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The Pilot Project Podcast is an aviation podcast that aims to help new pilots learn what it takes to succeed in the world of flight, to help people in the flight training system learn what they may want to fly, and to give Canadians and the world a peek into life on the flight deck in the RCAF. We want to help pilots succeed and thrive! We interview real RCAF pilots for their exciting stories as well as the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll learn their tips to develop resilience and the tools it takes to make it in flight training.
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AI GENERATED AND WILL CONTAIN SOME SMALL ERRORS. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE CONTACT thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com. We understand the importance of good subtitles but currently as a one-person operation we just don't have the ability to edit these in a timely fashion and keep episodes coming out regularly. Thank you for your understanding!
All right, we're ready for departure here at the pilot Project podcast, the
best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF,
brought to you by Skies magazine and RCAF today. I
am your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is my budy, Paul
Goddard. Paul, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for being here.
Thanks, Brian.
Happy to be here.
Before we start, let's go over Paul's bio.
Paul completed pilot training in 2015 and was posted
to Triple Four squadron in Goose Bay, Labrador, flying the
CH 146 Griffin in the combat support role.
Over three years, Paul flew about 500 hours, including
tactical first officer training, SAR conversion training,
the Mudlake, Labrador evacuation Op, Lentis and
Kamloop Spec, and a small handful of JRCC
task missions, JRCC being Joint Rescue Coordination
Center. Paul was then posted to Greenwood, Nova Scotia, where
he was finally able to live with his wife Michaela and fly the
CH 149 Cormorant at 413 Transport and
Rescue Squadron. Over five years, Paul flew a little
over 1000 hours and completed the upgrade process
to SAR Aircraft Commander. During Paul's time in the Air
Force, he has been a deputy squadron operations Officer,
president and vice president of the Combined Mess Committee Unit
Flight Safety Officer and Pilot Section Scheduler.
Paul is currently posted to three CFFTs, where he is training to
become a qualified flight instructor on the CT 139
jet Ranger and teach phase Two and three rotary.
Today we will be focusing on his time flying the Cormorant in
Greenwood, Nova Scotia. Okay, so, Paul, we'll start
with our standard first question. Where did aviation start for
you?
Like many of your guests on the show, I was an air cadet, so
I joined, uh, when I was twelve. Did GlidEr, was
unable to do power because I went to RMC instead. And the
timeline wasn't going to work out on that. After that, it was just
military flying. So phase one in between, uh,
third and fourth year at RMC and then phase two right
afterwards. And I got really lucky and ended
up moving up a cohort because there was a guy
who needed to take some leave for personal reasons, and I ended
up in his slot and he came in in my slot,
basically for phase three. Okay, so that worked out really well.
Nice.
So, like a lot of us, you got a strong start in air
cadets.
I did, yeah.
Were you previously interested in aviation or did that kind of spark by going
to air cadets?
Yes, both. I, uh, think that it started a little bit
before that. Like, I always kind of wondered what I wanted to
be when I grew up and I chose not to
instead. But, uh, the air
cadet thing really cemented it for me that I wanted to be a pilot
and that I wanted to do that professionally, not just as a
hobby. And realizing that I'm wearing
glasses, your viewers can't see that, but realizing that my eyes
were going to be good enough because, uh, they changed the standard the
year before I was looking to apply.
Mhm.
And I would have been able to get in under the old standard anyway, as it
turned out. But that perceived barrier was going to have kept
me from applying to the Air Force. So when
that changed, I didn't self select
out and I ended up just throwing my name in the hat and here I
am.
Yeah, that's great. It's such a good program. There's just so
many of us that got our start that way. And how many people do you
meet in their teams that they're like, okay, this is the career
I'm going to do. And then they actually follow through with that. Uh,
they live the dream. I think it's a really neat thing.
Yeah.
And some of the skills that you learn there are
foundational, right. Like that ability to see
an end goal and keep doing every little step it
takes along the way to get there over such a long period of
time, like that focus and that discipline. I
really credit to my time in air cadets.
Yeah, well, even before you go to glider, you have to do
flying scholarship that year. You have to go to the classes every week.
And I started that when I was 13 in preparation
for applying to go to this scholarship when I was going to be
15, turning 16.
Right.
Yeah.
Before the year I actually made it, I did another year of basically
prep work. I've been working towards this since
I was 16 years old. I went to glider when I
was 17. So, yeah, it's a very
strong foundation. How, huh, did you find your flight
training experience in the forces?
It was good.
Very stressful. When I went through phase one, it was very much a
selection course. When I went through phase two, there
were so many students. There were, I think,
three or four courses in house ahead of me. And then by the
time I was leaving again, three or four courses behind
me, and I had a great group on my course
in my cohort. But on the whole, it seemed like the
environment was very competitive in,
like, I, uh, want to get what I want out of this
selection sort of thing. But I got lucky in
that the great group of guys and girls that I went through with all
wanted a variety of different cockpits to fly
in. And everyone ended up being able
to get their first choice because our course director was very active
in making swaps forwards and backwards, ahead and behind our
courses in order to make the math work out.
Mhm.
So because enough of us wanted the
various three streams, we all ended up getting the
first stream that we wanted.
It's interesting how based on people's
personalities, a course can be like. We've always
stressed that aviation is a team sport.
It is.
But a lot of people, especially in the early stages, don't realize that.
And they're like, I have to look out for number one. It's
interesting how much better of an experience it is when
you have people who realize this is the time to come together.
Yeah.
And just the group
banding together as a group and taking the time
to be people and not just coworkers and
not just people in competition for
various slots. Like, if you get to know the guy
who's sitting next to you in class and you guys study together,
you're going to build each other up. It can only go positively if you're
all lifting each other together.
Yeah, absolutely. So you got selected for
the Griffin, but now fly the Cormorant. Was the Cormorant the end
goal? And how did you feel when you were selected for Griffins?
Yeah, so I knew that it was coming. Um,
I said, I want to fly the Cormorant. And the course
director said, no slots this year. They're all, okay. Okay,
that sucks, but that's life. And so I was
happy to go to Goose Bay and get
into a yellow helicopter, knowing that that would keep
the door open to someday being a quamarant pilot.
And even if that didn't happen, then maybe I would end up going
into, uh, Trenton and flying primary
search and rescue with the Griffin instead of doing
primary search and rescue on the Cormorant. So I
viewed going to Goose Bay as a bit of
an adventure. It was a temporary thing, like every posting in
the military, you're going to be there for as long as you're there, and then when you're gone, you're onto
something else.
So make the best of it.
Enjoy the time you have while it's in front of you.
And if you go in thinking you're going to have a bad time, I
guarantee you will.
Yeah.
