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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 Skies 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 back for a third recording session in your old basement.
Bryan:Thanks for being here today.
Troy:Yeah. Thanks, man. It's it's great to be here. Feels, starting to feel like I'm living here again.
Bryan:Today, we are wrapping up our conversation with Troy. Listeners can check out part one where we talked about his beginnings in aviation and flight training, and part two where we talked about his time in search and rescue. In this final episode, we'll focus on his transition into instructing, his time flying with STARS, and his perspective after more than two decades in aviation. So we talked about this at the end of the last episode. You were posted into three CFFTS here in Portage La Prairie as an instructor on the helicopter course.
Bryan:How did you feel about that posting and going into the instructional world?
Troy:In a nutshell, I was I was pretty excited. Yeah. It was something I wanted to do. It came a little sooner than I thought it would, a little sooner than I really wanted it to, but at the same time it was very welcome. Even a few years prior to that I thought instructing would be really cool and it was something that I wanna do.
Troy:We talked about it a couple episodes ago that, they offered me an instructing position in Moose Jaw on the Hawk at one point. Mhmm. And that I was pretty excited to do that. It didn't work out because of my, my injury, but, I was looking forward to it. So fast forward a few years, I'm flying helicopters now.
Troy:I'm well into my operational tour and I'm loving that but I'm still thinking, yeah, at some point I'd like to get back to instructing. The wing commander in Gander at the time was a fellow named Lieutenant Colonel The Pilot. He, at some point in his career, was an instructor and we just got chitchatting one day. He was a flying guy as well. So we're on the crew and we're flying and picking his brain about that.
Troy:I happened to say, yeah, you know what, I have a strong interest in teaching one day at some point when I've had enough operational stuff under my belt. Well, maybe less than a year later, search and rescue was told that they had to send somebody to Portage to teach or to Moosha, one of the two. They had a few guys in mind, each of those guys, well, they either didn't want to or they had other plans or anyway, they couldn't fill the spot on a voluntary basis. So remembering that I did express interest in coming back to instruct, well, I got moved onto the list and quickly moved to the top of that list. The next thing I know, summer of twenty thirteen, I'm coming to Portage of Prairie.
Bryan:So it was like a little unexpected timing, something that you were looking forward to.
Troy:Yeah. So it's it's something, like I said, it's something I wanted to do. I just wanted a little more time in search and rescue. We talked about it on the last episode. I was right at the edge of upgrading where the first upgrade attempt was not a success.
Troy:So we're doing some focus training to get me ready for the next upgrade that was right around the corner. I also mentioned that I put my hand through a table saw and another injury set me back. So I was really hoping to get past that injury, get my upgrade and then have a couple of good years as a SRA C in Gander. I wasn't ready to leave Gander either. It's my home province.
Troy:I'm loving being back home and life was good. Kim was having a great time down there. Everything was good, right? So we didn't want to leave Newfoundland yet. But at the same time, there was a need for a SAR pilot to fill a spot in one of the training schools and it made sense for me to go, made enough sense for me to go anyway.
Troy:Mhmm. And, yeah. So I, you know, I I got here in 2013. I probably at the time would have preferred to, get here a little later than that, but it worked out great.
Bryan:Okay. So you got here, you did FIC or the flight instructor course and you started instructing. How did you find teaching was different from the operational world?
Troy:It's very different. In the operational side of things, the helicopter is a tool, right? So you fly the helicopter to get a job done. And you get to the point, especially with more and more experience doing that job, you get to the point that flying the helicopter, like driving a car, you don't really have to think about it, right? So flying is the natural side of it and doing the job becomes the focused part of it being there.
Troy:Coming back to the instruction side of it, now all of a sudden you need to think about the how of flying that you didn't have to think about for a long time. So that's a challenge in itself. The other thing is the precision side of it. Not that we don't fly with precision in the operational side, but it's not looked at with the fine tooth comb in the way that it is in instruction. When we say hover at four feet, don't mean five feet, we don't mean three.
Troy:When we say fly at 110 knots, it's not 112 knots. These things are, we don't necessarily pay attention to that stuff in the operational side. But now in instruction, we have to. And as an instructor, so you not only have to be good at that stuff, but now you need to learn how to teach that stuff to students. Right?
Troy:So now you're introducing other things like learning styles, teaching techniques, teaching tools and so on. It's a whole different ballgame whatsoever from the operational side.
Bryan:Yeah. And I know what you mean about the focus being between, like, operating versus flying. Yeah. Like, might sound kind of weird to listeners if they don't have operational flight experience, but if you're focusing on a STAR mission or for me, focusing on hunting a submarine, like Yep. You're focusing on operating safely while you accomplish a task.
Bryan:You're not focusing on, like, yes, you're still trying to fly precisely, but, Yeah. If I'm trying to fly at 300 feet and I'm at 320, that's fine, you know, as as because I'm doing other stuff. Right. If I'm descending, my copilot's gonna call that out. But, like, you know, unless it's a safety issue or affecting the mission, it's not as important.
Bryan:But when you're trying to teach someone how to do something, it has to be perfect so that they get that perfect example.
Troy:That's exactly right.
Bryan:Yeah.
Troy:Yeah. The extra 20 feet that you're flying at is not the important thing. The intent of that flight to hunt down that submarine, that's the job. And if you keep it safe, okay, the flying side of it is just the means to get the job done. You don't have to have the exact precision that we expect here at the school.
Bryan:What do you think makes a strong instructor pilot?
Troy:It's not a one size fits all. Every instructor is different. We have different backgrounds, different experiences, different skill sets, different abilities and different styles of teaching and that's good. I've worked with some other countries, other militaries, they have a little more of a canned, some of them have a little more of a canned approach to instruction. There's a script, you stick to the script and you build the pilot in the end.
