Alright, 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 one of my best friends in the world, Davis Clark. Davis and I have been friends since we were second lieutenants together in Borden. We did our flight training together for the most part. We went on the Aurora together and we went to the desert together. So today is special episode for me in that we're not only chatting with a close friend who I've trained and deployed with, but we're talking about the airframe that I flew operationally. So we'll get right into Davis's bio. Davis graduated from flight training in 2012 and was posted to 405 Squadron in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, flying the CP 140 Aurora, uh, where he deployed four times to the Middle East in support of Op impact. In 2018, he was posted to two CFFTS where he instructed on the CT 156 Harvard, two for three and a half years. In 2021, he was posted to 407 Squadron in Comox, BC to fly the CP 140 Aurora. He has continued to deploy in numerous operations around the world. Today we will be focusing on his time on the Aurora. So we've been friends for a long time, but I actually don't know this about you. Where did flying begin for you?
Flying in the Air Force began for me kind of in a moment of life crisis, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my history degree. I went to university at Wilford, uh, Laurier, and was working on an arts degree there and intended to go into teaching for high school or perhaps getting my PhD in being a professor if I was going to make it through kind of the academic education stream. After a year of student teaching at my local high school, being able to pop in and do some US. History courses with my old grade eleven history teacher, I realized that it was going to be fairly stagnant in that you're teaching the same syllabus year after year and the professor route really wasn't going to be for me even if I was going to be able to make it. Teaching is really kind of tertiary behind publishing and researching for them. So I started to pursue some avenues to try and travel. Having never actually done it, but had a strong desire looked around at perhaps being a pilot or flight attendant at like an airline. I didn't really feel like I was going to be able to get the flying hours required to be a pilot for an airline and I didn't feel that a flight attendant was really going to be for me. So I looked at being a military pilot instead and put my application in and went through the training system.
So that was pretty good timing a because on a whim you got in and shortly after that they closed the trade for quite a few years.
I didn't actually know that, but I do know my timing was quite fortunate in that I had only one year left of university. I was allowed to join under ROTP, the regular, uh, officer training plan at the time when it was closed for deo entries for quite some time. And it was also, uh, fortunate just that it was only a year or two after they allowed lower vision standard pilots in.
Yeah, that's right. I forgot they made that change. Right, uh, around the time you joined. I remember you talking about that in board and how you just sort of squeaked by on that one.
Yeah, exactly. It was really kind of just the world's most fortunate timing for me to be able to get into the Air Force.
As a pilot, how did you find your flight training experience in the Forces? Did you have any setbacks or any hiccups? And if you did, how did you.
Get through that landing transitions? I had a little bit of trouble with on the Grobe and then later on the Aurora, going through the training that everybody goes through and then also going through the training that just the Aurora pilots have to go through, I was able to overcome that. And that is a big credit to some of the instructors that existed at the schools at the time. Sometimes with an instructor change, you're able to get somebody able to relay what we refer to as like a how to or their own personal technique. A uh, way to explain it differently to a student, different from the way someone else had told you in the past. Not that the procedure would be any different, but they would be able to help you out, get you through onto the next phase of training and being able to figure out something that uh, worked for you.
You're talking about basically when somebody can sort of without changing how it's done, just explain it in a way that just lands with you and makes sense to the way you think.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. In terms of kind of a broader perspective, I found the training experience to be stressful. I think all students kind of feel that because the big difference, of course between military and civilian training is that you only have a limited number of chances at all times in the military. So if you find yourself going through a rough patch, you really feel kind of like you're on the edge of losing your career at times. Definitely, if you don't feel it yourself at any point, you see peers and friends go through that stressful period. Big things, really, that I found to be a challenge, besides that were similar weather struggles that you see in other like everybody experiences this in their flying training. I would imagine when you're dealing with winter weather or low cloud or things that preclude you being able to accomplish the training you need to do. And then you just have these big gaps between training, which makes it difficult with somebody with low hours trying to hold onto material that they don't have a firm grasp on yet.
Yeah, it's super difficult when you don't get that continuity.
Yeah. So my time as a student in Moose Jaw was easier for me because it was done during the summer, whereas, for example, on the King Air for phase three, multi engine was a little bit more challenging because I might have a week between flights as I'm trying to figure out how to fly a multi engine plane. But overall, I mean, especially the ex military instructors or current military instructors. I was taught by ex Snowbirds F 18 demo pilots, guys who'd gone to Iraq or Afghanistan with helicopters, be they Shinooks, uh, or Griffins search and Rescue, experienced guys with Buffalo, or even like, the pipeline. Instructors at Moosejaw generally have to have a high enough grade for them to have been put into the jet stream that they're able to get you through the military training system because they've all done it themselves.
You mentioned the high level of stress when you went through flight training. Did you have any methods that you use at the time to kind of cope with that or overcome that?
I think basically I ended up building a resilience over time. It was kind of a common thought that I tried to relay to students when I was teaching in Moosejaw that you will fail stuff eventually, without question, whether it's going to be a check flight or a regular flight, whether it's before you're winged or after you're winged. Everybody's going to have a bad day at some point. And you need to build a, uh, resilience to kind of just letting stuff go in your mind, uh, learn from it, but also to be able to just move on and focus on what's ahead of you because the past has kind of happened now. And you just need to study and practice and cheer fly, and do all those things that are going to let you succeed on your next chance, because you're not going to get a huge number of chances, and you need to kind of capitalize on the ones you do have.
That makes sense, though, what you're saying about it being kind of a resilience that you develop over time, especially because back then we weren't receiving the mental performance coaching that the students receive now. So we just sort of had to slowly figure it out in your head, like, accept you're going to make mistakes, accept you're going to fail, accept these things are going to happen, and then learn to get over it, right?
Yeah, exactly. And I would always try and explain to students or first officers now basically, there are going to be lots of times where you have a bad start to a flight, but the flight is going to be eight or 10 hours long. You can't let it sit on your mind that whole time. You have to kind of move on and focus on your job. So it's a skill that I think is pretty critical to build over time.