I mean, that's become such a theme for this show. The most
successful people are the ones who can be
happy anywhere and they can find the bright side
of a posting that wasn't exactly what they hoped for, or getting a
cockpit that wasn't what they hoped. You
know, those are the people who love their job no matter what.
For sure.
So you mentioned Goose Bay and kind of making the
best of that. Looking at it as an adventure, it's pretty
isolated. How did you find your time up there?
It was a bit of a mixed bag. There were parts of it that were
really frustrating and there were parts of it that were
slightly difficult. Personally. We made reference in my
bio to living separately from Michaela. We weren't Married at the time that I went
up there. She was still finishing up her, uh, navigator training,
her axo training, and then made it over onto the Aurora
in Greenwood. So at least we ended up in the same time zone. But
all of the free time leave wise and all of the free
money ended up being spent on Air
Canada to make the trip down. So, uh, that worked out
well that way. But the great outdoors up
there is so much bigger. Labrador. The nickname
for it is the big Land. And, uh, it's called that for a reason. Right.
Like it's 6 hours on what is now a
paved road to get to Labrador City from Goose
Bay. And there's Churchill Falls in the middle, but that's
basically a gas stop and a hydroelectric
dam and the supporting economy that has
been built up around that community for those reasons.
So in order to get to Canadian Tire, in order to get
to Walmart.
In order to get to sushi, you.
Got to do the six hour drive one way.
Wow.
And then do the six hour drive back the other way. So if you're looking
for amenities, you're not going to find that in Goose Bay.
I like to tell people when they ask know, it's got
everything you need. It does not have everything you want by a long
shot.
Mhm.
So people who have younger
families who go up there and are like a really cohesive
unit end up having a good time because they spend a lot of time outside, they
spend a lot of time in the community with the other military
families. The other thing that's unique about Goose Bay is
the fact that you have to live on the
base. So if you're a single person, you have the
option, I guess, if you want to live in the shacks and eat in the mess and
do the regular thing like that. But the
PMQs are also available and that's basically where
everyone ends up.
Mhm.
So for that reason, it's a very
close knit community. When I was up there, mess life
was very strong, and there was a really good culture
of going out and seeing everyone and just being social
on a Friday night. And so those
two things make it easier to build a community
because the community is all here and you already have
something immediately in common. Even if the person
across the street from me is an MP, NCM. Um, I
can relate to them in a way that maybe lots of
people wouldn't choose to relate to each other if
they knew that I was in the military and they were a, uh, local. I was going to be
here for three years. THEY'VE BEEN THERE FoR 30. THEY'RE GOiNg TO BE THERE FoR 30
moRe. Right. So that sense of adventure that
everyone brings up to Goose Bay with them is what makes
it such a great.
Military community, in my opinion.
Yeah, it is really neat how those smaller
postings that a lot of people look at as maybe
undesirable are actually the places that have the
strongest community just by necessity and by the
nature of having a small location, for sure.
And that, like, I wouldn't recommend
Goose Bay to everyone, but I would
recommend Goose Bay to anyone who is looking
at that and thinking it might be fun.
Mhm. BECAUSE IT IS.
But if you're not interested in going there and having a good time,
like.
I said, you won't.
SO WHAT EXACTlY DOES THE CORMORANT dO? We haven't covered it on
the show yet, but we also have the Hercules and the SAR community.
How do their roles differ?
I'm going to back up a bit and talk about the SAR system.
SURE.
So there's three different regions in
Canada. The one that I participated in is the,
uh, Atlantic Search and Rescue Region, which is
coordinated by the Joint Regional Coordination center in
Halifax. And they
receive distress signals. Either it's
from the folks in Trenton who, uh, get the
satellite downlink, or it's from
the Coast Guard receiving a mayday call,
or whether it's from an area control unit receiving
a mayday call, or being relayed a day call in some
cases, or whether it's from a
provincial police force, whether it be the Royal
Newfoundland Constabulary, or whether it's, uh, the RCMP,
or whether it's the, uh, certetic Becc. Those are the main folks
who feed into the Joint Regional
Coordination center. And from there they make decisions
on who and what to task. They
get a lot of calls every year. Some of those calls end up going
to air assets to prosecute the
mission in terms of we're going to go out and either do a
medevac off of a boat or we're going to search for a lost
hunter or we're going to do lines over the water looking for someone
who fell in. Those sorts of tasks
are what we tend to end up with every once in a while. We also
end up with what we call humanitarian tasks.
So the lost Hunter would be an example of that where the provincial
police find themselves in a situation they
aren't resourced to deal with. Another example would
be if someone was hiking and they needed an evacuation medically,
but the provincial response was going to be inadequate
to the situation, we would go and do that.
We being the federally responsive SAR system,
whether it's an Air Force asset or whether it's a, uh,
Coast Guard asset. From there,
if you're tasking error asset, the
Hercules is higher,
faster, has longer endurance, longer range
than the cormorant does. They're your search platform.
And so traditionally you have Sartex in the
back that are trained and equipped to parachute out of the back
of the platform to go and render aid
to people on the ground until such time as
they can be extracted and people can be
stabilized in place and then
evacuated by other means because you can't
evacuate people out of the middle of the bush
using a Hercules.
Right.
And Sartex being our search and rescue technicians.
That's right, yeah. So they come from other trades after a period, uh,
of time in the forces already. So it's what we call a remaster
trade and they come with a set of
experiences and receive a set of training
after going through selection that prepares them to
provide medical and survival
aid to individuals in the least
hospitable areas and environments of our country.
Yeah, they're amazing people. They're, yeah, if you meet
them, they're so, so impressive and they can, they can do
anything.
And working with them every day keeps a pilot humble.
Yeah, no doubt.
If you'd like to know more about search and rescue technicians or
Sartechs, this is a great time for a shout out for my friend
Dylan Weller's podcast, the SAR Take. That's
the SAR take. Dylan is a
great guy and he's one of our Sartechs in the Royal
Canadian Air Force.
Yeah.
So those are the people that we are
delivering to a scene. And so
the other thing that a Hercules can do for a, ah,
cormorant is provide top cover. So when you have someone
who's on a ship oat 200, 250 miles
offshore and needs to be off of that ship
faster than they would be able to if they were just steaming
to shore. That's like a 25 hours trip if
the ship is making ten knots, right. That's some
reasonably simple math with some average
speeds and assuming a bunch of things go right,
that's your best case scenario. So if someone's
having a heart attack, that's it man.
Mhm.