Troy:Well, we don't really do that. In our side of it, we have a guideline. This needs to be taught and now you as the instructor, you need to bring your skill set to the table to teach this in whatever style you have. So what makes a good instructor? Well, I think first of all, you need to have some sort of a passion for instructing, for teaching.
Troy:You need to really want to do it. Want to enjoy teaching, you want to enjoy seeing your student learn this stuff and get satisfaction from that. You need to obviously know your aircraft. You need to know how to teach. So you have to put your own work into developing yourself as an instructor.
Troy:It takes quite a bit of work to get there and as you work your way up through the stages of not only the instructor course, but then the follow on experience that comes with it through the levels of instruction. I just think you need to put your time into doing that and honing that craft. And that's exactly what it is, it's a craft. But it comes from first of all, the desire to teach. And I think another thing is as well, another important thing is you can't forget what it's like to be a student.
Troy:Right? We were all there. Yep. At one point, we know or we knew the stresses that students go through. Military flying training is it's stressful and you need to need to remember what your students are going through.
Troy:And you keep the big picture on on everything and and I think you'll bring more to the more to the table and the student will get more from you.
Bryan:Yeah. It's definitely important to try to put yourself back in touch with how things felt back then I think.
Troy:We forget about it sometimes, know, we become, you know, we've talked about it over the last couple episodes, you get to a comfort level in the job that you're doing and it's sometimes easy to forget where you came from.
Bryan:For sure.
Troy:It wasn't always easy to do this job though. Yeah. Right? No matter what job you are doing. Mhmm.
Troy:Yeah.
Bryan:Something that I thought was really interesting when we were preparing for this interview is you were part of a simulator only training experiment.
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:Can you tell us about that?
Troy:That was a was a good experience for me. It was fun. I wasn't too far into the instruction game at that point. I think I was a fairly new newly minted instructor. So a CCAT instructor.
Troy:I was paired up with, a more experienced guy named Tim and Tim was an ACAT instructor. I'll call it an experiment or a trial. What they were trying to do or trying to assess, okay, can we teach a student fully in a simulator to the point of his first or her first solo flight? So that's what we did. Tim and I and two students, one student being, you know, having never touched an aircraft before starting military flying and another one being a fairly experienced retread from the fixed wing world.
Troy:So, a little bit of a broad category there. The four of us went to Lafayette, Louisiana to Flight Safety International. For a couple of weeks, Tim and I taught these guys just strictly in simulator, taught them how to fly helicopters. And the ultimate goal, even though we were quite skeptical about it, was to okay, after the program, you know, that portion of the training was done in Lafayette. We were gonna come back to Portage here and the very first day they would jump in a helicopter and go flying.
Troy:Now that's even to think about it now, kind of raises the hairs on my neck. So we did it. We taught them in the sim. They did well. They became really good simulator flyers.
Troy:We got back here though Tim and I both, we felt really uncomfortable saying, okay, there's a helicopter, take it and go fly.
Bryan:Like literally this would be the first time they ever started a real helicopter.
Troy:That was one of the possible outcomes of this trial, let's say. When we were working with a simulator So simulators are fantastic tools. They really are a great addition to flight training. But a simulator is still a simulator. It's not the real deal, right?
Troy:And we felt that after we ran them through that program, you know, maybe with the limitations of that particular sim that we were using or maybe some other variable, I don't know. But, we just didn't feel that they were quite ready to take a machine flying. And in hindsight, I think it would have been crazy to do so, to allow them to take a machine without having never flown the real deal without an instructor. We came back and we said no, we want a handful of flights with each student. They have that core procedural skill set built there.
Troy:Now let's transfer to a helicopter and see where it goes from there. And you know what, that part of it worked out pretty good. So we did, we flew each of them. I don't even remember how much, but we flew them a little bit in the helicopter just to get them acquainted with the machine, feel the effects of the actual winds, feel the effects of, you know, ground effect, thermals, you know, all the environmental stuff that you don't get from a simulator. Sight picture, what does four feet actually look like instead of pretending in a simp, those things like that.
Troy:And after a couple days, yeah, we stepped back and we gave them the aircraft and off they went. So in the end, there was there definitely was a certain level of success. Probably not that first, COA, you know, the, sending them directly into a helicopter without an instructor. That didn't happen, but the rest of it turned out pretty good. Mhmm.
Troy:They went on to, to have some pretty solid experiences on the course and follow on careers as well.
Bryan:Wow. Yeah. Get where the thinking is coming from on that. Like, airline pilots, they get their type rating completely in a sim. The first time they fly the aircraft is an actual flight, like, with passengers, but they already have flown fixed wing and they already have a bunch of experience, and they're not flying it as the captain.
Bryan:They're flying it as the first officer.
Troy:So Yeah. They're not solo. They're, you know, on the helicopter side, you know, I've got friends that have flown in on the oil side of things, you know, with Cougar helicopters in Saint John's. They do the same thing. You you do, your checkout in the simulator.
Troy:Your very first flight in the aircraft is a revenue flight for the company with passengers in the back. We'll talk about STARS here shortly. Same sort of thing. We get our checkout entirely in the simulator. STARS does a little more indoctrination.
Troy:We can talk about that later. But the same idea though, right? Simulator instruction is in this modern day of flight training. It is a thing, it's here to stay and it is very effective. I just think that that particular experiment was maybe a little too ambitious And when we got back, yeah, it took a few more flights in the actual aircraft, but they still flew probably with maybe four flights under their belt as opposed to the nine or 10 that normal students, would would have gone through.
Bryan:Yeah. So, after a little bit of time instructing when you had a good amount of experience under your belt, you went to the standards check pilot role. Yeah. What does that involve?
Troy:So, yeah, within the instructional side, some of your listeners might not be aware, you start off as a C category instructor, which really is an entry level instructor and that's just a license to learn more about instructing. Then you jump into the B category of instruction. The BCATs are our workhorse guys and gals. You spend the most time as a BCAT. You're honing your skill as an instructor.