Yeah, especially when you're a student or an Fo. You don't need to worry about that. You don't need to keep it on your mind because you're going to hear about it in the debrief anyways and then you'll figure it out and why it happened and what you can do next time. Unless it's something that a skill that you're going to use over and over again during the flight, then you might need to talk about it right there. But generally speaking, you can just let it fly by you and worry about it later on.
Yeah.
I think we both asked for it as a first choice as a scheme to get posted together. If I'm remembering correctly, I know how I got hooked on the Aurora, but what got you interested in it?
Well, at the time I had been only really interested in flying a multi engine plane, something big. But I also wanted some of the hands and feet experience. As you remember going on flights with the Tacal guys at 400 Squadron in Borden. It was really kind of exhilarating to see that low level flying that you just really only get in the helicopter and I wanted to try and marry that up with my desire to fly a uh, bigger multi engine plane and that really kind of narrows it down to a handful of platforms for the Canadian Air Force. You're really only looking at the J model, Herc and the Aurora. The Aurora at the time was what I asked for first because I figured I would have a better chance at getting it over the very popular J model at the time. I'm sure if you end up with any uh, prospective two LTS or pilots in training listening, they'll think that's crazy because the Herc J absorbs so many students these days.
But it was a new airframe then, right?
Yeah, it was brand new.
I think things were still moving pretty slow for training. I think people were getting trained down in the state still.
They were, yeah. Uh, or otherwise transitioning to the Canadian training system. So uh it was very popular, very hard to get. I chose something that I figured I'd have a better chance at actually getting being the Aurora, uh, out in Greenwood specifically, partially because the training is out there and partially because, again, asking for Comox was always considered to be a very difficult thing to ask for, so I just didn't ask for it. But yeah, really I was looking for a big multi engine plane that I could throw around and work with a crew and see parts of the world that were far flung and not just domestic Canada type of thing. Uh, harkening back to what I was talking about in the beginning, where a lot of what drove me to be a pilot in the first place is a desire to travel.
Yeah, I know that. For me, it was kind of the same that somebody kind of came in and talked to us about it and they kind of went over all the different stuff that Auroras do and all the places they go, and it just sounded like great variety and yeah, I mean, that turned out to be true. Which actually leads us into this next question really nicely. What does the Aurora do?
Actually, its theoretical replacement plan kind of nails down more or less what it's tasked with these days. It's just referred to as a multi mission aircraft, which really kind of highlights that. It's kind of an all singing, all dancing platform for us and most other nations. We spend our time, of course, doing anti submarine warfare, practicing it for exercises or otherwise doing it in real life, hunting and detecting submarines. We also do surface warfare. The difference, of course, being that you're dealing with a surface fleet like boats you can see on the top of the water versus boats that are under the water. But really kind of the broadest catch all is ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, which is really broad, far reaching concept as far as, like, what that actually constitutes for a Canadian set of tasks. Like, we do counter narcotics. We have the commonly in the news task of Op Kharib that the Navy joins us with, where we go down to Martin Lake, El Salvador, et cetera, and look for boats full of various illegal narcotics, working with the Americans in various other nations. We'll do that domestically with fisheries patrols looking for illegal fishers, looking for polluters. I've done domestic disaster relief twice. Once for Winnipeg floods and once for New Brunswick ice storm, where you're going to be employing us just to try and find brakes in a dam outside of Winnipeg in Manitoba, looking for downed power lines, stranded people on icy roads. We were doing night missions, and with the IR camera, you could see where the brakes and the dikes were right. Because you'd see water flowing through and it would be a different temperature and be picked up on our IR camera.
Uh, very cool.
We, of course, do search and rescue. It's not our primary task, but we do get retast with it often enough. And I have had some real life experience doing that.
Yeah, and then don't forget Arctic sovereignty patrols. Obviously, the ISR work overseas as well with the coalition forces.
Yeah, we've deployed in an overland role numerous times. Uh, spent all of Op impact doing that. It was used similarly, I believe, for Op mobile in Libya and a sort of similar tasking in Afghanistan, between Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. These are all slightly different taskings, different ways to employ the Aurora, but still in an overland imagery type of role.
I think that pretty well covers what we do. Can you quickly outline the upgrade process for pilots on the Aurora?
Yeah, it's fairly similar in some ways to most other planes, but also has some pretty key differences to other multi engine or other Canadian Air Force platforms. We go for typical first officer and then aircraft captain and then patrol captain is what the qualification is still referred to as, uh, often kind of used in common nomenclature, just referred to as a crew commander. So again, like Fo, AC, PC from lowest to highest category. One of the best parts of being an Fo in the Aurora compared to some other platforms is that we're fully mission usable. Like right away. I have a number of peers that their first missions as FOS were overseas in Iraq or various other real life operational deployments. And the only other flying that they'd ever done on the Aurora was as part of the training system. So I'm sure you've talked to some other guys where there's utility Fo on helicopters, which is different from like a Sarfo or you'll have Hornet pilots, for example, that are not capable of going into combat until they go through several other upgrades first. So it is a real nicety for us that you can be an Fo and just hit the ground running on kind of any type of task that they're going to give you. As far as the upgrade process itself, it's fairly arduous and lengthy in that it requires a lot of self study. You basically have to know how to build the plane to get from Fo to AC and be able to kind of reliably diagnose an enormous number of systems to be able to pass your upgrade. There's some navy in there. As far as my experience talking to peers in Moosejaw, the only other platform I believe that has what we refer to as an upgrade board is Maritime Helicopter. And I think that's probably the fact that they're both Navy type of assets. So those of course, as you know, are situations where when you're ready to upgrade from first officer to aircraft captain, you have a number of checks to go through. Simulator ah, check, flight check planning whether you can take the plane from A to B, take it overnight, carry out all the logistics with that stuff. But you also have to sit through typically a couple of hours of kind of questions about scenarios and how systems work and things that basically assess your judgment and interview you for the job of being an aircraft captain. Then you do that process again for being a patrol captain. The difference between AC and PC, of course, being an aircraft captain, you have typically around 16 months, 18 months, uh, at times in the past to get through an upgrade where you're just talking about how the plane flies, how the systems on the airplane work, like hydraulics, power plant, propellers, all that stuff. But, uh, once you get an aircraft captaincy, you're only permitted to take the plane on transits, fly it from one base to another, or otherwise have restrictions on how low you can fly. And then as a patrol captain, or LRPC, that upgrade is all about tactics, and it's about employment of the aircraft in a mission focused type of way, like how do you hunt for submarines, how do you protect ships, how do you employ the camera on counternarcotics type of tasks? And that upgrade allows you to be top category, fully mission capable, fly with a crew and deploy with FOS or ACS underneath you.
