolutely nothing else in the room. So they were it it really was the end of an era. Mhmm.
Troy:They and they were dismantling everything to move into the next program.
Bryan:Wow. As you said, you got through phase one flight training. You moved on to phase two on the Harvard in Moose Jaw. How was flight training going for you in those phases? You ended up doing phase two and phase two Bravo, but how'd that go?
Troy:It went relatively smooth as far as military training courses could go. It was again a fantastic experience, but a very I'll call it stressful. I don't think it's as much like this right now. It might be. It's been a long time since I've been in Moose Jaw.
Troy:But at the time, I always felt that I had to perform and that's a good thing. You need to perform and that's what we want from our pilots. But there was always the fear of not being able to perform and always the fear of we always call it two strikes and you're out. One bad flight can lead to an extra training flight. That one goes bad then okay, that's going to lead to something worse and possibly, the end of your flying.
Troy:That's the way I saw it as a student. Now being on the other side of that, as an instructor and as a trainer, it really isn't that way or at least not right now. We do what we can to get you over your hurdle. We will give you the training that we can, as much training as we can within the confines of the training plan that you're on and so on with the time available. So, we will put our every effort into it.
Troy:But I guess my own perceived pressure at the time going through Moose Jaw, I didn't feel that way and I was always I was pretty stressed going through that course to be very honest.
Bryan:Well, you must have been doing pretty decent though because you initially wanted helicopters but they ended up convincing you to take a jet slot. So, how did that come about?
Troy:That was interesting. I Before I went to Moose Jaw, I did a little bit of time OJT, on job training, in Gander at one zero three Search and Rescue around, the Cormorant around the Cormorant pilots. And I was pretty taken by the Cormorant. It's a fantastic machine and I thought, yeah, this is what I want to do. But I was also a fence walker.
Troy:So, I went to Moose Jaw and I'm working my way through this course. Yeah, I did well. Again, I talk about the stress but that stress just was it was my motivation to keep doing, doing better and performing on the course. I was a fence walker, So, like back when I was a kid, if it flew, I was smitten And that goes for helicopters, it goes for fixed wing aircraft, jets. I struggled with deciding what I would request after after Moose Jaw.
Troy:Ultimately, the end, I did decide that helicopters, that's that's the route I wanna go. There's no bad route but for me, it was it was gonna be helicopters and I would have the opportunity to potentially serve in my home province, flying the Cormorant. That was my hope anyway. So I did request helicopters and I that slot and I was waiting for my helicopter course. At the same time, they were having trouble filling the I think on my course they were hoping to get three jet slots filled and there was only one person that requested it.
Troy:So I was approached by a major in school. I and one other guy who did relatively well. I think he did a little better than me. I was about sixth in my class out of 12. So I was middle of the road.
Troy:I was with some really strong performers. But the thing about us is that they knew that we were not 100% convinced or solid on the routes that we requested. And they thought, well, what about this? They presented an opportunity for us. How about you take a jet slot and when you go through the jet program, if you're encouraged to go on to the F-eighteen, fantastic.
Troy:Welcome to the jet stream. If not, then we'll give you the opportunity to be an instructor here at the school. You can do that for a few years and then maybe go to your helicopter communities or in his case, the other guy wanted a fixed wing position. So I hummed a nod over it, the other guy did too. He decided to take it and I still, I stuck with helicopters initially until while you were waiting your next course at the time, they put you in what we call the Tasker Shack.
Troy:Tasker Shack is that, it's a shack between the two parallel runways in Moosha and your job is to look through the binoculars at the aircraft on approach, make sure they're landing gears down. If it's not, you try to radio and tell them to put the gear down and if that doesn't work, set off some flares. So that was my job and I'm sitting there and day after day after day, I'm watching the Hawks fly in and out of the airport and do some really what I thought was really cool stuff and they have this really cool sound and I'm starting to become pretty obsessed with this Hawk, and I'm thinking, that's a cool machine and did I miss an opportunity here? Like most good stories, a girl comes into the scene. I met a girl locally so then I'm thinking well, boy, if I take this jet position and if I in the end don't go to become an F eighteen pilot, I could stay here and be an instructor.
Troy:Let's see where this goes. In the meantime, I could see where things go with this girl. There's always a love interest in every good story. Was this Kim? This is Kim.
Troy:So it worked out in the end. Anyway, I was pretty intrigued by that opportunity as well and I decided to go for it. I went back to the chief flight instructor, tail between my legs sort of thing and I said, sir, I know you offered me the jet. I stuck with helicopters. I'll put it out there.