Troy:You're building on that skill, you get to the point where, okay, you're on the senior side of the BCAT and now you are getting some of the more, let's say the students are having difficulties, certain difficulties, you're starting to work with them a little bit more. And then you start working on towards your ACAT. But within that workup, we start introducing things like what we call, we used to call them supplementary checks. Now they're supplementary trainers. So you're flying with your colleagues to help say someone a little more junior than you to work on their instruction skills and so on.
Troy:We introduce testing, testing students and a few other things. Then you become an ACAT. Not everybody does the ACAT things. It takes a few years and then some people are not in instruction for a long time, some people post out. But for those who do move into the ACAT, it's the experienced instructor, the senior instructor, right?
Troy:And as an ACAT, you are the one that would do the brunt of the stuff that I just talked about, those check rides and developing of the junior instructors, we'll say. So as an ACAT, some ACATs are pulled or the majority of ACATs in the helicopter school anyway are pulled into standards. As a standards guy, so you do have all of those roles. You're doing the flight tests on the students, you're doing the checkrides on the instructor cadre and so on. You're also overseeing the standardization of the school, making sure everybody's flying to that same standard within our training plan and our manual flight training and so on.
Troy:So you're overseeing all of that. But also here, this is a little more exclusive to three CFFTS. I believe Moose Jaw does it differently. Here in Southport as a standard sky, we also run the flight instructor school as well. So I would say maybe the bigger part of my job right now and back then when I first went into standards was teaching new instructors.
Troy:So we would get the guys and gals back from operational tours and they are coming to become instructors and we are the ones that guide them through that. The instructor school has three phases. Phase one and two is just a conversion back to this particular machine whether it's a two zero six or the four twelve. And then phase three of the flight instructor course is all about instruction, learning how to become an instructor. So that's really what the brunt of all those things I guess are the brunt of what a standards guy will do here.
Troy:And then even after the new instructors are minted as instructors, you are kind of guiding them and overseeing their progress through those levels and eventually hopefully becoming ACATs themselves. So, a lot of different levels of what you do on the standard side.
Bryan:Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of aspects to it.
Troy:It's pretty involved. Yeah, it's really good. I really enjoy it. We go through times where day after day you're doing similar stuff, you're building this instructor. But then a few days later you're doing a test on a student and this is a clear head test, which is daytime VFR flying.
Troy:And then, okay, tomorrow you're doing an IFR test on a student. Okay. Now you got a checkride on a an instructor and, you know, there there's there's a nice variety. Mhmm. It's not monotonous at all.
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:So after six years of instructing, you were posted back to 9 Wing Gander as a flying pilot, and this would be when you sold the house to us.
Troy:I did. Yeah.
Bryan:But then COVID came, much to everyone's chagrin, and you ended up as a wing flight safety officer and deputy wing ops officer. Yep. What challenges did COVID introduce into operations in Gander?
Troy:Yeah. It was an interesting time for for everybody. Right? I don't, That's no surprise. But yeah, I did go back in 2019.
Troy:So after six years of teaching, I was ready to get back to the operational world. I went back to Gander with the intent to fly. Like we talked about in the last episode, I didn't complete my SAR AC upgrade. I'm going back, I'm pretty excited to get back into it. Leadership at the squadron are guys who were friends of mine in the operational side before.
Troy:It's going to be fun. It's going be a great experience. My family is excited to get back to Newfoundland. So this was all gonna be we're really looking forward to it. 2020 comes and this little thing called COVID-nineteen comes around, right?
Troy:Turns the world upside down. It changed my trajectory. You can imagine the leadership of the squadron, it's all new territory for everybody, right? So they had to make some decisions, I had to make some decisions for the safety of my family and so on. So yeah, it was decided that I would not be a flying pilot at the squadron.
Troy:This time around, I was moved to the wing side of it. So to nine wing Gander. And my role, like you said, I moved into a wing flight safety role where I kind of oversaw the flight safety side. Now, I had a great team of flight safety officers working underneath me and they did the brunt of that work and it was great. It was a fantastic team.
Troy:The other part of my job there was deputy wing operations officer. That's where things got interesting for me. So on the squadron side, yeah, absolutely. They went on as status quo as they possibly could. Yes, things looked different.
Troy:We had all of the COVID variables to deal with the lockdowns and the new protocols that they had to put in place. But I was removed from that now on the wing side. So on the wing operations side of it, we had oversight of all incoming military aircraft definitely to Canada and in large part to North America. There were two points of entry into Canada. They were Goose Bay, Labrador, which is also in Newfoundland of course, and then in Gander.
Troy:Our role was to basically meet every aircraft that came. This was during the time of lockdowns and isolation and so on. So we'd have to meet the aircraft with the protective gear, the N95s and the various degrees of protective equipment, oversee their transport to the hotel that they would be isolated in for a certain amount of time. We had to take care of all the logistics of that and make sure everybody adhered to those protocols and so on. It was very interesting in that unit.
Troy:At base ops or wing ops, we were a motley crew of characters there. So a couple of pilots who were not flying, myself and the wing opso. She was also a non flying pilot. A couple of very experienced, there was a retired Sartech, was a retired air traffic control guy, a retired army warrant. There was a variety of characters there and we were the ones that were put in charge to oversee all of this, the incoming aircraft and so on.
Troy:It was great. It turned into a great experience. So I went to Gander with the intent to fly again, that turned into something else. But overall, it became a fun experience and yet another story in my career.
Bryan:Yeah, that sounds like a wild experience. When you were talking about this before the interview, I was thinking when you talked about COVID stuff, I was like, oh, like around the wing. I didn't realize as, like, basically an entry to Canada and handling all that stuff too. Like, that's a lot.
Troy:Yeah. It was cool. It was it was kinda nerve wracking at the time because, well, COVID is still fairly new. Right? Mhmm.