Yeah, that's right. And both of those upgrades require an enormous amount of self study, lots of time in the simulator, both the flight SIM and the operational SIM, there are a ton of work, and they're really best done relying on your SME's on the crew. That's your subject matter experts. Like talking to your radar guy to learn radar, which I, uh, think I've said on another episode Kevin Laughin did for me. Thanks, buddy. Talking to the, uh, Taco to learn your tactics outside of the book, talking to your engineers to learn your systems, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, exactly. You really have to rely on the crew for a lot of that stuff. So lrpfo lrpac. LRPC. Long range patrol, first Officer, long range patrol, aircraft captain. Long range patrol captain.
Can you briefly outline the moat, which for listeners is the Maritime Operational Air Crew Training Course, and that's where all the crew members learn to operate on the Aurora.
Yeah, I think it's fairly similar to your average kind of pilot training in terms of the sequence of events. You'll start in Greenwood, uh, at 404 Squadron with ground school just getting you through PowerPoint lectures or practical demonstrations or discussions of systems such as the engine, the propeller, the hydraulics, kind of how the airplane flies and how the systems on the airplane work. Once you go through, uh, kind of a battery of ground school tests, then you'll move on to the simulator phase where you apply it kind of a safe environment. The SIM is located in Greenwood. When you go to the SIM phase, you are joined with the flight engineers and you're going through the practical application of how the plane flies and how the systems work, playing through it in a, uh, safe environment. And then you'll move on to the PT or pilot training phase. Again, just you and the flight engineers going through the practical day to day, how the plane flies, how to land the plane, how to take off, how to do steep turns, 62, all that type of stuff. Practicing loitering the engines. Once you're finished that phase, the flight engineer is operationally capable and goes back to squadron. But that's when you go back to ground school and start going through some of the back end stuff. And by back end, I mean joined by the ASOPs and the Axos.
Axo is Air Combat Systems Officer, which is commonly referred to as a NAV. ASOP is airborne. Electronic. Sensor. Operator.
Yes. So you're joined by them and you're going through how to employ the rest of the aircraft. So you're talking about sensors like radars and sauna buoys and acoustics and how the camera operates. And you're going to employ those in the mission simulator that we also have in Greenwood. And then you're going to start flying as a fully formed training crew still with 404 on the MPT phase.
I think it's maritime procedure. Trainer It's funny you mentioned the mission SIM and, uh, often pilots roll their eyes and kind of dread going in there, but there's really no better place to learn the tactics in real time. And it's a really good tool. And you really realize that when you're going for your upgrade to crew commander. And hopefully you have a crew commander that drives that home to you earlier. So you get better with tactics sooner.
Yeah, exactly. But once you get through the mission simulator, you do your MPT flights, the training flights with the whole crew on board. And when that phase is complete, you're sent back to your squadron to be operational.
Yeah. And that's it. And like you said, from there on, your feet are in the fire. There's not an introductory period. We were both deployed within a few months, less than half a year of finishing moat, six months, which was great. We got a ton of experience. Yeah. You mentioned, uh, loitering an engine, which is something that's kind of unique about the Aurora, and that is loitering or shutting down an engine intentionally while flying. Can you go more into that?
Yeah, it's a tactic that we employ where basically we're going to save fuel by shutting down an engine if we want to stay in one place for quite a long time. So you might wonder if it's going to save fuel, why would your average pilot not just want to loiter an engine all the time for either an Aurora or a different platform? So if you're going to be flying at a low altitude and not having to travel very far or very fast, there are situations where you'd want to shut down one or two engines. Typically numbers one and then number four engines, leaving you with engines number two and three running, or two, three and four running, and you're able to save quite a lot of fuel and stay out for another one, two or three, sometimes more hours. Extending your flights like well into the double digits, doing things like looking for submarines or looking for boats full of drugs. One of the biggest things that actually causes us to have to do a huge amount more training on how some of the aircraft systems works compared to some peers is if you talk to, like, a Hercules H pilot who have the same engines and same propellers more or less as we do. Their upgrade does not require them to learn as much about how the propeller or engines work. I've never had a real explanation as to why, but it's one of my suspicions that it's because we have to shut them down and know how all the various systems that protect them from coming apart on us work. Because we interact with the propellers more than just turning them on at the start of the flight and turning them off when we land.
Yeah, I mean, I've always assumed that basically there's so much increased risk during that time when you're shutting down and restarting engines that it's just that much more important for us to kind of understand what's going on during that time. Sticking with the theme of flight training, where do you think pilots tend to struggle on the Aurora?
I think most pilots, myself included, in times in the past, have just been due to the amount of things going on in terms of what the airplane is doing, what the mission is comprised of, what's happening on the radio, the amount of trades on board, and the amount of mission sets. It's just a lot of stuff to kind of go through some of those things. We have four trades on board, which is more than most other platforms in the Air Force, perhaps the most, but I haven't really ever looked at it. You've got your pilots, your flight engineers, your Axos, and your ASOPs. And then, of course, the ASOPs are split into two different types of ASOPs. You have the acoustic and the non acoustic ASOPs. So kind of five trades, in a way, on board, and getting to know what all their jobs are and how to talk to them and how to employ them when you're a crew commander is a struggle, and it's a lot to know, and it's, uh, quite a lot. In addition to the amount of training you have to do as a pilot to go through your own upgrade, understanding what they do can be quite a challenge. I remember showing up at 405 Squadron and literally had never even seen an ASOP wing before. The one with three lightning bolts on it. Yeah, I had never seen the trade badge before. I didn't know what they were. So you have that process. You have the fact that when you asked about what mission sets, we do, we've got our surveillance with counternarcotics antisubmarine warfare, anti surface warfare, overland operations, and all the other stuff in between, domestic, uh, patrol, et cetera, that it can easily happen where you get tasked to go carry out, uh, a counter narcotics mission. And you haven't done that type of flying in six or eight months.