Troy:If you still need somebody on the jet, I will accept and I'll take it. But if it's too little too late, then I'm happy to go with the helicopters. He looked at me kind of a smirk on his face and he said, your timing can't be better. It just so happened that the other guy that took the jet slot, he found out I believe that day or day before that he's actually too tall to fly the Hawk. So, he was taken off course and they still had two vacancies in the jet world, around the jet jet side of things.
Troy:So, I just slipped right into that slot and went on the fly of the jet for for a couple of years. It was great. And what
Bryan:did you think of the Hawk once you got on it?
Troy:It was Yeah. It was everything that, you know, the little boy inside of me thought it was gonna be. It was it was great. It's a small machine in comparison to the F-eighteen and some other jets out there but when that turbine engine starts up, it has a particular sound that just really appeals to me. Love it.
Troy:And then you get it past I don't remember the lingo, you get it past the gas turbine portion of the start and put it into idle and the sound changes to a different sound and that intrigued me. Then just the smell of that jet fuel and that was everything about it. And that's before you even take it off the ground, right? And I remember my very first flight in the jet, my instructor, we we got off the ground. I mean, the thing just glides off the ground.
Troy:Nothing like a helicopter. I mean, the helicopter beats itself into the air but a jet, it just it was just so smooth. It was not like anything else I had ever flown. There's no propellers so there was all centerline thrust. It was smooth.
Troy:It's you know, it was just nice and it pushed you back in the seat when you were full throttle and barreling down the runway. It was yeah, it was was a cool experience. That's awesome. Yeah, loved it.
Bryan:So, you ended up earning your wings on the Hawk. How how big of a deal was that to you?
Troy:Oh, that was yeah, that was huge. I mean, it was very exciting to be able to do that on the Hawk. That's somewhere I I never saw myself going down that route. Mhmm. You know, not only was I in the military, but I grew up in the eighties and of course, '84, think it was Top Gun comes out.
Troy:So like every kid my age, we grew up watching Top Gun and just dreaming of being Maverick flying around the skies, right? So no, I didn't get to that point, but this was a cool step in that direction and I loved it. I also had my family there to see me get that. It was great and, just the fact that, okay, all that stress leading up to the the culmination of my training thus far, you know, with with those wings being put on my chest, it was just one of the best days of like like most of us, one of the best days of our careers. Mhmm.
Bryan:So obviously, this was a pretty happy time for you. You've received your wings, achieved your goals so far anyways, and and that's pretty exciting. But you actually went through a really difficult experience at this time as well when you lost a close mentor of yours. Can you tell us about that?
Troy:Yeah. His name was Brian Mitchell and, most people knew him as Mav. So Brian was what we called a snapper. So he was essentially what I do here at the school now in standards conducting the test for the students and staff and so on. So I first came across Brian on one of my tests.
Troy:Think it was a NAV test, I'm not sure, maybe an instrument. And I remember seeing him, carried himself differently. He was a friendly person. In the position that he was in as a tester, we were always fairly nervous around those guys. But Brian had a way to put you at ease.
Troy:He'd have a conversation with you, he'd talk to you like a human being, like you are the most important person in the room. And I caught that from him just even from being tested by him. And I ended up doing several tests with Brian over the course of that phase of training. This was on the Harvard. And again, I held him in high regard.
Troy:He was a good man. Well at the same time I actually started going to a local church in town in Moose Jaw and I saw that after a couple days there I realized oh Brian's at the church. That was cool and I made it a point on the Sundays to go out and chat to him and would again, he'd give me all the time in the world, just a stand up guy and I'd see him there with his wife, Melody and with their children and just to see how he carried himself with his family and out in the real world away from work. He was just all around a stand up guy. I came to respect him very much and got to know him over the months, chit chatting on Sundays, seen him at the school and we got to know each other very well and he became actually a big supporter of mine at work through training, more so when I got on the Hawk course because Brian flew the Harvard.
Troy:So it remained very professional while I was going through the Harvard side. Then when I got on the hockey, this is where he became more of a mentor. He was in my corner, you can do this. He was a good motivator and always very inspirational to talk to. He did become, I consider him my mentor at the time, the biggest mentor that I had and yeah, again, I can't say enough good things about him.