They need help a lot faster than that. So that's when you send your
cormorant to go out and extract the
patient from the vessel. So we go out
and we insert a Sartech into a situation, whether
it's like I just described on a vessel, whether it's
on top of a mountain, whether it's uh, in the middle of a field
or a swamp. And a lot of the time we're doing that
by hoist. And then we will extract the
patient, usually in a rescue basket, uh, if
they're ambulatory, or in a Stokes litter, if they're not, and
then retrieve the Sartech as well at the same time, and then
get them to emergency medical care, whether that's
in the form of an ambulance at an airport, or whether
that's setting them down at an airport and
just leaving them be because they didn't
require any sort of medical assistance. But the situation
they were in was going to deteriorate to the point where eventually
they would, um. And so
we go and we do the rescue part of search and rescue
is basically what it boils down to.
Okay, so to really simplify what you
just said, the HERC is the search
portion typically, and the cormorant is typically the rescue
portion when you're dividing up search and rescue.
Right.
And there's large amounts of overlap too. Right. So when the
Hercules is doing top cover, they're participating in the rescue
by acting as a comms platform. They find us wins. On
the way home, they've saved me needing to refuel twice to
get home.
Dropping flares for illumination, that's huge, that's a game
changer.
And we can get into that more detail a little bit later if you want to.
Sure.
And for searching, the Cormorant is
capable and allowed to fly a lot lower
and a lot slower than Hercules can. So
we overlap search areas as uh, the
Searchmaster will dictate in order to
provide the right kind of coverage in the right areas.
Okay, it's complex.
It's usually complex, yeah. There's a lot of moving pieces.
Yeah.
What is the training and upgrade process like for a Cormorant
pilot.
Nominally, you have two years from when you
arrive on squadron to become a fully mission
capable SARAC, which means
that you have to hit the ground running. So you start,
uh, out coming off of the OTF in Comox, go to your
home unit, whether that's, uh, in Comox or in
Greenwood or in Gander. And then you are
a Fo one. So you start
basically being trusted to
learn and to keep the blue side up on the
AI and to be as helpful as you're
capable of being in any given moment. But you're just there to
soak it all in, get better at flying,
and learn how to eventually
become that AC.
I just want to break in for a couple acronyms there.
Yeah, go for it.
OTF is operational Training flight Fo
first officer. AC is aircraft commander, and
AI is attitude indicator.
Sorry for that.
It's okay. We speak in acronyms.
Yeah, it's alphabet soup over here.
That's why I'm here.
Yeah. Okay.
And then, uh, from there, you'd become an Fo two. And
at that point, you've gotten the blessing from
standards to fly nightboats with
just any AC, as opposed to needing to do other training
and standards. That's the most challenging thing that
we do, is a nightboat. And I think we're going to get into that a little bit later. Again,
referencing back to the flares. But that's that stage of
your training is just getting good at that stuff.
While you are an Fo two, that's your opportunity to continue
and get really good at flying the aircraft.
And you need to be really good at flying the aircraft so
that you don't have to think about that while you're trying to think about the
mission. There's no brain space to do both at once.
And so then after that, you
become a fo three, potentially at the
same time, but not necessarily at the same time.
You can become a utility AC. So you would be
allowed then to do ferry flights, example, between
Gander and Greenwood, doing a tail swap. You can do that
between, uh, Greenwood and Comox. I did that as a utility
AC. There were three of us pilots on that
crew, along with an FE and a couple of Imp techs,
and we were again, just doing a tail swap. But while you
are an FO three, you are acting
as an AC during simulated. And
potentially, if you have the opportunity and things
work out well in terms of luck and the level
of complexity of the mission versus your level of ability at that
given moment, you might be the acting AC on an
actual task mission. And then
after that, you go through your upgrade trip.
There's build up to this in terms of, uh, like
Rons.
Ron stands for remain overnight
simulated taskings.
Running training days yourself. And at the
end of it, someone comes out from, uh, Sarset.
Sarset is search and rescue standards evaluation.
And training, and sits in the jump
seat. And you and an Fo two or
better sit together in the
front and make all of the decisions and do
all of the flying in order to demonstrate your
competence and run those
scenarios through to completion. And if they're happy
with the fact that you are safe and
effective and efficient enough, then
you will be granted the SAR AC
category, and then you can take the crew out and do
SAR.
Wow.
So that's a pretty involved upgrade process.
Yeah, it is. And historically, it
hasn't happened in two years.
Mhm.
That's honestly too much. And, uh,
pros and cons to needing to write almost every single
pilot an extension. Right. If you think that this is something that the
person's capable of, and it seems like
this is going to be
achievable, why not do the paperwork?
Mhm.
But the counterpoint to that is you shouldn't have to do that paperwork for
80% of the pilots that are going through. So
there's room for improvement. But
that's the policy that we're left with right now.
Yeah, and it's a little above our pay grade.
Exactly.
Those are things that they hopefully polish over time.
Exactly. And things are improving as well. Like
the binder that you need to complete has
evolved, and it's creating a
situation now where people are better trained. And
recently we upgraded a Sac with less than 500
hours on type. And I credit that to their ability as an
individual. Highly, uh, competent young man. And
he's also been given these opportunities
that were very prescribed
and laid out at the right intervals. And I think that he is a
sign of the success of the system and the fact that it is
evolving.
In the correct direction.
We're seeing that people are getting less and less flight time as we
move towards simulation and a bunch of different factors. So
it is important for those upgrade processes to become more and
more efficient.
Definitely.
So we often ask what a normal day looks like, but in
SAr, there are very few normal days. Can you tell us
what the schedule is like at 413 Squadron?
So there are a couple of caveats to this.
Like you said, what is normal? M. Um.
But when you walk in in the morning, if
you're on standby, you should expect that
you're going to be liable starting when
you first walk through the doors. And also before that, at 05:00 in the
morning, you can get a call as early as then. And then at 04:00
in the afternoon, you can be released from JRCC.
Assuming there's been no tasking in that.
Time, JRCC is the Joint Rescue Coordination.
Center, and then the night crew takes over.
Okay.
So at 04:00 in the afternoon, that's when, if
you're on what we call slash, um, you've done your
crew rest. You are at home on calL,
potentially going in on a night flight if that's what's
on the fly Pro, and then liable
completely overnight. Again, whether you're
airborne on a night trainer or asleep at home on your own bed
until 05:00 the next morning.
Okay.
That's when the day crew takes over. On the weekend,
it's a little bit different. So there is
a slash crew for the whole weekend, effectively,
and a backup crew. So when you're on standby,
historically, you've been on RP 30. So 30 minutes notice to
launch. When you're on slash, you're on RP Two, which is 2 hours
notice to launch. And when you're on backup, you're on RP Twelve. So
12 hours notice to launch.
Okay.
Those are airborne times. So coming along with that response
posture requirement is a geographic restriction for where you
can actually live. And, uh, that's true at all of the SAR
squadrons. So the larger
geographic area for Greenwood, if, uh,
memory serves, goes all the way out eastbound to Windsor.
That's right.
But for 413 Squadron, it only goes.