Troy:We didn't know too much about it. Had to get aircraft in and out of the country, so people coming from the East had to come through Gander. We're just kind of making it up as we went. Right? What do we do with them?
Troy:Where do we isolate? Newfoundland had some very strict protocols in place as well with lockdown and isolation requirement times periods. And also there was a lot of stuff to juggle around there and we're just trying to make it work. And we did as good as we could. And yeah, it turned into a pretty good experience.
Bryan:So a couple years later, you decided to leave the CAF after nineteen years. What led to that decision?
Troy:Yeah. I don't know. This is this is something that we put a lot of thought into over the years. I was getting to the point that nineteen years, that was two years of reserve but seventeen years of full time. So it was my seventeenth year as a full time guy.
Troy:I was at the point, okay, any longer than this, I'm going to stay till the pension but if I'm going to get out, it has to be somewhere around now. And I love the military, I loved my time with the military but there were some other things that I was really interested in. And one of them being this company called STARS. So when I moved to Portage in 2013, it's the first time I had heard of STARS. STARS is Shock Trauma Air Rescue Services.
Troy:So that's what it stands for. It's the primary air ambulance here in the Prairies in Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba. And they do some great work and I knew some people working with STARS, some former military guys that transitioned over and I got to know what STARS did. And I thought, Yeah, that's definitely something that I really want to do. Over the years, Kim and I discussed, Is this something that we're going to do?
Troy:Am I going to leave the military? Are we ready to settle down in The Prairies? Of course, Kim is from The Prairies so that's an easier decision for her. Being from Newfoundland, a little more difficult for me to decide on that. So we got to the point, definitely we want to try this thing out with STARS if I could even be hired by the company.
Troy:I did apply in 2018 for a position that came up in Winnipeg. I was called in for an interview on that one, but we decided as a family, we're not quite ready for this transition yet. So we stuck with the military for a few more years. So yeah, here we are in Gander. We're coming down, we're on the backside of the COVID pandemic.
Troy:Things are starting to settle down now but on the career side of it, don't know where my career is going with the military. So I started thinking about STARS again. This is in 2021. I started thinking about STARS. I started contacting some of my friends, Bruce, a friend of mine who flies for STARS in Regina, Greg as well in Saskatoon.
Troy:Well, a position actually came up in Saskatoon and I realized another former colleague of mine, Duke, was working in Saskatoon. I contacted Duke, hey, tell me about the job, tell me do you think it would be a good fit, should I apply for it, that sort of thing. We had some back and forth and he gave me some good advice and in the end he said, you know what, put in take this as you will. He said, I'll put in as many good words as I can about you to the boss. So is that one good word or 20, I don't know.
Troy:We left it at that. I did apply for the job. That particular one got filled internally so life went on. Couple months later, I guess, just started thinking about STARS again and I started writing a friend of mine, another well, the guy I just mentioned, Bruce. I wrote and just touching base with him and he said, hey Troy, really sad morning here.
Troy:He said, Duke passed away last night. And of course, like it did to everybody who knew Duke that hit me like a ton of bricks. Duke and I were we weren't real close friends but we were work friends and, we had quite a few conversations and it was tough. Tough to find out about that. Fast forward a while later, a few months later probably, I'm working that wing ops job in Gander.
Troy:I remember it's about eight 08:30 at night. I'm still at work. I'm working on this project that, I had to do a presentation the next day to a group of US Air Force majors and colonels and I'm way out of my league and I'm stressed and this is not my thing. Slogging my way through that and my phone pings and I looked at it and it's a message from the base manager, aviation base manager in Saskatoon for STARS. A fellow named Barry, fantastic guy.
Troy:Barry is also a retired military guy, was a 103. Yeah, he just touched base and he said, hey Troy, it's Barry. Duke and I had a couple of conversations about you. Duke put in a few good words and I'm wondering if you'd be interested to come work for us. Sadly, we have an opening at the company right now.
Troy:And then that was that. That was my invite to applying for the company. I went home, I discussed it with Kim and I put in an application a short time later. This time we decided, yep, time is right. It's hard to walk away from the military, but we're gonna do it.
Troy:We're gonna take the next step, go on to the next adventure, and off to Saskatoon we go.
Bryan:So you guys made the move out to Saskatoon from Gander, and you did your training with STARS which as you mentioned is largely in the sim I believe, right?
Troy:Yeah. So even before we moved to Saskatoon, I started training with STARS. I carried out the rest of my contract. STARS was fantastic. Let me finish up my contract.
Troy:They held my job for the next four months. I finished up my military contract and then I started training. So the family stayed in Gander at the time and the STARS training was predominantly done in Texas, just outside Dallas.
Bryan:Once you got into actually doing the business with STARS, how did you find that it differed from military STARS?
Troy:Well, it certainly has some parallels. It is similar in a large sense. But yes, has some differences as well. So the similarities, first of all, working for STARS, it's very similar to being operational with the military. In fact, I've said a few times or many times that working for STARS just feels like I'm at a new military posting.
Troy:I just wear a blue suit now and not green one. A number of the other pilots that I worked for were retired military. The documents read very similar to our documents and how we fly were very similar. So there were a lot of very similar things. The ways that it differed, okay, well now you're also working with people who have never been in the military.
Troy:So you've got the folks that have always been civilian. So on the pilot side, civilian pilots who trained in a different way than I did, who their work experience was very different from the stuff that I had done. And it was really interesting to learn that side of it actually because I really had little to no experience or understanding of how things worked on the civilian side. So it's really cool to see it from their perspective, Guys that have worked their way up doing utility work or working in the North and so on then eventually found themselves at STARS. So that was really cool.