Or ever.
Yeah, or ever. And you just have to be good at it and remember how to do it. Study it up before you go. Take advantage of the simulators and train for that thing that you're going to be doing. It's quite a handful. In addition to, of course, the fact that you're going to be going all over the world a lot of the time, there are some common spots that you go often enough. Like, uh, if you're on the West Coast, going to Hawaii is a fairly, uh, common spot, so getting in and out of there is simple enough for us. Scotland is another one that you don't have to think super hard about a lot of the time. But there are other times you go somewhere new, like you're trying to fly to Kuwait, or you're landing in Greece, or you're going to presswick England or somewhere new and different that you just have to learn on the fly, or try and dig up some old word document from ten years ago. It's a kind of thing where you need to be familiar with where to look more than necessarily exactly what to know all the time. It's, uh, knowing that that information exists and where to retrieve it quickly is an asset to itself.
So now that you're posted out West, I'd like to know, is there a big difference between flying in the West Coast and the East Coast?
Yeah, there's a huge difference. Some of it is going to be really obvious and other parts of it won't necessarily be so. The obvious difference, of course, is the fact that you're living in a mountainous region out here, whereas Nova Scotia you're not. And there's kind of like pros and cons that come with that. It was kind of eye opening to me. I always assumed that there would be minor differences in terms of weather and scenery, but there's quite a few more things to it than that. Just recently, trying to plan pilot training flights, you might remember in the East Coast, a lot of my mentors would go try and do a variety of different places just for experience. Going to Yarmouth, Halifax, Charlottetown, Frederickton, Moncton, Sydney. Try and find somewhere else. Do a trainer up to Newfoundland. Pop into Stevenville Deer Lake. Anywhere else to see and experience something.
That isn't Greenwood in the Bay of Fundy.
Yeah, exactly. And there are places that you can fly from Comox, but you have a lot fewer options for even just something as simple as trying to do circuits, because Tofino is not going to really be conducive to that.
Why is that?
Ah, tofino is too short for training. Uh, okay, Victoria can be done and Vancouver theoretically can be done, but anything in the Vancouver airspace is extremely busy and it's not unusual to get turned away and told that you can't be there. And ah, at this time, NAV, Canada is going through. Their own staffing difficulties and they have had times lately where they won't allow people to come near the airport at all unless they're going to be going to the airport or departing from it.
Like in terms of they won't let you in just for training or for doing circuits or whatever.
Yeah, and as a vaguely seasoned pilot might know, when you look at the CFS you'll run into, uh, the CFS.
Is the Canadian Flight Supplement, which is basically a giant book full of information for every airport you can fly into in Canada. Yeah.
And you'll run into issues like Calgary. We'll have training restrictions in Pearson, and Vancouver is just another one of those airports that has a bevy of restrictions. Basically a lot of airports around here are either super busy or too short for training. And then you have all the ones tucked into the mountains where you can't reasonably take a, uh, plane just for circuits. So we have some options for doing practice approaches, but either way, kind of the end of it is we don't have as many playground airports that we can go to in the west as we do in the east to improve first officer or other pilot training. The scenery is a big one, of course, the difference between the mountains and the East Coast is pretty stark, but it comes with its caveats as well, where the mountains are a lot harsher to deal with. They're often kind of coated in cloud outside of the bright summer days and subject to a lot of winds that some of the helicopter guys that you surely interview will talk about. The mountain flying training course. They have their own winds that make flying low level and any of the other training we like to do near land a little bit more challenging than it is to go up to, say, Cape Breton or the Bay of Fundy or in the vicinity of Nova Scotia and Charlottetown. The scenery is different, but also restricts but improves your training in some ways in that it makes it more challenging. We're the only ones with a weapon range. There isn't one in the East Coast this time. I don't know if there ever will be, but it exists only in the Georgia Strait. So we're the only ones that have the ability to practice torpedo drops out here and the East Coasters have to come out this way. The types of deployments you do East Coast and West Coast are similar, but we have different common spots. I've only been at 407 Squadron for just over a year at this time and I've already been to Hawai three or four times, whereas the four and a half ish years that I was at 405 Squadron fully trained. I never went to Hawai or even touched the Pacific once. It is kind of luck or not luck at times, depending on what kind of deployments come up for you or exercises. So I talked a little bit about how the terrain makes, uh, training difference, and that also mountain approaches are much more challenging, famously for instrument flying, which we're able to access easily from the West Coast, but much more difficult to get to from the east. But one of the big kind of terrain or environment, I guess you might say differences is actually the amount of snow and cold weather operations that happen in the East Coast, which sounds like a negative in terms of if you want West Coast weather, you're obviously not going to get huge amounts of snow out in the West Coast. But in terms of pilot training value, I was regularly doing deicing procedures or dealing with difficult runway environments. Blowing snow, I remember you had to divert once because of a CRFI of zero.
The CRFI is the Canadian Runway friction index and is a means of measuring and reporting the current conditions of the runway surface. That's a good story, actually. So we were coming back from the Azores and you were doing I was.
Coming back from one of my Lrpac flights from Trenton.
Yeah. So they came in ahead of us, and we knew that there was kind of a storm that was going to hit Greenwood just after we were planning to arrive, so we needed to get there on time. And they landed probably ten minutes ahead of us, and it was, I think, slushy. And they reported that. So the airport sent out their sweeper machines, which for some reason always seemed to, instead of clearing the runway, polish it to an ice rink. And then the tower called us minutes later saying, yeah, uh, the friction index is zero, you can't land. Visibility rapidly decreased and we had to divert for the night to Frederickson. So that was fun. Yeah.