Out as far as Burwick.
So it's more restrictive in order to be able to meet
that two hour time frame.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So if you're on standby and it's a flying day,
usually you'll do two sorties, one in the morning, one the afternoon.
We like to get out and do lunch
somewhere else in order to be able to stretch our legs, get out of the
local area that we see all the time, especially at night.
We see it all the time. And then it also affords us more
opportunity to work with different boats. Our bread and butter
of what we do for training largely revolves around,
hey.
Can we get a boat? We try.
So we're working with the Canadian Coast Guard and with the
Coast Guard Auxiliary. And, um, when we do boat
camps, we also contract for boats sometimes just to get a lot
of variety to work in different conditions, work in different
geographic areas of the SRR.
What's the SRR?
The search and rescue region. Okay, so SRR Atlantic
encompasses all of
the Atlantic provinces, all of
Labrador, and a good chunk of
eastern and northern Quebec. And I believe
Quebec City is just outside and is in,
uh, sor. That's managed by Trenton as opposed
to by Halifax.
Okay.
So as well, when you're doing an Ron. So I remain
overnight. So the aircraft doesn't go to bed in the hangar at
home, it goes to bed somewhere else. And the crew
will generally be sleeping in hotels in SAR.
We'll get to that selling point in.
The future, and
we try to get.
Very good spread out coverage of where we're going
on those rows in order that by the time you're in AC,
you've seen most of the southern SRR, which is where we
do the vast majority of
our calls to. And then
on a night trainer, usually you'll just do the one sortie
and it'll be out to do a boat and
then back all on the same tank of gas, generally.
Okay.
Or land work again, really in a
reasonably small circle around the airfield.
Mhm.
And that's just probably doing some kind of confined area
work at night.
Yeah, confined areas and hoisting really are
the two big ones. Uh, sometimes we do airfield
work. We tend to try not to do night circuits just to be
good neighbors. If the weather is keeping us in Greenwood, though, we
end up doing a lot of confined areas in and around the
airfield, sometimes on a particular night.
And the reason that Paul's saying they're trying to be good neighbors is I
used to live in the PMQs in Greenwood, and when the cormorant goes
over, like, your dishes are shaking in the cupboards, it's
quite a powerful, loud aircraft.
It is, yeah. I was doing circuits one night with a
relatively junior fO, and the Facebook group for the
neighborhood that I live in is right under
downwind, and it was lighting up, and just,
uh, not understanding why we're doing
what we're doing really triggers some people.
Yeah, well, you got to get the training in at the end of the day.
Right.
You need to be competent and proficient.
That's it. Yeah.
And like I said, I do try to be a good neighbor, and I believe that everyone at the
squadron feels the same way. And, um, when we can
avoid it, we do avoid it.
M so what was the
hardest part.
Of the job when you started?
It was
realizing that you can't help.
Everyone and
finding the grace to give to
myself that this is just not something that we can
do tonight.
And trusting the AC was
just doing.
Everything that we could and sitting there in the other
seat for long enough, you see that people are working hard
to try and make things happen. And when we do turn missions off,
it's not done lightly. It's done for the safety of the crew and the safety of
the aircraft. One of the things that people
say in SAR is you shouldn't create a second
emergency.
Mhm.
And that's true. And you have to learn that early on,
even though it is not always the easiest pill to swallow.
You want to go out, you want to help people, you want to save lives. And
sometimes that just can't happen that night or that day, for whatever
reason.
Yeah, I imagine that would be really tough. I've
known SAR ACS who had to make that call,
and it really weighs on them.
It does, absolutely. I'm fortunate not to have
had that decision
myself.
Mhm.
To have to make that decision. But I've been part of a
crew when we have decided not to go, and there were good reasons. I've
been part of a crew where we had to delay the mission.
And you always feel better about that. It's like we
made the call, the safe call, and we went out later
and managed to do it anyway. And that worked out well.
So when you're first struggling with this,
how do you overcome that feeling?
Um, you just sit with it, really, and
sort of readjust
the way that.
You look at the job.
The job at the end of the day is bring home the crew.
If you can bring home the aircraft, even better. If you can save
a life, even better. But at the end of the day, if you haven't
brought your crew home.
You shouldn't have left.
The cormorant is an extremely capable aircraft,
including outside of the SAR world. Can you tell us about some of these
capabilities?
Yeah.
So it's quite a large aircraft. It's nicknamed the
flying School bus, and for good reason. If you were to put the
ramp down and if it were capable and, uh, ignoring
structural load issues, uh, if there weren't any seats in the back.
I drive a Mazda three. I can fold my mirrors in and drive it right
up the back and park it in the cabin.
It is huge.
It's massive. And it's difficult to understand
how large it is until you're standing beside it.
And the downwash
from it is substantial. It only has one disc.
When you say disc, you mean the disc shape that is made
by the rotor spinning?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
So it only has one main rotor system providing lift to the
aircraft. And because it's so heavy and because the
disc is reasonably small compared to its size, the
downwash is substantial. When I'm trying
to get the point across to people
who we're going to help, and I'm telling the crew
across the radio, we have Hurricane force
downwash that seems to get the message across well enough. But
otherwise, we've showed up to boats and they've had crab
traps and lobster traps all over the top. They've had
metal tables which have been blown over before by crews.
If it's not bolted down, it's leaving the deck.
Mhm. So it can lift a lot, it.
Can carry a lot, it can go quite far for a
helicopter. Its endurance is in the realm of five or
6 hours, depending on. Yeah, depending on how much fuel you're
able to take because of the payload. And
it gets relied on for a lot of SAR like things
that are not necessarily SAR. So we
spoke a little bit about the humanitarian missions already, but other things
that it does is it assists with exercises undertaken
by the NORAD community. So that's starting to
happen more often where we're asked to
preposition an asset in a part of the country where
it isn't normally in order to be able to respond
to a potential ejection if required.
So almost using you in like a combat support role.
Yeah, exactly. And that is going to
become more prevalent, I believe, as
the Sartex have been
removed from combat support and we are now
using medtechs in that role instead.
That's right.
I forgot about that. But Vic mentioned when we did his
interview that the role of combat
support and SAR are in the midst of some adjustment right
now.
That's right.
Yeah.
I'm very good friends with one of the CEOs of a, uh,
combat support unit, and they were telling me that the
medtechs are exceedingly capable people
and they're very good at their jobs and
they are not given enough
credit because they're not Sartex. And that's
the only thing that people see is the reduction in the capability,
where what we should be looking at instead is the
fact that they do bring all of these things to the table
that we just wouldn't have without them.
So the other things that we do sometimes is, uh, support
other components of the Canadian Forces. So
there are people in the forces who
do very demanding and kinetic activities that
require the ability to be evac
quickly and effectively if something were to go wrong,
and especially in a maritime environment, one of
the best tools for the job is a cormorant. So we will be asked sometimes
to assist with those things.