Troy:Well fast forward, I got my wings, I invited him to my wings grad, he was there, shook my hand and celebrated with my family and our friends and that was pretty special. So, I go to Cold Lake, we'll talk about that story in a little bit and I come back, I end up back in Moose Jaw for a while and it was during that time that I was back in Moose Jaw where Brian had gotten onto the snowbirds and he very excited about that. Sadly, very tragically before he was able to fly in his first season as a snowbird, he was part of what we call a dissimilar formation flight. So there were the three aircraft that flew in Moose Jaw, the Hawk, Harvard and the Tudor were doing a photo exercise and, they flew in formation over the, over the base and Brian was in the aircraft with a photographer taking photos. And I remember they flew over the base and then they disappeared behind the buildings of the base and it was at that time that Brian's plane crashed in a field just north of the base and tragically killing Brian and his passenger was a gentleman named Chuck Seneckel, the photographer on the flight.
Troy:That was That tragic was day. It was a tragic day for many people. Of course, for his family, for his colleagues, friends, for the base and I lost my mentor that day and that sent me into a bit of a spiral as well. I didn't know how to handle that, there was nothing like that before in my training or really in my life. And I just remember not knowing where to turn next sort of thing.
Troy:It was a tough thing to go through.
Bryan:Mean it's almost like the person you would turn to to talk about it was gone, right?
Troy:He was gone, yeah. That was tough and my fiance at the time, actually just two days before the tragic accident there, Brian was in the office that I was sitting in and I'd just recently gotten engaged and I remember asking him to come to my wedding and he said, Yeah, I'll be there. And two days later, the crash happened and it was a hard time.
Bryan:Were you watching when that happened?
Troy:I watched, we had a group of people watching the formation fly over but they disappeared behind the buildings. So all of us on the ground, we weren't able to see the incident. Mhmm. So we didn't we didn't see their, his airplane crash.
Bryan:When did you first know that something had gone wrong?
Troy:At the time, I was working in ops and, we were with another group of people and my friend Ben was actually on shift in ops while the rest of us were outside watching the formation and Ben came running out in a, I'll call it a panic, he came running out with urgency saying, get back in here, we've just had a crash. At that point, I didn't know it was Mav who was involved in it but you know, the the base went into crash protocol, somebody in the formation had just crashed.
Bryan:So obviously, you had to find a way to keep going. How did you deal with this as time went on and you know, in the short term and the long term, how did you not move past it, but how did you manage to keep going?
Troy:Well, time is a good healer. Everybody has their way to cope with those kinds of things. They have their people that surround them. I was fortunate, to have of course my fiancee, she wasn't living there in town, Kim wasn't there, she was actually on a work term back in her hometown but she was a great support from a distance and then when she could, she got down there and she was a fantastic support. Our circle of friends and again, yeah, some people have this spiritual side of things that they go to and I certainly have that side.
Troy:That was a tremendous help. It was just surrounding yourself by your circle of support and that's what got me through it. Over time or as time went on, what word am I looking for? The pain of it I guess started to settle down and you you move on. Does happen in this career.
Troy:It has happened before and you just you find a way to move on. I don't really know what the what the exact answer is for that.
Bryan:Yeah. I had a buddy of mine, Chris Allen. Axe was his call sign. Yeah. And we did basic training together.
Troy:Okay.
Bryan:And when I was going through Moose Jaw, he was doing his fighter training.
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:And he was at Cold Lake on the f 18. And, you know, he'd come back to Moose Jaw and we'd buddy around and he'd tease me a bit and and, you know, he was trying to get me to go jets and it was great, you know, to see him again. He was he was becoming a mentor of sorts to me and someone who I really looked up to and went overseas to Iraq for OpImpact and I ran into him on both my tours there. Mhmm. And it was really cool to run into each other around the world and see each other doing the business and that was really neat.
Bryan:And then, shortly after my second tour, got a message from another guy that we did basic with. He said, hey, did did Chris die?
Troy:Oh, no.
Bryan:And I I was like, no. Like, I just saw him in
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:Over in The Middle East and he came back home and turned out he died in a he drowned. He he died in a fishing accident off the out in BC. And it and it's like one of those things where you're like in disbelief almost. Right? And then like you say, time goes by but every now and then it'll hit you like a punch like you remember that this person is gone.
Troy:Yeah, and that's exactly right. Even now again, that was I believe the date was 10/09/2008 and we're almost twenty years past the point but it's still the memory is very alive.
Bryan:I can see that.
Troy:And strong. Get emotional when I talk about it. I'm sure you can hear it in my voice. It's a tough thing to have to deal with, right? But you hold on to the good memories and I honestly, in the course of my life and in my career, I only knew Matt for a very short time.
Troy:But it was a quality short time where he did take on that mentor and friend role in my life and support in my corner helping me get through it.
Bryan:Yeah. Well, he sounds like he was an amazing guy.
Troy:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely was.
Bryan:So prior to this accident that we just discussed, you actually went through a pretty serious incident of your own. Can you walk us through what happened to you when you were on your fighter lead in training on the Hawk?