That stuff is just stuff that doesn't happen out in the West Coast, which, if you want to talk about enjoyment of things like surfing and skiing and whatever, yeah, the weather in the West Coast is much more conducive to some of that. But in terms of aviation experience, you definitely get a much more broad spectrum of different and challenging weather generally out in the East Coast, I find, especially, of course, when it comes to winter operations.
Let's shift over to talk a little bit about your time in Kuwait and flying over Iraq. What was it like to deploy there and to fly in that environment?
It's kind of a broad question.
Well, yeah, because you were there four times. Right. So you were there as an Fo, as an AC, and then finally you took a crew there as a crew commander.
Yeah, every experience was different was probably the biggest thing for me, and that I was on the first crew. There were two planes and two crews sent, and I was on the first batch to arrive in October 2014. And it was my crew that finished in november december 2017. I had to come home a month earlier than the rest of my crew, actually, to go teach in Moosejaw. But what that really means is that what it was like flying in and out of Kuwait and into Iraq. Syria was different every trip.
Did you ever have any moments over there that were kind of like holy moments? Uh, I can't remember. Did you get shot at? I think you did on the first tour.
Uh, yeah, and that's kind of what I mean in that none of us had, as far as I'm aware, maybe one or two on the two crews had ever seen gunfire, especially at night. And so you have all these training sessions where you're talking about how to announce to the crew that you're under fire and what kind of your maneuvers might be to deal with that. But first of all, we're Air Force assets, and we haven't really seen that type of thing before. And so you'd see arcing tracers tracer fire from various types of weaponry on the ground. And it looked like it was coming up on an angle and then coming back down. You're sitting there in confusion, looking out the window, like, was that shot at me? Was that shot at someone else? Is that just surface to surface fire? And bullets normally do that. Does artillery do that? Can you have artillery tracers? And these are kind of like laughable questions if somebody's aware of this stuff. But when you're just like a baby pilot or whatever looking out the window at this stuff, you don't know. You don't know what you're looking at. And so even if you are being shot at, or if you're not, you might not necessarily recognize it correctly. It's easy to be confused and concerned. Like, I remember times getting surfaced, air fire reports, and some of them would be canceled later, saying, oh, that was a flare, because you're just seeing light at night, and you don't know if it's a threat or not. So it just kind of makes the situation confusing and mentally challenging. I think, for most of us, I.
Know, like, some crews knew for sure, like, they had seen the service to air fire coming up at them. But, I mean, in all likelihood, we were probably most of us were shot at at some point. You don't know. Sometimes there's so much going on. Yeah.
And there were times that we were employed directly over battles between ISIS and Iraqi, uh, militias or Iraqi ground forces or whatever Kurdish forces happened to be at that location, and you'd be flying overhead of a battle. So it is very hard to tell at times, uh, what you were looking at exactly.
I remember sometimes I would see, like, a new thing shoot up into the air, and I would just kind of go and count to 20. And, uh, I was still there, so I guess there was nothing to worry about.
Yeah, it was a little easier if you were like, seeing something happen directly through your red camera and you see someone looking at you, then you know that they're looking at you. That's a little bit different, but generally, like, looking out the window and seeing this stuff happen at night. And actually, a point worth bringing to the listeners is that we're one of the few Air Force assets that doesn't fly with NVGs and probably never will.
And for the listeners, NVGs are night.
Vision goggles due to the amount of kind of screens we have going on in the cockpit that relay mission information. But it definitely changes what you're looking at night. A lot of the time, you're just looking at darkness.
You've mentioned a few, but what other places does the Aurora, uh, commonly go that you think people would find kind of cool?
Some of the most standard are Hawai. Scotland and Italy are really common stops for us. There used to be others, but they've kind of gone away as the Americans have adopted the P Eight and closed some of their P Three bases. But it's kind of hard to not like Hawai and Scotland. And Italy is super nice in its own way as well. Uh, when you're going to Sicily, really nice scenery and history and everything there. Even those get boring to some people when they've been to Hawai like six or seven times. It sounds like the world's Smallest violin complaining about going to Hawai again. Because of what the Aurora does, it's fairly rare for us to be somewhere like Kuwait and flying over Iraq. Like when Op mobile was going on, they were flying out of Sicily because of the rarity of our overland role. Besides, uh, the latest and Op impact, you can generally rely on it being somewhere coastal.
That's right.
You're going to be places like Alaska, Japan, Guam, Hawai, San Diego, Florida, Azores for Portugal, Italy, UK. In a variety of places. Norway.
Iceland?
Yeah, Iceland. It's a lot of typically quite scenic locations, so it's kind of hard to find places that you truly don't like going and you'll have bad experiences. Like, I heard about crews in a location where the garbage dump is on fire and everyone's getting splitting headaches from the burning rubber. And, uh, they're in a room that has no curtains and it's sunny outside almost the entire time, so it's impossible to sleep, and they're not allowed to go outside the hotel and things like that, where that make the experience less enjoyable. But typically you're able to kind of see a little bit of the local environment and enjoy your trip again, like world's smallest violin type of thing. Like, we're in a hotel, you could complain about how nice the hotel is or isn't. A lot of military members are experiencing significantly worse accommodations than that.
If I'm a new pilot, I'd like you to convince me in 30 seconds or less. Why should I fly the Aurora? What makes it unique and who would it appeal to?
I think it appeals to anybody who wants to work with a large crew because it is the largest crew military asset that we have, typically flying with twelve people, although minimum operational crew is ten. So it really allows you to get out and have a lot of fun both in terms of flying and doing operations, but also have a lot of fun out on the road in Italy or the UK. Or wherever you are with a pretty big group of people that you work with kind of day in, day out. The manual flying is a really positive thing, I think, for the Aurora, one of its best assets, especially in days where a lot of, especially, uh, multi engine planes are highly automated, the Aurora is not. So it allows you to kind of throw the plane around with your own hands, which again, in the multi engine community is quite uncommon.