Okay.
The cormorant is a fairly complex helicopter.
Where do new pilots tend to struggle when they start on the
cormorant?
Energy management is something
that you have to learn early
on, and you have to learn very well. And it's
a huge step to move from a 412 to
a cormorant. We're talking maximum gross
weights of, uh, 11,900 pounds
for the Griffin, versus
14,600 kilos,
or 15,600 kilos if you're
taking a full fuel load on the cormorant.
So about triple what the Griffin can do?
That's right, yeah. So we can take
almost a Griffin worth
of, uh, fuel in the cormorant.
It's insane.
So that aspect of energy management
catches people off guard, especially in the early stages. So it's
important to just take things slow, take things step by
step. And you need to get good at
flying the machine without needing to think about it that
much in order to be able to later on
do all the mission management. And that's where
people will start to struggle, is as they're handed those
things. SAR is a
messy, gray,
nonlinear tree of decisions that you need
to make in order to affect an outcome. And it's always
changing, always changing. And that's one of
the things that, personally, I struggled with, is that I would have a really
good plan, and we would go and start to prosecute it, and then
things would change, and I
wouldn't allow myself the
flexibility to change my plan. Uh, and
that very quickly got beaten out of me in the fo three phase. But
when you're doing tabletop exercises, it's like we're going to go and do
this, and it's like, okay, cool.
And then when you have to go.
And do it in an actual
aircraft.
You need to be reactive without being.
Too reactive, if that makes sense. And just allow
the changing variables to feed into
your decision making loop and change your plan
accordingly if it becomes able
or necessary that you should do that.
So it sounds like, to me, I always ask,
where do people struggle? And then the big question is, how can they overcome
that?
Right?
It sounds like the only way to overcome this is
experience, practice training, experience.
Chair flying, and giving yourself the grace to learn
without beating yourself up about it.
Yeah, that would be huge. Especially when you were saying
you started out fairly rigid in your planning.
And it's hard when that doesn't work, when you have
an idea of how things are going to go and then it doesn't go that way.
That's right.
That can be really demoralizing.
Yeah. Your plan has to
change. It can be a great plan on the ground, but as soon as you get new
information, you need to make a new plan.
One thing I like that you've mentioned a couple of times is how important it
is to learn to fly the aircraft really well, because
eventually the whole point of it is to employ it in
a, uh, mission.
That's right.
That's a big thing that is different about flying in the
RCAF versus flying in the civilian world. If you're flying in the
civilian world, in most roles, your job
is to fly the aircraft. You're flying the aircraft to fly
something from A to B. So your main purpose is
flying in the RCAF. Often you're learning to
fly so that you can go accomplish a mission and use that aircraft
as a tool. So the flying part is just a means to an
end. The real meat and potatoes of what you're doing is
the tactics and employing that aircraft to get the job
done.
Yeah, and we see that crossover to the civilian
side of things. A little bit narrower, uh,
on the helicopter side, because there are people who do power
line survey, slinging, firefighting, long
lining, all of that kind of stuff is very
similar in that you're using the aircraft
to accomplish a task. It's not just you're taking off
from point a flying at, uh, cruise
altitude X, to end up at point
B with whatever the payload is.
But we take that to an extreme
in SAR. And when you're flying, for an
example, when you're flying IFR, IFR is
what you do to get to where you are going to do what you need
to do. And maybe what you're doing when you
finished that to then get home again afterwards.
Mhm.
So if you have to spend a lot of mental energy flying
IFR, then you're not going to have enough mental
energy to fly your mission in the middle of your
flight and do the thing that you need to be
doing, which is potentially a nightboat in
the.
Dark with fog
over the North Atlantic.
With flare illumination and an
aircraft somewhere above you, and
having the brain space to untangle all of those things
getting to and from on scene. It
needs to take so little of your bucket that
it's not impinging on the other thing that you need to.
Do when you get there. Yeah, for sure.
What is the strangest sarcall you've ever gone out
to?
I've rescued a couple of EPIRBs, which
is a, uh, Beacon. Basically, it's EPIRB,
but what it is is a beacon that
is released from a boat after it
sinks, potentially, or in the
cases that I've been involved in, it was knocked off or fell
off, somehow enters the water, self activating,
sends a 406 signal up to the SArSat,
comes down to CMCC Trenton, goes across to
JRCC Halifax.
CMCC M is the Canadian Mission Control center.
And they say, we have an EPIRB going off,
and we need you to go and investigate it and potentially
rescue whoever was on the boat that may or may not have
sunk. And in both cases, it's just like a,
uh, can of Folgers, except it's yellow and it has
an antenna, and, uh, it's just bobbing there in the waves
because it fell off of a boat. So that's the strangest one
I've been involved in. There are also people that have had to
find out that they were in a
landfill, like the EPIRB had gone off in a landfill after
it had been disposed of improperly.
Oh, no way.
Right.
So we're getting, as an organization, as
a larger SAR system, a lot better about identifying the fact
that it is in a landfill or in a dry dock and
not using SAR assets, primary
SAR assets, to investigate it as a real
emergency. There's some filtering that's
happening now.
Right.
Because that's a big use of resources.
Absolutely. It's expensive to launch a Hercules in a crew.
It's expensive to launch a cormorant in a crew. And what it means is
that asset is potentially unavailable
either then or later on for something that's actually
going on.
That's right.
Helicopters can go almost anywhere. What is the coolest
location you've ever landed or flown out of?
We flew out of Saglic in
northern Labrador. It's a disused airfield that was built by the
Americans during the war. It was part of the Atlantic crossing
routes.
Oh, you mean the VHF route that you can take?
Yeah.
So neither of us can remember the name of it, but essentially, there was a
bunch of stepping stones across the Atlantic from the days when
people couldn't fly just directly over the Atlantic Ocean.
That's right, yeah. And it also. It formed part of
the defense of North America as well at various points in
time. So we were staging out of there and
flying into the Torn Gat Mountains National park
with the permission and Cooperation of Parks Canada in
order to conduct mountain flying as an
exercise. So we would wake up in the morning, go
out and fly in those mountains, landing at, uh, various
locations, and, uh, then fly back at the end of
the day and stage there again for the following day. And we
did that. The squadron did that over a two week period and sent two
crews up. And that was where my
helicopter had a run in with the polar bear one night.
Yeah.
Well, you know what the next question I had was, what's
the craziest situation you've ever found yourself in on the Cormorant? So
I imagine that's the one.
So, woke up in the morning and was
told by the AC that our flight
engineer had gone down and done the walk around and that
the helicopter had been attacked by a polar bear. And I
just looked at him and I laughed because I thought he was joking. There's no way
this is real, right? Like, you got to be pulling my leg.