Troy:In the back of the aircraft, you're flying with some of the most highly trained healthcare professionals I've ever met in my life or that exist out there. You know, critical care paramedic, critical care nurse is generally the back end complement of the crew. Sometimes we have doctors flying with us, usually trauma ER doctors, I've had an anesthesiologist with us, I've had pediatricians, and that's the other side. You work with pediatric units, you work with NICU, so neonatal professionals. So that side of it was quite different, the complement of the crews that you're working with.
Troy:As opposed to being in search and rescue, you got a couple pilots, a flight engineer and two Sartecs, right? So that was different. The experiences that they brought were different. And the flying itself, there were again some strong similarities. STARS does scene calls, search and rescue does scene calls, STARS does hospital transfers.
Troy:Search and rescue in Gander does some of that or we did anyway when I was there. They may have moved past that now. Those things were a little different. What search and rescue did that STARS definitely doesn't do is the marine rescues, the flying into a very inclement weather situations to pull somebody off of a boat to bring them back to shore, that sort of thing. That stuff didn't exist in STARS.
Bryan:Do they do any search stuff?
Troy:We are trained. It is in our manuals to do search. In my time there, we didn't. Okay.
Bryan:So it'd be a pretty extreme situation.
Troy:It would be. Actually, I'll correct that. My very last week of missions, we did do a little bit of a search for a potential drowning victim but that was in two years at STARS, that would have been the only time. Okay. So yeah, is in the realm of possibility but doesn't usually happen, at least not in my time there.
Bryan:Okay. Let's talk about your first mission. It came just hours into the job.
Troy:Can you
Bryan:tell us about what happened that day?
Troy:Yeah. It's a bit of a common trend, I think. Similar to in when I went to Gander, you know, barely got my feet wet and then looking down the barrel of my first mission. Right? So this was my very first day at the base with STARS.
Troy:I was paired up with a retired military fellow named Eve and Eve was showing me the ropes around the base. And we were barely halfway through that indoctrination and the tones go off. And we'll say less than two hours into my first day, I find myself sitting in the middle of rural Saskatchewan Highway at a vehicle rollover scene call. Yeah. Wasn't so much easing into it, it was dive in head first.
Bryan:Yeah. Yeah. How did that feel compared to launching for a SAR mission? Like a pretty similar feeling?
Troy:Well, know, I would say that Search and Rescue geared me up pretty well for that. My experience in SAR, this wasn't foreign, right? This wasn't foreign to me. It's not like I just came from an instructing role. I just came from a much different utility flying role.
Troy:I had been there before. So this was just a reintroduction into something that I was quite familiar with at one point in my career. It had been a while. I left search and rescue operations in 2013 and this was 2022, so nine years later. But it resembled search and rescue very closely and it was familiar.
Troy:Okay.
Bryan:Another incident that you dealt with that thankfully is fairly rare in Canada was being called in to assist on a mass casualty event.
Troy:Mhmm.
Bryan:What stands out from from that day?
Troy:Yeah. That day stands out as one of the biggest days of my time with STARS. That morning, remember my car must have been in the shop or something because the paramedic on my crew that day picked me up at the house. I jumped in his truck and he said, I just got a text from the night crew paramedic and he said he's on the scene right now, six people injured, expect to be, called in for backup sort of thing. Oh okay, there's, something serious happening.
Troy:So we made our way to the base, got there with the crew, got the crew together and we talked to, what STARS calls the link center, which is STARS dispatch and, yeah, sure enough we were dispatched to the incident but we were to pick up the doctor first on the way. So, got the aircraft ready and we launched pretty quickly after. We picked the doctor up at the rooftop of the hospital a couple miles away and continued on to the scene. Community was about an hour away from Saskatoon and when we got there, chaos is the best descriptor. So three STARS helicopters were called in.
Troy:The first one was on the scene, that was our night crew. We were called in, the second crew from Saskatoon and then a Regina crew was also called in and my crew and Regina crew showed up at the same time so I was the second one to land there and then, the Regina crew landed right behind us. Sadly there was an individual from the community. He was injuring a lot of people in the community. We didn't know what to expect, what we saw from the air.
Troy:Again I go back to chaos. There was, you know law enforcement personnel and vehicles just all over the place. Basically anybody in law enforcement that, that could be there were there including conservation officers and so on. Everybody was called into it.
Bryan:Was this the guy who went on like the stabbing spree?
Troy:Yeah. So I mean this was in national news that's why I don't mind talking about it. It's a very well known story and it's in a community called James Smith Cree Nation. And yeah, he well the end result sadly and very tragically, 11 people were killed and, I believe another 17 were injured. Wow.
Troy:Yeah. So it was quite a tragic event. We at STARS, we flew out I guess the most critical but the ground ambulance personnel, they did the brunt of the work that day. I mean hats off to those crews. There were I don't know, there must have been 10 or 20 ground ambulances dispatched to the scene and they were just transporting the injured victims to the closest hospitals or wherever it made sense and, yeah, just quite the experience to say the least.
Bryan:Were you doing multiple trips or just the one in and out?
Troy:So we, my crew, we brought the doctor in. So we stuck around until the doctor was ready to leave the scene. From there we went to a close by hospital and picked up somebody who needed to be brought to the trauma center in Saskatoon. So that's what my crew did. I believe the other helicopters, might have transported a couple of patients each and then the majority of them would have been transported by ground.
Bryan:Wow, that's quite a day.
Troy:Yeah, it was definitely one that stands out, in my memories of my time at STARS.
Bryan:When you guys go to something like that, like, do you see a lot of pretty tough stuff or is it as the pilots, like, you staying in the helicopter not seeing much or So as
Troy:a pilot, it's not mandatory that you go to the actual scene. Yes, as the pilot you are well within your right to stay with the aircraft and we do have some pilots that do prefer to stay with the aircraft. I would say the majority of pilots there like to help as much as we can or as they can and I know I did and, most of the other guys I flew with, they did as well. We would offer our help to the what we call the AMC, air medical crew. We would offer our help and that could could range anywhere from well mostly it was, we would go for, you know, go grab this equipment or take this back to the helicopter that sort of thing.