Yeah. If you enjoy hands and feet flying, the Aurora is the place to be. I think, in the multi engine world. It's great. It's awesome. You're going to be flying at 300ft, you're going to be flying at 60 degree turns at low level over the ocean, all by hand. It's really good for that. Yeah.
And of course, one of its more popular selling points is that you get to stay in one place for a while. It was put pretty well by one of my old Cos, where it's an asset that you forward deploy to a location to operate out of that base for a while. So unlike other multi engine planes, where you'll transit from A to B to C to D and kind of move on as you go, it is an asset that will sit in one location, like Iceland for three weeks or Scotland for two weeks, and you'll be in and out of the same base. Kind of get to live there for a little bit. Um, before you go home.
What is the coolest memory you have from the Aurora?
I think for me, it really comes down to the crew. In some of the trips that I did overseas to Kuwait, I worked with a lot of really good crews over time, and there were some trips where we would rent out, ah, the theater on base in Kuwait once a week and just, we would vote on the four or five best episodes of The Simpsons. We want to see that week and just sit down and enjoy some popcorn and go through some episodes of The Simpsons. And I think some of those trips are my favorite memories. You'd think you might pick like a specific flight or specific deployment or whatever, but I think it's actually hanging out with some of the crew that I was really good friends with and doing stuff like that is what really made some of those trips for me.
Yeah, I remember on our second tour where we were on the same crew, that was such a fun deployment. Like, it was you and me and Stan, and we were all buddies and we had great engineers. It was just a great team. There wasn't a single person on that crew who wasn't amazing.
Yeah, I think one of my like it still makes me laugh to this day when I remember it. I was on my first trip with my crew. To this day, the only song that I've ever bought and I really don't actually know if this qualifies as coolest, but the only song I ever bought on itunes was Shake It Off Sailor Sweat. Because every day, driving from Camp, Canada to our airplane for like two or three days in a row just listening to Superstition Kuwait, it happened that Shake It Off was on. So it became kind of our crew song. So we all bought it, we all had it on our phones, and so every time we were, uh, in the cars hooked up to the bluetooth for the car, we would just have time to definitely listen to Shake It Off and definitely crank the whole time we're going through checkpoints or whatever. And the best part of all of it was that the pilot car is the one that had the most passenger seats available, because there were only three of us in six or eight seats. And so anytime we were flying with passengers, like an intelligence officer or a, uh, visiting Aurora pilot or whatever, they would be subject to Shake It Off.
It's funny, whenever I hear that song now, I think of how you guys used to do that, because I was on the other crew and we had songs we'd put on as well. But specifically shake it off for me is Kuwait. I don't know. I think it always will be.
Yeah.
What is the funniest story you have from the Aurora?
I have a hard time picturing a specific funny story, but I'll definitely give you a recent one where I was flying with actually a guy who taught me clearhead One in Moosejaw when I went to go teach there in 2018. He's a current first officer on the Aurora. Uh, and we're going through kind of some of the nuances of the training evolution that's coming. And we're on a crew trainer corex, a crew Operational Readiness Exercise is what we call it. We're on a corex and there are a couple of emergencies we're allowed to practice airborne, typically ones that require crew cohesion and knowing how to kind of interact with things in a safe way that aren't going to be a risk training. Like you're not going to accidentally shut down an engine or something like that is what I mean. So we were going to be practicing the cabin fire procedures. And it's one where you go to a PA at the start of it, and the pilot announces, crew, you have to go run around the airplane and look for smoke and look for things that are burning or whatever because you've detected a smell or smoke in the cockpit or whatever. Right.
And the reason for that is the Aurora has an immense amount of electronic mission equipment in the back, and the whole plane is full of computers and systems, and it's an older aircraft, it's meticulously maintained, but stuff happens, stuff does overheat. Sometimes things can go wrong. So it's really important for these people to have this drill specifically extremely well practiced.
Yeah. So we're just talking about it in the cockpit between the three or four pilots standing or sitting the seats and the flight engineer kind of like what we're going to say, what we're going to expect, how things are going to be carried out in the plane. And all of a sudden, one of the pilots goes out on the PA system and just, uh, announces, crew, carry out cabin fire procedures without anyone in the back being aware that this is simulation. They immediately fly out of their seats and start running around the plane. We have to corral them back like, no, never mind. It was going to be a practice. You didn't tell anybody? Sorry.
Oh, no. They must have been really scared.
They reacted quickly, which is really nice.
What was your best day on the Aurora?
For me, I think actually similar to my answer to kind of coolest memory or memories from the Aurora, uh, is something I fondly remember doing in Greenwood. And it was pretty rare that you got to do it because you needed to be coming back from the east and you needed VFR weather. But I always loved canceling IFR on the descent just before Cape Split, which is like a provincial park, of course, in the Bay of Fundy, and with the Aurora, you can come down to 200ft. Then you just sneak up behind the cliffs of Cape Split, really enjoy some beautiful Nova Scotia scenery as you come around, and just crank a nice 60 into right at the end of Cape Split, where all the hikers are there to enjoy the view and see this big plane roar out from behind the cliffs. And then you're in the Bay of Fundy and you just pop up into Greenwoods, uh, airspace and request clearance to land. And it was one of the most rewarding, fun ways to kind of come home. Having an airport where you can do a VFR arrival like that, having an airplane that you can do an arrival like that is so fun. I really miss being able to do that kind of thing because you need kind of an airport that has that type of terrain feature around it. But, uh, yeah, I really love doing that.
Yeah, that was always a blast. And it was such a cool opportunity as well for a junior pilot to see the transitions you can do from IFR to VFR, which is instrument flight or visual flight rules, to be able to kind of pop back and forth and do some fun stuff and then go back up and do an approach. It's just really neat to be able to do that. What was your hardest day on the aircraft?
Hardest day, without question for me is the transatlantic, uh, search and rescue that I got to do. You ended up being kind of my transit guy in the end for that one. Yeah, it was a pretty wild trip.
Yeah, that's right. I'm a side character in this story.