You thought this was, like, part of a scenario or something?
Absolutely. Or not even so much a scenario as
like, uh, let's see if we can get one over on, like, is he
awake today?
Yeah.
So turns out it was real. And, uh, I sent
you the link to that one. You can find it on the CBC.
It's still there.
And if anyone is interested in seeing some of those articles, we'll
be putting the links into the show notes.
That was pretty interesting.
And the response for how do we now
get helicopter parts up to
northernmost Labrador was really. It
was interesting in retrospect. It was frustrating at the time to watch
how the logistics had to unfold in order to get pieces
from Greenwood all the way up to Goose Bay and then from
Goose Bay all the way up to cyglic.
Yeah, that sounds like it would be pretty complex.
It was a little bit, um. Triple four squadron ended up bailing us
out, so that was great of them to do. Um,
and, uh, it just, again, goes to show that, uh, aviation is
a team sport.
Yeah, absolutely. So you've said to me in the
past that you don't get shot at. The weather is your enemy.
SAR in the Cormorant means you'll be doing challenging operations in
poor conditions. I would imagine that hoisting from a ship in bad
weather would be one of the most difficult situations. Can
you describe some of the dangers involved and what it feels like?
Yeah, that's where you make your money. You're there in
the hover. Maybe you have arrived from an overwater
transition down, which is allowing and
directing and supervising
and safeguarding the aircraft
automation to bring you down to
a hundred foot hover over whatever sea state
is underneath you and you can come
within a quarter mile using a radar paint
of your target, which in the case that we're talking about here,
is going to be a boat, quite large boat,
potentially, uh, a shipping vessel, a
cargo container vessel. And
at that point in time, as long as you can see
the 100ft down to the
water and you're quarter mile forward
corresponding to your radar paint, a, uh, light
which is illuminating the target from the target,
then you can proceed.
I don't know how that sounds to someone who has no experience flying over
the water, but to me as an Aurora pilot, that sounds
crazy.
It's horrifying. Yeah, absolutely. You're like sitting there
in the left seat with the AC, who probably has done
this 20 or 30 times
before in the right seat. And you're looking out the window
at that light and going, there's no way, man, why are
we doing this right now? And the answer is to try and save
someone. And the helicopter will keep you
safe and will allow you, if you
treat it nicely and use the automation the way it's
designed, to then close with that
vessel until you can fly off of
it visually, using a rat out hold function to
keep the collective in the appropriate position
so that the helicopter is going to
then descend or climb to an altitude
that you've set it to, corresponding to how high you want to be over
the deck of the vessel while you're hoisting. And
then the helicopter holds your heading
and you are now flying
against, uh, spring pressures. And
with the aircraft trimmed out, tracking it
in and out along a visual reference line over
the vessel which is.
Moving in the dark, you may or.
May not have a horizon because maybe the Herc broke that night, maybe
it's there and it's providing you flares, which gives you a horizon
inside your ping pong ball, which it's a game changer,
those flares. And you then will
put a live
person on that hook in the form of a
Sartech, hoist them out to the deck, which again
might be rising or falling 30ft, might be pitching
1520 degrees, depending on the sea
state, and put them onto the
vessel to then go and render medical aid or potentially
just put them on the vessel long enough to get someone into a rescue.
Basket and then do the whole thing.
Over again to get them off. So when you're doing your
insertion, generally what you do is you
insert two Sartex and a piece of equipment. So that's
three, move into the rest position,
wait for them to do what they need to do because you can't
afford to leave the hover because
it's such an intense
and difficult procedure to arrive back in that
position that you're better off just burning the
fuel instead of trying to
end up burning more fuel anyway to come back to that
position. And then you need to then go
in, recover a, uh, Sartech, the
equipment potentially from the rest if there's good guideline
available. And then the second
Sartech again. So you're doing this six times
in the pitch dark on night vision goggles. So you're
looking through toilet paper tubes now down and
right, and you are leaning out over your
seat probably three to six
inches. Your right shoulder is out
of the seat, your head is probably two
inches from the window, and you're looking down at like
a 30 degree angle at your references. Hopefully
you have the ability to scan up from time to time underneath your
goggles if you're wearing them. Some people tend not to, to look
at your horizon, which is supposed to be your primary reference, but let's be
honest, maybe it's not there. And you
have people who are dangling from a one,
uh, piece of cabling with a hook
on the end and trying not to bash them off the.
Side of the superstructure on their way up.
I just sort of tried to picture myself doing that
and it feels so uncomfortable and
so scary. The first time you do
that. It must be outrageous.
It's daunting, absolutely. But you don't
start in that situation. You end up there.
Right.
So that's how we get through our upgrade process, is to go and be.
Able to do that after maybe less.
Than 500, maybe more like 800 hours on
type. When you start out in Comox on the
OTF, you do it to the, uh, black duck,
which is. It's like a tugboat sort of situation.
And you're doing it in the Georgia Strait, which is a
relatively calm body of water because of how
confined it is being between Vancouver island and the mainland.
And you are generally doing it with a lot of cultural
lighting around and you're not doing it in
fog. There is training limits that apply as opposed
to the SAR limits. So you need to crawl
before you can walk. You need to walk before you can run. And what I
just described to you is running full tilt with your eyes
closed in the dark.
Yeah. Right.
So even when you open them, it's a little disorienting.
So that's as bad as it can ever get.
It's almost always better than that.
How does that feel?
It's daunting at first. Absolutely.
And when you're there, it's
tense and.
You need to be able to relax enough to be able
to do it right. Like it's all about fine motor control
and the interface that you have
with the machine. And so you're using
your proprioception in your joints. Hopefully you've
anchored your wrist to your thigh, you have
your feet guarding the pedals, but you're allowing the aircraft to
fly. Your heading, you have your hand on the
collective, but really it's the aircraft keeping you
out of the water. So all you need to think about now is
moving your fingertips and you just
think forward and right. And it doesn't
matter that the
boat is pitching, bobbing and
weaving, you're just flying your line in.
Mhm.
And as long as you can keep the helicopter steady and just make those fine
movements as you're doing it, everything is going
to be a lot smoother. It's when you start overthinking it, it's when
you tense up and allow gross motor control to
take over. That's when things start to go sideways.
And people can get hurt.
Yeah, that just sounds crazy. As a fixed
wing guy and as someone whose
distances are normally measured in hundreds of feet above
the water and much larger fractions of a mile
from a vessel, that's crazy.
Yeah.
So from a fishing vessel or like the Coast Guard
cutters, we tend to, uh, for
hoisting, be 35ft off the water when
you're doing a boat to something that small, simply to maintain
visual references.
Wow.