Troy:But there have been times, I didn't have to but there have been times when the pilot had to step in to, to help with, giving CPR compressions and that sort of thing. So if you're willing to get involved like that, they will certainly use your help in some way. Mhmm. Yeah.
Bryan:Something that is unique about STARS is it has a very strict weather decision protocol. Can you explain that and why it's so important?
Troy:Yeah, in a nutshell, and this is where it differs from search and rescue in some ways anyway. So when STARS is contacted for a mission, be it a scene call or a hospital transfer, we're most of the time, not all, but most of the time we are not the only asset available to do that call. There's STARS which is the helicopter EMS but you also have the fixed wing air ambulance and you have, the ground ambulance as well. The strict weather protocol is there because well they don't want let's say I accept the mission but the weather is marginal. It's not 100% that I'm going to make it to the hospital but I don't find out until I'm an hour into that trip.
Troy:Well that's an hour of possible delay to patient care. That's an hour where a ground ambulance, that patient could have been put on a ground ambulance and been making their way toward the hospital. The weather protocols, one of the main reasons they are theirs is to ensure the patient is getting the proper and the most efficient care that they can get. You're not going to delay by launching into something that you can't bring to completion. So a call comes in, pilots will go into the Operations Room and the medical crew will go into a separate room and we have two calls.
Troy:The pilots are taking, details on the location and that's pretty much it. We're just told, okay, there is a mission to this location, be it a hospital or, a lat and long coordinates on a map. Can you do the mission based on weather? And really that that's strictly the next decision the pilot has to make. In the meantime, the medical crew is, in another room in the building and they're getting the details of what what the the situation actually is.
Troy:So on the pilot side, yeah, you take all of the, the weather, analysis that you can get your hands on and, you make a decision. Can we successfully do this? If it's clear sky, night or day, then it's an easy decision. Yes, we pilots accept the mission. If there's some marginal weather that will have to be dealt with while we have to make the call, okay, can we still get it done?
Troy:Can we alter the route? Can we do whatever we have to do? And then in that case we would let the link center know, yes we can accept the mission but and whatever that but is. We will have to go this route. We will have to do this.
Troy:Or you just come down and say either you know what, there's only a 50% chance that we can do this or downright we can't do this based on the weather. So the pilots make that decision. Like I said, in the meantime the medical crew is in another room getting the details. Only after the pilots have made the decision that they can or cannot go, only then do they join the medical crew to actually find out what's going on. The reason behind that is that they don't want the pilots to be influenced by some emotional, factor.
Troy:So let's say there's some children involved or you know the pilots are going to want to do everything in their power to get to an accident scene that has children involved and the company just wants to avoid that kind of thing. For sure. Knowing that there usually is another, asset that could be dispatched to help. They don't want the emotion, well they want to separate emotion from fact. Can we do it or can we not?
Bryan:Yeah. Do you ever have situations where like you say okay we can't do it and then you find out in one of those situations like holy crap. I wish I had said yes.
Troy:I've had a couple, where we look at the weather and you know it is always we want to do the mission, right? We're looking for ways to get it done but sometimes your hands are just tied and we cannot do this mission within the restrictions that we have and we just have to say no. So we make that call and we say we declined the mission because of weather or whatever the scenario is. Then I've had it okay you go to the next room and they're still on that call. The medical crew probably hadn't been told that we declined at that point so they're still involved in the conversation and you find out some of the details of the conversation and it is something like that.
Troy:There's a child or a family involved or something and it eats away at you. But I can fully see why STARS has that rule in there because you start to look for ways to bend the corners and let's make this work Where that's hardly ever the right thing to do because you go out there. I have gone out there and there are sometimes you tell the dispatch that while there is weather out there, it's probably a 50% chance that we can get it done. We're happy to launch if you want us to and then it comes back well this is the small percentage of situations where maybe the roads are too bad for ground crew or something like that And then they say, okay, we want you to give it a try. And I have gone on those and had to turn around because the weather just, wouldn't allow us to to get to the scene or or whatever the scenario was.
Bryan:Yeah. So we're talking about a couple different difficult situations here, missions where you can't go and you wish you could or difficult missions involving children. How do you manage the emotional side of those calls during a mission and then how do you manage it after when you're home?
Troy:Yeah, you know what, I still don't have a really black and white answer to that. I do admit the ones that involve children and there were missions that involved children. And I'm happy to say that I think I had 150 call outs in my time with STARS and not all of them, some of them were cancelled and so on. But of all my missions, you know, the majority of them were happy outcomes. Mhmm.
Troy:Really happy outcomes. But sometimes, I mean, it's it's the way it is. Sometimes, you're not gonna have that happy outcome. Yeah. And sometimes those missions involve children and they were the ones that really, hit close to home because I have two children and at the time my kids were I think five and seven and anything that involved children really just impacted me.
Troy:It was hard to separate the emotion from the job that you were doing but you have to. You have to look at it that okay and this is for everybody whether a child or an adult or whatever the scenario is, STARS is being dispatched because this particular person is probably having the worst day of their lives. You as the STARS crew might be the only hope that this person has. So you look at it in that vein in that okay, I've got to put the emotion aside. They need me as the pilot to fly this machine to that rooftop so that they can get this patient into the trauma center and, to save a life.
Troy:You do the best you can to separate the emotion from the job that you have to do. After the job is done that's when you deal with the emotion And everybody has their own way. I mean STARS does have a peer program where you talk to your peers about this and you well even before that we have a debrief. Every mission is debriefed and you talk among the crew. Beyond that you have the peer program.
Troy:Beyond that you have professional help if you need it. For me it was using the crew and the peers at organization. Using my family. A lot of support from Kim. She was a tremendous support through the difficult ones that you had to do.