Yeah. So I hadn't been a crew commander for very long, and I got, uh, put on call to do a search and rescue that was some big sailing race from Europe to North America. And I suppose this probably would have been 2017 or so. And basically a huge number of ships sailboats, I believe, had ended up caught in a storm in the middle of the Atlantic. And it was kind of like your typical worst case scenario that you brief and talk about your entire Aurora, uh, career. A situation where you're dealing with you having to spend as much time as far away from base as possible until you have only as much gas as you need left to go home, and you're just way out there in the middle of the ocean. Like, I remember being basically equidistant between St. John's and Lodges Lizors, and just being out there in the middle of the night. It's obviously terrible weather because it's well, it's a search and rescue. So these guys aren't in trouble because it's a sunny day and they're floating along on glassy waters. They're in trouble because it's a crazy storm. And these guys have, like I remember coming up to talk to one of the guys in the ships on the radio, and he said that his windows were stove in, and he was, like, trying to block them up with cushions to prevent water coming in. And this is one of those situations where you're loitering engines, you're shutting them down to save fuel. And basically, what had already happened for me to get there is I'd flown from Greenwood to St. John's, which is a two hour flight. St. John's, Newfoundland, and a, uh, Hercules crew had just come back and they were showing me cell phone footage of what the sea state was like and what the weather was kind of like out there. And then we fueled and went out there. So that was two hour flight. And then we ended up flying a 12.2 mission. So the whole day was 14.2 flying hours with a 23 and a half hour crew day, which we have various layers of permission required to grant that. But, yeah, uh, what happened is we stayed way out there in the middle of the ocean trying to vector ships to go rescue these sailboats and Hercules came out to replace us and flew back to St. John's. And then what would happen when we got there is our Ils failed. It's kind of a lengthy explanation, but in a nutshell, neither glideslope was coming in and only one of the localizers on our two navigation systems on the plane. So we had to get away from the storm and ended up having to divert to Gander and our Ils failed there too.
For the listeners, the Ils is the instrument landing system and it's basically what allows pilots to land in, uh, very poor weather invisibility.
Yeah, it's a precision system that allows you to get in really terrible weather. And we ended up having to land as like a storm was rapidly approaching. Pressure falling rapidly is the common point that would come up in the weather reports and had to land on a GPS approach in Gander. But because of the, uh, failed approaches in St. John's and the failed Ils in Gander, it was basically like land in Gander you're not going to have enough fuel to go anywhere else. And it was already a 23 hours day, huge amount of flying hours long, long mission diverting in terrible weather. And that was a very challenging day. Made worse by the fact that when we landed in Gander, most of the hotels and everything were booked for like, I think it was a visiting hockey tournament or something. So myself and the navigator slept in the airport in kind of a crew apartment set up and some of the guys slept in a local motel and some of the other ones went to, I think, like an RV park or something. We were just scattered to wherever there was a bed to be in. Thankfully, everybody got rescued happily from that search and rescue. The Hercules kind of like tidied it up while the Aurora was in bed with us in Gander, you had gone out to St. John's to take our plane. It's like, sorry, the plane is in Gander?
Yeah. So I had been flown out on another Aurora with my crew and we were the follow on crew. So basically if the search had to keep going, it would have if they had been able to get back into St. John's, we would have taken the plane, refueled it, done the checks and taken off into that and gone and done probably another 14 hours on scene. But when they didn't get in, obviously there was no plane for us. So I got a call in the middle of the night basically saying, uh, they can't get in. So the next day I think the search basically had wrapped up by the morning. So what they did was they sent a Cormorant from Gander to fly us up. So we got to go up into Cormorant, which was really cool. They took us around an iceberg and stuff, so we got to do a little sightseeing, and then we got there, packed up Davis's insanely exhausted crew, and flew home.
Yeah, it's kind of hard for me to have a day harder than that. I think it was just due to sheer exhaustion and the number of challenges and all that, it was very hard day.
You couldn't come up with more challenges than if that had been a simulator scenario. I forgot about that. What a day. It's hard to imagine that you could top that experience on that. Sartrip but what is the most rewarding experience you've ever had in the RCAF?
I think actually teaching in Mooseja is probably it. I think anytime you're getting some sort of tangible job satisfaction, it's kind of like a ready reward. And when you're in the teaching environment in a place like Mooseja Airportage, you're interacting with the students who are motivated to fly and succeed and get their pilot wings every day. And you can see this experience every day. So it's not like being on an operational squadron where, for example, if you're involved in search and rescue, it's very tangible. If, uh, guy in a sailboat gets saved or you're rescued somebody out of the mountains or any of those types of things, especially in Aurora, those don't happen very often. It's operational flights where you're able to tangibly get the reward are, um, a lot less common compared to when you're working at a school and you're seeing these students succeed kind of day in, day out, and understand how to be better aviators and better pilots. And I found that to be an incredibly rewarding, fun experience. Talking to them at the mess or eating popcorn with them in the ready rooms and things like that. Seeing these students progress, um, to be better pilots is a really rewarding experience for me.
Yeah. For anyone who's listening, who is a future hopeful student pilot in the Air Force. You hear it right here, how much the instructors care. And that's a common theme when I interview people who have instructed in the Air Force that they really love to watch you folks succeed and grow. So that's great to hear.
Some of my most fun days are when you really get to kind of sit back and realize how rare it is, what you're doing, and the stuff that you see even as simple as, like, most people don't get. To fly and look out the window for fun and take the plane where they want to take the plane, even just in terms of like, I'm going to turn left or right right now. The ability to see whales and remote islands and waterfalls that people don't get to see, and submarines and crazy airplanes that are incredibly rare to see, and how many people to go to Guam from North America. These are all kind of really rare experiences, I think, for most people. And I think that those are really kind of like high job. Satisfaction days for me.
And it's such an important thing to remember to do, too, is to take that satisfaction out of your day, to sort of sit back and say, wow, I can't believe I just got to do XYZ. Because sometimes you're working so hard to succeed or to do it well. It's really easy to forget about the joy of what you're doing. And there's so much joy to be had in flying these, like, incredible machines and seeing these rare sights. What do you think is the most important thing you do to keep yourself ready for your job?