Uh, because when you lose those virtual references,
you lose the ability to not hit the boat for sure.
Right.
And we've had it before, and I was in the back of the
helicopter where we have settled onto a fiberglass antenna
and punctured a fuel cell. To my knowledge, that's only happened once in the
history of flying cormorants. But frankly, I'm
surprised that we don't hit more boats more often. And it comes down to the
training that we are provided
and the ability to practice that
we're given. And you know,
when you're coming up to a boat, whether today is going to
be a good day or not, based on how tense you're feeling
and based on how your reaction to the
conditions are going, and there are situations where you
just won't put a startech on the hook for training because
it's not worth it. So if you can get some dry runs, not
even necessarily putting the empty hook down,
maybe that's what you need for the night. Maybe that's your
small victory, and every little bit helps, right? It's
all about making sure that everyone can come home
in one piece at the end of the day. And for training,
there are some risks that just aren't acceptable.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Now, we just touched on this a little bit when you talked
about sometimes the training you get is not the
training you expected, but it can be enough. You've mentioned to me that
in SAR, even if the outcome isn't what we were looking for,
the mission can still be successful. Can you give me an example of this?
Yeah.
So, one of the missions that I flew, we went out to
the easternmost part of southern
Quebec, and We were looking for, uh, someone who had
been fishing from shore, and we didn't
end up finding them. They had
tied themselves to an anchor point. It was like a
lobster pot that had been weighted down, and we ended up finding
that. And it was night, it was dark.
We were able to be high enough and shine our light down enough.
And there was enough light that night as well,
that on the MVGs, we could see the bottom quite
clearly. And all the way to the drop off, we were
able to crawl around at
130ft, looking straight down, using the night
sun, determined positively that they just weren't there anymore.
And the night sun is like a super bright spotlight, right?
Absolutely, yeah. It's bright enough that one of the things that you
can't do is refuel the
helicopter if it's been on within.
30 minutes because of the heat it generates.
Because of the heat it generates.
Wow. Yeah.
So even though we didn't find that gentleman that
night, we were able to say that he wasn't there
anymore. Search is accomplished. Rescue
just couldn't happen.
Mhm.
And that's frustrating, but sometimes that's
the way it is.
Mhm.
And the reason for the listeners,
if I'm interpreting this correctly, the reason that that
can still be a somewhat positive mission outcome is
because without that certainty,
the search may go on for days, weeks,
depending on, I'm assuming, various conditions, and
the search can end up using assets and people for a much longer
period of time. Even though it's very unlikely that you
will find that person.
Right.
And more than that, it's
about the people that they've left behind.
So we are able to say positively
we found what he was using to anchor himself and
he wasn't attached to it anymore. And if he's not back on
shore, then he's somewhere else.
Yeah.
And that's really sad to have to say to someone, and I'm glad that I'm
not in the position and haven't been in the position to have to do that to
someone directly. But that's effectively the
conclusion that I came to and the information that I had to
relay through RCC and Ultimately
that hopefully provides a little bit of
closure.
Mhm.
A measure of closure, instead of just
wondering.
Yeah.
And so when he doesn't come home
and the SQ are out and they're scouring the
shoreline and he's not on the shoreline, what's the, uh,
de Quebec? It's the provincial police force. And when they've
scoured the shoreline and he's not on the shoreline, and the boats
have been out and they haven't found him, and the helicopter has been
out, and they see what's on the bottom that no one else has been able to get to
or look at yet, then hopefully
there aren't any more lingering questions.
What would you say are the most memorable flights you've had on the
Cormorant?
The ones where you take someone
who, you know, would have
died and successfully relay
them to the next level of care?
There are people who, hand on heart,
I can say that I and the
crew directly participated in
saving their life.
For real, not
hypothetically.
That's pretty amazing.
It is.
And that is job satisfaction. That's
as good as it gets.
Mhm.
Those, for me, are the flights that are most memorable is when I can look back at
it and think, yeah, we did that.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
What is the best day you've ever.
Had in the cormorant?
We had gone out to the ILA Mele
and taken a young boy who
was potentially having acute appendicitis
from an outlying island to the main island.
It was, uh, from a nursing station to a hospital sort of situation
where we were increasing the level of care he was going to be received so he could be
assessed properly. And hearing
from the guys in the back just how stoked he was to be
on the helicopter and how
it was such a big deal for him and his parents to be on
board and to be able to give that to them
where they wouldn't have been able to get across on a boat that night because of the
weather, and just realizing
that we were able to.
Do that for them. Yeah.
So just giving them that positive experience, and it's
kind of interesting. It's a combination of, like, they got to
enjoy the ride, but also they're able
to have that weight off their shoulders of, is our
son going to be okay? Are we going to be able to get him proper medical
care you guys were able to provide, right?
Yeah.
And looking in retrospect, he
was going to be fine. And from the way
that he was behaving on the aircraft, it was clear to the Sartex
that that wasn't what was going on.
But if it had been or if it had been allowed to
develop into that, then him being
off of that island that night instead of after the storm had
been through, whether it was the next day or the day after, that could have made a
huge difference.
Mhm.
What is the hardest day you've ever.
Had on the cormorant?
There was a mission where we did, where there
was a fishing vessel that was sinking,
uh, the Mucktown girl. And it was off of the
coast of Kanso in Nova Scotia,
sort of south and east of Cape Breton.
And, um, it had
been towed by the Canadian Coast
Guard and the tow line broke because of the conditions
and it started taking on water.
And so everyone zipped up their immersion suits and hopped into
the life raft. And then while
they were getting off of the life raft
and onto the Coast Guard vessel,
four of them made it onto the deck and one
of.
Them made it into the water
and we found him,
which is good. But
when we took
him out of.
The water and brought him into the cabin and the Sartex were doing
CPR on him in the back, that's when it
became real that not everyone
that we bring into the helicopter is going to walk off of
it. Uh, and
that was a challenging day for
me. It was a challenging day for the Sartex
in the back. And just the randomness of
it, that's what I think I had, uh,
trouble with the most was why
was it this guy? Why didn't he make
it onto the deck?
Yeah, because they were basically home free.
Yeah, pretty much after a bunch of really
crazy incidents.
That's right.
And then we were going anyway
because they like to be
proactive with getting a cormorant into the air. Like I said, we have
2 hours to do it and then we have whatever
transit time it's going to take to get there. So by the time
this vessel needing a tow turns into
the situation where there's a man in the water now, if enough
time has elapsed, then the outcome isn't always
guaranteed. And that's sort of what we ran into that day.
Yeah.
And it comes back to the idea that
you can't save everybody. And struggling, um, with
that early on and reframing it made dealing with that incident
earlier, but it still took some.
Time to work through. Yeah.
How did you work through that incident in particular?