Troy:And again you don't come home with the details because well first of all she wouldn't want to hear the details but for confidentiality you don't talk about the details But you just keep a general, yeah, I had a real bad mission tonight. And then she helps. She helped me through a lot of that. So a lot of people depend on their home support, their family and friends. And again, mentioned it before, people have other ways of dealing with things.
Troy:They have the spiritual side of things and certainly an area that I've had to fall back on. There are ways to deal with these things. The main thing is you have to deal with it. You can't just let it bottle up because at some point it's just gonna be too much and it will lead to some sort of breakdown.
Bryan:Absolutely. Yeah. So as difficult as this job could be, you have said that STARS was one of the most meaningful parts of your career. What made it so meaningful for you?
Troy:You know, there's a lot of things. I can't say enough good about that organization. STARS is one of the best things I've ever done in my career and in my life working for STARS. I've already mentioned that you know it's the hope that STARS brings to the person that's in need. If you're an accident victim, you're in the hospital and you need to be transferred to another facility, whatever the situation is, STARS brings hope to those people and it was great to be a part of those crews.
Troy:The helicopter can't get there without the bus drivers in the front right and it was great being that guy that flew these professionals and patients around. So that part was so rewarding and like I said before, the majority of the missions I did with STARS were positive happy outcomes and that is rewarding and it makes you feel great to know that you've done something to help someone during a time of need. So that was great. The people that I worked with were great. I had a great boss there and other great colleagues on the pilot side.
Troy:It was awesome to learn about different backgrounds. The guys that came up were raised in an aviation world that I wasn't raised in on the civilian side. It was really cool to learn from them and man did I ever learn lots. The crews in the back, the paramedics and the nurses in the back and they were just top notch professionals. So you put everything together and it was just an all around fantastic experience.
Troy:And the company itself, the organization, they treat you from day one boots on the ground there. They treat you like a VIP, right? You're the most important person in the room at that time and and after two years, that feeling didn't change.
Bryan:Wow. Yeah. Sounds like a great organization to work with.
Troy:It is. Yeah. They're they're fantastic.
Bryan:So let's talk about how you got back into the air force and then just close with some reflections. What ultimately led you to return to the RCAF?
Troy:That was also, multifaceted. So I just finished telling you about how good the organization is and it is and it was extremely hard to walk away from that company after such a short time with them. But it came down to it was for family, family reasons. Most people look at, the STARS schedule so from a pilot perspective in Saskatoon we did eight day blocks. Of those eight day blocks four of them were in the day but four were at night.
Troy:So this is one thing that came up. It puts a smile on my face but it made me realize the impact that this was having on the family. So up to this point for all of my kids lives, up to that point I was either an instructor, so Monday to Friday guy home every night, every weekend for the most part And then my little bit of the ground tour time in Gander also very much with the family. Now all of a sudden, even though, you get a lot of time off at STARS, that time off was also when my kids were in school. So all of a sudden here's daddy who prior to working with the company, I had to leave the family to go to train in The States for four or five weeks or six weeks, I'm not sure, I can't remember.
Troy:So that was tough on them. Daddy is all of a sudden he's away. And then when I was working in Saskatoon, I had moved the family there. Well, daddy is all of a sudden having to spend four days sleeping somewhere else at night. He's missing birthdays, he's missing I don't think I missed Christmas, I missed New Year's, a couple of important dates through the year.
Troy:And we dealt with that. We don't like to do that but we dealt with it. But from my kid's perspective, the story that my wife reminded me of, she said one night she was laying down with my daughter. My daughter was five at the time and I think Brynn asked, Kim, where's daddy? Is daddy coming home tonight?
Troy:And no, he's not coming home tonight and Brynn said, mommy I I wanna learn karate and Kim said, why? And Bren, she said, well because daddy's not here anymore. I need to protect the family. It's a cute story but it made us realize that this is actually having a bit of an impact on our kids that they're not used to. If the kids were born and raised into that situation, that's one thing but the shift work was actually having an impact on them that I didn't even notice.
Troy:You deal with it as the adult, you deal with it but it was actually having an impact on the kids. So that probably the first thing. Then on the financial side, we'll look at that. I started thinking future family finances and that sort of thing and I'm thinking well I was fairly close to that military pension. When I left the military, I left all of my pension monies in with the pension center so I didn't withdraw it.
Troy:It was still there. I deferred it to a later date sort of thing. And I knew that if I did go back to the military, I could just carry on that pension. I think it was seven years that I'd have to put into it to get to the pension. And the military pension is, boy, it's not something to bat an eye at.
Troy:It's really good. It's a solid future financial security.
Bryan:Absolutely, yeah.
Troy:It really is. And in my time out of the military, they actually made some, some changes to the pilot pay which contributes to the pension side
Bryan:of it.
Troy:So the long and short of it, as great of a time as I was having with STARS and as amazing of a company as they are, things on the family side of it were becoming more and more of a a thing that we had to consider. And, we just made that decision. Well, if we go back to the military for six or seven years, secure that pension, we'll take care of that, the children, the kids will be a little bit older but in the meantime they get to have daddy there every night and weekend sort of thing. We thought that might be the better thing. Then the future financial side of it is secured and the increased pay that the military just offered, that's a nice byproduct of making that decision.
Troy:So we did that very reluctantly because on Kim's side, she had found a great job. She's a teacher and she found the job of her dreams teaching in the school there in Saskatoon. So there was a lot for us to walk away from by coming back here but also a lot for us to gain by coming here as well.
Bryan:Yeah and like our family, you guys love it here.
Troy:We do. We really do. When I was growing up in Newfoundland, I didn't dream of settling down in Portage Of Prairie, Manitoba but this town, there's something about it, right? It's a it's a great little town. The camaraderie of, the friends and colleagues you make or you meet here, you know, it's just great.