I think one of the most important aspects to kind of remember all the time is that you need to keep studying because there's just too much stuff to know. Some of the things that I talked about before about how it can be a challenge for people going through their upgrades with the amount of stuff that they have to know in terms of number of trades on board, who needs to be paying attention to what this mission is and how to do it, is that it can easily be that. Even if you're a top category, you're a crew, uh, commander of the Aurora, uh, and you're going to do a crew trainer. But today's crew trainer, you're going to practice overland surveillance. Like, well, I haven't done overland surveillance maybe in nine or ten months because I've been focusing on antisubmarine warfare or I've been deployed to this place over here. And just recognizing that you need to get back in the books and kind of refresh knowledge all the time. It's just kind of an attitude of being humble where you can yeah, it's like being humble about you can't know everything and you're not going to remember everything. You need to be able to kind of refresh what you need to know before you go out and do your job pretty much every time.
What do you think makes a good pilot?
I think probably the most important aspect is someone who can apply tools they know to new situations, because you are not going to encounter things that are always familiar. You may have trained crossing the ocean, going to Scotland before, and then you get your aircraft captaincy, and the first mission you're signed out on is to go to Italy or to go across the Pacific somewhere or go down south to the States.
It's always something you haven't seen. Somehow your first taskings are always something you didn't do before.
Yeah, and it's an important skill. Like when I was teaching in Boost Job, there's a phase for the phase three students who are going off to become either instructors or fighter pilots, typically called comp or composite phase. And it's literally only things that they've ever seen before, just kind of in jumbled or combined order. You're going to do a little bit of clearhood, you're going to do a little bit of navigation, and you're going to do a little bit of instrument flying and maybe the plans will change a little bit. But it's all stuff they know, and it is a phase that most find to be fairly challenging. And on the surface, you wouldn't think that it would be because it's all stuff they know, but just putting it in a new context makes it very difficult for students. And that's something that you have to kind of carry through the rest of your career. And to me, again, what makes a good pilot is somebody who can recognize a new situation. It's an approach into a place you've never been before. It's mountainous, and you've only been used to flying in the prairies. It's the Pacific, it's not the Atlantic, and you've never been west before. It's always going to be relatable to something you already know and the tools that you already have. And being able to apply those tools to a new situation is an incredibly important skill.
Yeah, absolutely. Part of the goal of this show is to give new pilots actionable advice that they can use to succeed in their career as pilots. So what would your advice be to a new pilot?
I'd have, like, a couple of things. Uh, I'll keep it pretty succinct. One of the most important things to recognize is that everyone fails. You're going to fail something at some point. Some of the strongest students that I ever flew with would completely crush phase two and then end up on phase three. And end up with phase three on the Harvard, I should say geared towards jet pilots. Or again. Instructors and run into a lot of struggles there as they're trying to move beyond things that are fairly cookie cutter into things that are requiring a broad picture. Or maybe you'll never fail anything through all of pilot training. And you'll get your wings. And then you're going to start to struggle on your upgrade on the Aurora or whatever, uh, platform you're doing as you try and fly a big plane for the first time, um, or deploy to the Middle East or Europe or whatever for the first time. You're going to struggle at some point. It's inevitable. Even if you're a really strong pilot, it's going to happen. You need to continue to study all the time for the reasons I talked about earlier, where the orders will change and you're having to juggle a lot of knowledge. It's kind of impossible to remember it all all the time. You have to recognize generally that someone else is going to be better than you. They're going to be better maybe in general or maybe just at specific things. And you need to be able to kind of learn from everybody else's experience and take that on for yourself. Just kind of sponge up knowledge where you can. And it might not even necessarily be another pilot. Coming from an Aurora community, some of the guys who are I would expect to be really good at. Tactics like the Axos are really important people that you need to lean on through your training or ASOPs of their radar knowledge. If you're going to talk about going through pilot training, that can be both instructors and other students, because you want to learn from things that they did well or things that they didn't do well, so that you can either emulate things that were success that they did or avoid kind of a pitfall that they made.
I feel like that sort of like all these things that keep studying, learn from everyone around you. It sort of blends in with that comment you had about being humble and being kind of open to the fact that you are going to fail. You are going to need to study a lot. You are going to be learning from everyone around you.
Yeah, it's kind of a weird job in that, uh, you'd think that a pilot typically would be fairly solitary because you're at most two required people in the plane. Being a captain, in the First Officer, sometimes even single pilot, if you're a jet pilot or something. But it's very much community driven. You're learning from other people's experiences and you are always going to be able to learn from someone else. Someone has more experience than you somewhere. And it's important to kind of recognize that all the time that you're not necessarily going to be the best at everything and absorb what you can from other people to try and be the best person that you can be. But to me, the most dangerous pilot is somebody who is arrogant and then also tends to blame other things for their mistakes. It's probably your fault. Most flight safety incidents are pilot error. It's usually going to be a mistake someone made somewhere.
Yeah, it's usually pilot error or some form of human error, whether it's during flying or during maintenance or whatever. That's just life. People make mistakes. Yeah.
So just recognizing that you're not the best all the time and you're going to make mistakes and other people are going to offer lots of valuable information for you, it's a pretty important thing to learn early. Otherwise you're going to really struggle through pilot training.
Okay, well, that, uh, does it for this episode. Thank you, Davis, for your time and for coming on the show. It's been really great to catch up and hear your perspectives on all this stuff.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I've got a lot of really positive experiences in the Aurora. It's been a really fun community to be, uh, a part of. I think I've learned an awful lot.
Okay, that's going to wrap up our episode with Davis all about the Aurora. For the next episode, we'll be sitting down with my friend Corey O'Neill, and we'll be chatting about the Ch 148 Cyclone. Um, so if you've ever wondered what it's like to fly maritime helicopter or spend six months on a ship, now's your chance to find out. Do you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard on this episode? Or would you or someone you know make a great guest for the show? Reach out to us at thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com or at podpilotproject on all social media. We're on track again this month to have our highest listenership yet, so I want to thank you, the listeners, for that and remind you to help us out with the big three that's like and follow 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. See you.