Troy:Yeah, for sure. So, I got my wings on 12/07/2007. I started my fighter lean in training at four nineteen Squadron in Cold Lake in March 2008. Toward the end of my training on the Hakimusha, my wings course, There were a couple of incidents that I didn't really pay much attention to but I landed the aircraft a couple of times and my ears, particularly my right ear was blocked or I had a little bit of pain or some difficulty clearing it. I really didn't think much of it.
Troy:Fast forward three months later on the five year leading course, I noticed that when I was flying that this seemed to be getting a little more consistent, I'll say. Not overly painful, but just having some difficulty clearing the earth. I mean, on some of the things that we do or we did, they do in jet training, there's some pretty significantly high descent rates, climb rates. Declines are never an issue, but I noticed that on the descents I was having more and more trouble clearing my ear and it progressed to the point that the day of the incident we're talking about. We went flying, it was a BFM, basic fighter maneuvers flight.
Troy:A very dynamic flight, you and another aircraft are doing fighter maneuvers, entry level fighter maneuvers at this stage but very cool flight. But at some point in that flight, our cockpit decompressed. So the aircraft had a decompression and it actually went unnoticed for some time. We were flying around without proper pressurization in the cockpit, which depending on how high you go it could cause some physiological issues. We weren't flying too too high but I did notice something different was a result of that decompression and the big descent rate.
Troy:You know, at some point I noticed a tremendous pain in my ear. I had to get my instructor to roll out the level off to climb back up to see if I could try and clear my ear. It wasn't happening and I just had to accept that okay, I can't clear my ear but we need to land this aircraft that just had a decompression. I've got to suffer this out. So we landed and at one point I do remember just feeling a very painful crack.
Troy:Oh. Followed by relief. So, the pressure built up, built up, built up, the eardrum let go. I perforated my eardrum and then immediate relief after that.
Bryan:So did you know what had happened?
Troy:I suspected. Yeah. Yeah. Especially with that crack and it was in my ear, it was audible, right? I could hear it and I could feel it.
Troy:Yeah, it was not the most comfortable thing. I went to the doctor, he looked in my ear. I remember his first word was oof or his first noise I should say. My ear had filled with fluid with blood and so on and he confirmed that I just perforated my eardrum. Follow on to that later on that day, I also started showing symptoms of well, my fingers started tingling, my extremities were feeling a little weird.
Troy:I was getting these numbness, numbness in my hands and something in my face. I went back to the doctor the next day, explained it to him and he was a little bit concerned about it and I told him about the decompression in the aircraft and after thinking it through, he decided we don't think you have decompression sickness but you might and we really can't take the chance. So he medevaced me down to Edmonton in a four seventeen Squadron, Griffin. So I'm in the back of a Griffin being medevaced to Edmonton and I spent a weekend in the Misericordia Hospital in Edmonton doing chamber runs in a hyperbaric chamber. Yeah, three different dives in hyperbaric chamber just to ensure that I don't have the nitrogen in my blood.
Troy:Like the bends basically? The bends, yeah. He said it's unlikely that I had it, but I am showing symptoms of, I guess, a mild case of it, not really familiar with it. But I said we can't really take the chance, so we have to make sure.
Bryan:So, long did you have to be in the chamber at a time?
Troy:At a time, boy, there were two short ones and one really long one. The longest one was six hours. Wow. Six hours in a chamber and the two short ones I think were two to three hours each.
Bryan:Can they give you like a book
Troy:or something? Well, these ones, it was a pretty neat setup actually. The chamber, the entire thing was made out of glass. So you could see through it. You could talk to the person sitting outside, there was a microphone inside.
Troy:They had a television set up with I think speakers pumping into the chamber. So it was actually a decent setup, still not great for a guy who's kind of claustrophobic but I made it through. The tricky thing about it though, to add insult to injury here, the injury that I had on my ear back in Cold Leg, it had I guess what the word is, but had started to scab over, started to heal. So when they put me in the chamber, I again was having tremendous pressure and I had to stop there I said, no, this is too much. So they actually had to take me out, give me general anesthetic, perforate my eardrum on purpose, woke me up and put me back in the chamber.
Bryan:Brutal.
Troy:It became a whole incident. Follow on to it was that, well it led to a year long grounding basically. The ear injury was they deemed it a result of something that was happening anatomically in my neck, the eustachian tube that connects the throat to your ear. Something was happening to it. I don't know if it was collapsed or what.
Troy:They couldn't find out. I spent the next year seeing specialists, ear, nose, throat doctor, neurologist just to try and get to the bottom of what was happening and we never could figure it out.