Troy:It's a good place to raise kids. Whole picture, it's just a good place to be.
Bryan:Yeah. It's funny, when we found out we were posted here, someone said to us, nobody knows how good it is here. So people get posted here and they cry twice. They cry when they get here and they cry when they leave.
Troy:Exactly. Yes. And then then the joke goes on that, you know, don't tell people how good it is because we we want this to ourselves. We don't wanna be we don't wanna lose this. Yeah.
Troy:Yeah, it's just a great place to be. So it is again, it hard to leave Saskatoon but it was nice to be coming here. It's coming home, right? Now I couldn't convince the guy that bought my house to sell it back to me here I am in his basement doing an interview so next best thing.
Bryan:So you've had a long career in aviation, how have you found that that has worked for your family?
Troy:You know, it's, it's definitely had pros and cons. I'll stick with the pros first here. It's been a great career and it's been a great experience for the family. It's been adventurous. Our time has been in the Prairies and it's been on the East Coast but there have been, other experiences intertwined in there as well.
Troy:And as a whole, the family has gotten to see the country. They've gotten to meet a lot of great people and that's all of us, Kim and me but our kids as well. They have what will become lifelong friends in several areas of this country and around the world as well. We've had great opportunities to work with exchange pilots from Germany and from The UK and The US and it's been great. So there's a lot of pros in that regard.
Troy:Meeting people and having great experiences. The military really does a good job as a whole to take care of family needs. We really are striving to be a family first organization or at least that's the way I feel. That's been my experience. I know not everybody will agree with that but it has been my experience.
Troy:Funny enough, I rejoined the military for family stability. And that is true to the two locations that I've been in here in Gander. All in all it's been overall a really good experience for the family, hands down. There are some struggles that do come along with it. So like I said, Kim is a teacher.
Troy:She hasn't been able to really focus on her career because every few years we're uprooting, moving to a new place. So it's been tough for her to pursue her career which is one really nice thing about being back here now. She's back in the school that she has taught in previously and now she's there to stay. We're hoping that this will be our we're here for life sort of thing. So now she can pursue her side of the career.
Troy:So that's been tough and then on the kids, yes, they have friends in many places around the country and in parts of the world but it's always very difficult for them to leave that as well. I remember when we left this house just before you guys moved in. We're here, I remember doing the last walk through and I sat on your front step and I broke down in tears because this is the house that we brought our children home from the hospital to this house much like you guys I believe. It was hard to leave that. My son was five at the time.
Troy:We got in the van and we drove away, waved goodbye to our house and he said, daddy, I want to take a picture of my gas station. So just down the road, the co op gas station, right? The funny things that mean a lot to kids but we would often leave here, go get gas and then go do things around. So he wanted to go say goodbye to his gas station down the road. You don't realize how it does impact children when they're leaving and as adults we look at them and say oh that's cute.
Troy:Well to them it's heavy, it's heavy for them right and they're leaving their friends, they're leaving the only world they know. So that part is, it's tough, but you deal with that and you deal with it as a family, you get to the new location and the fun part is that the new adventure begins and we've always looked at it as an adventure. You know, we're going either an adventure that we're returning to because we have repeated, postings or an adventure that we're about to start and you know what, let's let's take this and run with it and all in all it's been it's been a lot of fun and a great overall experience for the entire family I would say.
Bryan:That's great. So as we get ready to wrap up here, in our first episode you talked about barriers to entry Yeah. Just from where you grew up. What advice would you give to someone from a similar background trying to get into aviation?
Troy:You know, as cliche as it sounds, go for your dream. Don't give up on the dream. Just go for it. Growing up in small town Newfoundland where young boys in that town didn't grow up to be pilots. They grew up to get a blue collar job in that town or the next town over.
Troy:It was something that I put my sights on. I wanted it and despite the barriers of entry I found ways to make it work. They weren't cut and dry but in the end it worked out and it led to a great career. So my advice is if it's something that you think you want to do then go for it. And whether that's on the civilian side or with the military and these days the military I mean the opportunity is there.
Troy:Need pilots and we would love to see your application come our way right but just you know go for it. There's always a way to get over a barrier to pursue that dream of in my case becoming a pilot. You know, there's a way to get there. I'm living proof right? You look at the some of the barriers and some people have bigger barriers than what I had but I I have barriers to get here and, you know twenty five years later I'm here and I've had what I consider to be the best career.
Troy:I've loved my career and even to this day I still love getting out of bed and going to work to do the job that I do. Right?
Bryan:That's the dream.
Troy:It is the dream.
Bryan:Yeah. Okay, Troy. That brings us to the end of this three part series. I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of what has been a very busy few weeks for you. We did one when you were flying nights.
Bryan:You came in on a weekend. Today, you're here between paperwork and a flight. Yeah. Really appreciate that. It's been really cool to learn about your career and especially to learn about the world of civilian medevac flying.
Bryan:That's super interesting stuff. It's been an awesome conversation and thank you for being here today.
Troy:Hey. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. I'm almost sad that it's over, but I appreciate the invite and, yeah, thanks for having me. Alright, man.
Troy:Pleasure.
Bryan:Fly safe.
Troy:K. Thank you.
Bryan:Alright. That wraps up part three of our series with captain Troy Clarke, all about his time in search and rescue, instructing in the RCAF, as well as his time flying four stars. Our next series is something really special that I am super excited about. We'll be sitting down with lieutenant colonel Chris Bray. He is the commanding officer of four two seven special operations aviation squadron.
Bryan:We've been working extra hard behind the scenes to get this approved, and we are going to be discussing special operations aviation. It's gonna be an awesome series, and you definitely don't wanna miss it. 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? You can reach out to us at the pilotprojectpodcast@Gmail.com or on all social media at @podpilotproject.
Bryan: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. Thanks for listening.
Bryan:Keep the blue side up. See you. Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.