That one in particular? I took a day off.
Yeah.
That's what it comes down to when you're a shift worker,
you end up with days that you can sort
of place on the schedule as days off, where if you were meant to be.
In the office, you're not.
You use one of the days that you're out instead. And I
just went and spent time with the family, and that's what it's always
been for me, is, um, not
getting away from work or disconnecting from work
necessarily as the solution to these things,
but just getting the break and taking the pause that you need
to be able to come back to it fully.
Yeah.
As, uh, we've been talking about. Unfortunately, USAR folks
do see times where people don't make it. What is the most
preventable way you see people lose their lives?
It comes back to life jackets and
the decision whether or not to wear them. For me,
it's an easy yes, and I don't know where the line is between being on
a ferry in BC where I don't actually need a life jacket, and I'm
comfortable walking around on that boat, not needing one,
and being in a, uh, kayak. And
it just boggles my mind to see people
paddling around national parks without wearing them or
canoeists sitting on them to make a cushion because
the seat of their canoe is hard and it's hurting their butt.
I know people who have drowned because they weren't wearing their
life jackets, and I've searched for people all night
who have drowned because they weren't wearing their life jackets.
And it's a topic of conversation
that happens a lot in the cockpit and in the
lines of the Sur units when you go out and you're looking for someone who's
fallen overboard and it's like, well, were they wearing a life jacket?
And you feel for the family
of these people who end up in the water, they're not wearing a
life jacket. It's the North Atlantic. Like, it's got to be four
degrees.
Maybe, and it could get up double.
Digits later on in the year, like in the summertime.
But it's an unforgiving environment, and
not choosing to do everything you
can to.
Get out of that water just doesn't make sense to
me.
Yeah, we used to get briefed on the survival times
before every mission we flew over the Atlantic.
And without a survival suit, a lot of the year it's
minutes. So if you aren't wearing a life
jacket and you can't be easily recovered,
you're in trouble.
And something that people don't think about is the gasping
reflex.
Right?
So if you're not floating while you're
gasping, it's not going to go well for you.
So if you can keep your head above the water by
wearing a life jacket for long enough to get your
first scream out, and if you're in the water for 15
minutes while the boat's going the wrong way and someone notices and then they turn
around, your ODs are way better than waiting for a
cormorant to come and find you in the middle of the night. It's just
not going to go well.
Yeah.
All right, we're going to switch to a little bit of a, uh,
lighter fare in 30 seconds or less. If
I'm a pilot in training, why should I want to fly the Cormaron?
What makes it unique and who would it appeal to?
The direct impact that you can have on
people's lives is
huge for job satisfaction.
And if that appeals to you,
I don't need to say anything else.
If you want another reason,
it's the largest helicopter
that I know of that someone
was going to give the keys.
To you and say, go have lunch with your
crew. That's awesome. Yeah.
We're down to the last three questions. We always ask
these questions. What is the most important thing you do
to keep yourself ready for your job?
Everyone talks about getting in the books,
and that's true. So I'm going to pick something different. Get the rest you
need and get the recharge that you
need. When we have the opportunity to take
vacation, I always do. When we have the
opportunity to do things as a family, I
always do. And in Sar, where
shift work is challenging to manage,
sometimes in terms of family obligations, in terms of
lining up with regular weekends, you need
to take those opportunities with two hands and make the most of them.
So that's something that I've always made a conscious effort to do,
and I think it served me really well, and I
recommend it to anyone. Take the time you can with your family
to do everything that you can together.
Yeah.
You can't say this enough. The job in the Air
Force, it's never ending. And if you're not careful,
it will take over your life. You are responsible for
setting those boundaries and for making sure that you're
striking a balance, because there's
always going to be a call for you to come in and
do the job. You have to make sure that you're balancing
that.
That's right.
And give that same ability to the.
People who work for you. Mhm.
That's a really good point.
What do you think makes a good pilot?
The trick, and I'm still learning it, of
knowing when your best that day
isn't going to be good enough.
That day, if you wake up and.
You'Re tired, maybe you can push through.
Maybe it's a bad idea.
That's a judgment call.
Mhm.
And you want to put yourself in a situation
where you don't need your superior
skill to get you out of a situation that your
judgment put you in.
Mhm.
Yeah, I've heard that saying before and it's
such a good one. Everyone wants to be a hotshot
pilot. We all want to work hard and
be the best in the business. But
hopefully, like you've said, you're not putting yourself in a position
where you're using everything you have
because all it takes is a little extra and now everything you
have is not enough.
Yeah, that's right. That's not to say that you need to be
at 110% every day when you walk into work. Like there are
days where 90% Is all you
have and 90% is going to be fine, but you need to know
when that 90% is not going.
To be enough, which is a real check your
ego kind of situation.
Yeah.
Staying humble is key.
Yeah.
And like we say, aviation is a team sport. If you
need to call someone up to fill the roster instead of you, then
do it.
All right, we're down to our last question. I want you to picture
a young pilot, maybe one of the pilots you'll be teaching
soon at the school. If you had to give advice
to a new pilot, what would that be?
Don't leave anything on the table. When you
are in training, the
single most important thing that you can
do is decide that your
training is important. If you're
going through it and you're wishy washy about it, or if
you're going through it and you
decide, you know what? Maybe I don't need to study for that
test.
It's going to bite you.
And you don't want to be the guy
who at the end of the day has questions, did I
work hard enough for this? You want to work as hard
as you need to every time you need.
To and show up ready to go. Yeah, absolutely.
There is no room for doing it halfway.
That's right.
Okay, that's it for our questions today. Paul, I just want to thank
you so much for being here. Uh, I really enjoyed learning
more about what you folks do in the Cormorant. Uh,
I feel humbled thinking about some of the things
that you take on and. Yeah, just thanks so much for being
on the show.
Yeah, thanks, Brian.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for our chat with Paul about
search and rescue on the Cormorant. For our next
episode, we'll check back in with our guest from
episode 15, Scott Harding. At the time,
Scott was on phase one grobe. He has now
completed phase two, as well as his phase three
multi engine course. So we'll find out what life was like for him
as a student and where he's heading next. Do you
have any questions or comments about anything you've heard on the show, or would
you or someone you know make a great guest? Do you have some great
ideas for a show? You can reach out to us, uh, at
thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com.
We'd also love for you to check out our social media, where
we post videos for every episode we make
featuring footage from RCAF, Air crew and
members. And those are all found at at
Podpilot Project. It's hard to believe,
but we have been putting out the show now for one year.
We just want to thank all of our listeners for coming along on this
adventure with us. It has been humbling. It has been
a learning experience, but it has been so much fun.
And without you, the show would really be meaningless. So, from the
bottom of my heart, thank you so much for joining
us with that, we will close by asking
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