Bryan:So, you ended up grounded for a year, what was that like mentally for you?
Troy:It was, I guess, demotivating. You're seeing the guys and gals that graduated with you and they're moving on to have very cool careers. The ones I got to know on the jet side of things, the ones that my former classmates went on to fly helicopters and fix wings. I was happy for them but at the same time kind of sad for myself that I couldn't move It on in this was a little depressing, a little demotivating. And you find We call it ground happy.
Troy:You find that the more you sit on the ground, the more you Okay. You become with being okay sitting on the ground.
Bryan:Yeah. Almost like you you don't want to fly
Troy:almost at
Bryan:that point because you're like, I'm out of the game. This is a lot less stressful. Yeah, I've been there.
Troy:I bet. Yeah. And I've been there more than once, more than that year but that's where it went.
Bryan:So, at some point you must have started to realize that jets might not be a thing for you anymore. Like when did that come about?
Troy:We tried to get me back into the cockpit, first into the jet and then into the Harvard. But the thing was the jet pressurization system isn't really too different than the Harvard pressurization system and there was really no success.
Bryan:Like it was painful?
Troy:It was painful. Every time I go, It was painful, I'd have to get them to level off. I'd have to try and clear my ears, sometimes it didn't work. I accept my fate, I'm going to land with another barotrauma. If it wasn't fully perforated, then there's certainly it was bruised.
Bryan:Did you have more perforations from it?
Troy:I don't know. I don't know if it ever did actually tear again but I had quite a few bouts of bear trauma, we'll call them. Incidents, landing with just severe pain and it carried on for years after. So it was a thing and we just couldn't get past it. So at some point, to try and get myself out of this lump, I started thinking okay, can we do?
Troy:This jet thing is not going to happen. So I started thinking about the helicopter again. I wanted this in the first place. Helicopters fly barely above the treetops, you know, they're not up there at 20,000 feet. So maybe, just maybe that might work for me.
Troy:I went back to the CFI, chief flight instructor, presented the idea to him, he said, you know what, I support you 100%. Let me work on it and a short time later, was told that I was gonna go back to the helicopter, world. Was it hard for
Bryan:you to walk away from jets?
Troy:It was, yeah, it was sad, They presented me with a great opportunity. So I didn't mention it but when I got my wings on the Hawk, they knew that, okay, maybe I didn't really have a passion to go to the F-eighteen world, but I did have a strong interest of being an instructor. At the time, they were trialing a direct to Hawk pipeline instructor. Now one guy had done it prior to me and he was a success. They wanted to try me in that same program just to confirm that yeah, we can do this.
Troy:So, they offered me a position teaching on the hawk and I was flattered and excited. So, it was really when this didn't happen in the end, know, but yeah, it was very disappointing to walk away from it.
Bryan:Yeah, I can only imagine like and fighters is a very gung ho all in of world, right? So it must have been really difficult after kind of getting into that mindset to say, okay, I'm going to go do something else. But at least I guess you had like a previous passion to turn to.
Troy:And I think that's what helped me. Having OJT ed around helicopters in Gander, knew that that was an exciting world as well. I did at one point request to fly helicopters. So it wasn't like a demotion or a consolation prize. It was the other prize that I also wanted equally as much.
Troy:So that part of it was a saving grace. Yes, disappointed to not be able to do the Hawk thing anymore, but I was really excited to see where this could probably go. Awesome.
Bryan:Okay, Troy. That is gonna wrap up part one. In part two, we're going to dive into your time flying search and rescue on Cormorant and get into some stories about some missions that you flew there, some tough decisions, some realities of SAR. Thanks so much for coming in today. I know you are flying nights right now, so I appreciate you also giving up your, time during the day for this.
Bryan:So I'm looking forward to connecting with you again on the next one.
Troy:Yeah. You're very welcome. Working on a little bit of just a little bit of sleep here, but I'm doing good.
Bryan:Alright. Fly safe.
Troy:Thank you.
Bryan:Okay. That wraps up part one of our chat with captain Troy Clarke. Tune in next week as we sit back down with Troy to hear about some of his crazy adventures flying search and rescue on the c h one forty nine Cormorant in Gander, Newfoundland. Do you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard in this show? Would you or someone you know make a great guest, or do you have a great idea for a show?
Bryan:You can reach out to us at the pilotprojectpodcast@Gmail.com or on all social media at at podpilotproject. And be sure to check out that social media for lots of great videos of our RCAF and Mission Aviation aircraft. As always, we'd like to thank you for tuning in and ask for your help with the big three. That's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends, and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now.
Bryan:Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up. See you. Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.