E99 O Canada!

[00:00:19] Speaker A: Friday. Happy Friday. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Dude, behind the mic again. [00:00:21] Speaker A: Yes. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Been a while, man. [00:00:22] Speaker A: It has been. [00:00:23] Speaker B: Dude. [00:00:24] Speaker A: Oh, God. What have we been doing? [00:00:26] Speaker B: Gosh, so much. But I'm excited for this episode. Yeah, I'm pumped. It's gonna be a good one. But first, let's explain our hiatus a bit, man. Where you been? You've been traveling a little bit, haven't you? [00:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we parted ways for a little bit. Went to Detroit. Oh, what a cool place. [00:00:44] Speaker B: Motor City. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Yeah. It was awesome, man. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:00:46] Speaker A: Great Lakes are awesome. [00:00:48] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:00:48] Speaker A: I ended up thinking I would have liked to be stationed there at some point, you know? [00:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Some. Some Great Lakes Search and Rescue a little different, too. [00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Pretty, like, overall, fairly flat up there. [00:01:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:01] Speaker A: But, you know, big Great Lakes. Lake Sinclair. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:05] Speaker A: Also not considered a great lake, but I think that's their primary training grounds. That was cool. [00:01:11] Speaker B: You did a cool Major League Baseball flyover, too. [00:01:14] Speaker A: Yep. Tigers. [00:01:15] Speaker B: Detroit Tigers. Yeah. [00:01:16] Speaker A: It's like a. A playoff game. Yeah. So it was a, you know, packed stadium, and it was cool, man. The timing was good. [00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it was cool to be a part of that. [00:01:29] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:01:29] Speaker A: What have you been up to, man? [00:01:31] Speaker B: Traveling too, man. Got to go out to Hawaii, which is. It's still. It's a fake place is what. [00:01:37] Speaker A: You know, I've never been there, so it's still fake to me. [00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Got an airplane. Nine hours later, I was in paradise. That was. That was crazy. The flying out there is incredible. The unit's great. They're busy. Really cool. 65 mission. Even cooler C130 mission. They get to go to, like, Midway, Fiji, Australia. It was pretty wild. [00:02:02] Speaker A: Damn. [00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:03] Speaker A: They get to stretch their legs a little bit. [00:02:04] Speaker B: They really do. [00:02:05] Speaker A: That's pretty cool. [00:02:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And then. And then I went over to Corpus Christi. That was a cool place, man. Probably had some of the best Mexican food I've had in a long time. Nice, like, insane barbecue, too. [00:02:19] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that was cool. Flying a little flatter there. [00:02:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:24] Speaker B: Not quite Hawaii, but we were flying down the beach, and I got. There was a. I mean, I put the brakes on in the helicopter because I saw a bonafide Texas longhorn just, like, strolling down the beach. [00:02:35] Speaker A: No kidding. [00:02:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it was pretty cool. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Down the beach. [00:02:37] Speaker B: On the beach. [00:02:37] Speaker A: That's pretty wild. [00:02:38] Speaker B: He was just enjoying himself. [00:02:39] Speaker A: I heard you can drive and ride dirt bikes on the beach. [00:02:42] Speaker B: Oh, dude, people are ripping it out there. Really cool. [00:02:45] Speaker A: And did you see any. Was there any crazy border stuff going on down there? [00:02:48] Speaker B: No, I think a little. Little further away. From the border than I. You would see it, but I know they were doing the border mission for a while there, But I got you units in great shape. Newest, I guess, second newest now that Ventura came online. But hangar in the Coast Guard. Second hangar and building. Yeah, dude. Neat as a pin. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Really? [00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah. That building is clean. [00:03:07] Speaker A: I don't know what new Coast Guard buildings look like. [00:03:09] Speaker B: It was really weird, man. It was like. It was. Just had that new building smell all the way through. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Heard you have to have a. Is it true you have to have, like a badge to get through the doors and stuff? [00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah, they hooked us up. They. Well, they just, like, code your CAT card. [00:03:22] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:03:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty cool. [00:03:24] Speaker D: That's cool. [00:03:24] Speaker A: I had no idea. Yeah, I heard about that. [00:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:26] Speaker A: And then, of course, when. When the system goes down, you just be locked out of work. [00:03:30] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:03:30] Speaker B: Then you just go home. You just go home for the day and do barbecue. Texas barbecue. [00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:33] Speaker B: I'm assuming. [00:03:34] Speaker A: Did you. Did you see the Selena Museum? [00:03:37] Speaker B: I did not. [00:03:38] Speaker A: Oh, man. [00:03:38] Speaker B: What is that? [00:03:40] Speaker A: Selena? [00:03:41] Speaker B: What's the singer? Oh, Celine Dion. [00:03:43] Speaker A: No, Selena. Ilos Dinos. Yeah. [00:03:48] Speaker B: Dude, that was. Is that a museum out there? [00:03:50] Speaker A: I think. I think that's where she's from. [00:03:52] Speaker B: No way, man. [00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. [00:03:54] Speaker B: It was cool. It's. Dude, some. It's just fun to travel, man. [00:03:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:58] Speaker B: And then I have a huge flight suit Friday, Top tip. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Okay. [00:04:03] Speaker B: If you're coming up for the dunker, do yourself a favor and go to Norfolk, Virginia. Those guys out there put on a great dunker. And it was. I went there kicking and screaming, and I left like, hey, that was actually some good training. [00:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Speaking of that, I actually went up there a couple months ago. Same facility. [00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. You did the dunker up there, too. [00:04:24] Speaker A: And luckily got in pretty quickly. I know there's like a waiting list or backlog or something like that, but Easy travels and. Dude, I was sitting there. I think it might be, like, the last dunker that I do for my Coast Guard career. And I was sitting there watching, like, everybody load up into the tube and then watch them put on their blindfolds and then comes down and flips over, and I was like, that's wild, dude. Like, if there was a normal person that wasn't involved in aviation and they were watching that. [00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:54] Speaker A: They'd be like, what are you doing? [00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:55] Speaker A: This is some crazy. [00:04:57] Speaker B: My dad, when I told him I was going out there, he was like. He's like, hey, can I, like, just pay to go do that? He's like, that sounds fun. And I was like, oh. I was like, dude, just open it up on the weekends, man. Make some extra cash for morale. [00:05:09] Speaker A: You probably could. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Probably could. [00:05:10] Speaker A: Yeah, man. That is. That is a crazy thing, though. [00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:13] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:05:14] Speaker A: You know, and. And people get really nervous about the dunker too. [00:05:17] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. Then. And that's again, why Norfolk? They like. There were a couple people that were nervous. They pulled them aside, did some extra work with them. We were in and out quick. It was great, man. I got. I got no complaints about that facility and the people who run it there. [00:05:29] Speaker A: If you could get there, man, if you could, that could be a one day trip. If you drive for sure. Flying. Yeah. You'd have to get a really, really early morning flight. But, dude, you're out of there by like, what, just afternoon? [00:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Because. Yeah, dude, flights of your Friday. Top tip. [00:05:42] Speaker A: Shout out to Norfolk. [00:05:45] Speaker B: Is it Naval aviation nor folk or Norfolk. [00:05:48] Speaker A: Norfolk. [00:05:48] Speaker B: Norfolk. Yeah. [00:05:49] Speaker A: I just don't like to say it that way. Yeah, yeah. Shout out to those guys. [00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, yeah, we got a man, I'm pumped about this episode that we're going to rip tonight. [00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, me too, man. [00:06:00] Speaker B: I was immediately corrected. So we have a Coast Guard pilot who does an exchange program out in Canada. I called it the Canadian Coast Guard. It is not. It is the Royal Canadian Air Force. [00:06:10] Speaker A: Who corrected you? [00:06:11] Speaker B: He did. [00:06:12] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I texted him be like, oh, I'm really excited for the Coast Guard Canada episode. He's like, royal Canadian Air Force. So we figured that out early on. [00:06:19] Speaker A: Okay. [00:06:19] Speaker B: Thankfully. But we got him another pilot, a SAR tech and one of their flight engineers. That's going to. Come on. [00:06:26] Speaker A: Okay. [00:06:27] Speaker B: I think we're just going to drink beer and talk about search and rescue in the Pacific Northwest, man. [00:06:32] Speaker A: Dude, super pumped, man. Yeah, looking forward to it. Now, the. The Canadians do have a Coast Guard. [00:06:37] Speaker B: They do, but they don't fly aircraft. [00:06:39] Speaker A: Maybe. [00:06:39] Speaker B: I don't know. Well, you know, we're probably going to figure it all out now. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Let's figure it out. [00:06:42] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it, man. All right, let's call these guys up. [00:06:44] Speaker A: Here we go. [00:06:44] Speaker B: Oh, Canada. [00:06:50] Speaker A: Our home and native land True patriot love in all our songs. [00:07:05] Speaker B: Wes, what's up, dude? It's Max. We're excited for this podcast. Thanks for coming on. You got. You got Ian, Simon and Nick there with you too. [00:07:14] Speaker D: They're here with me. [00:07:15] Speaker B: Sweet. Well, let's kick this off for our listeners who don't know. This is Wes Jones on the phone right now. He's a U.S. coast Guard pilot over on exchange with the world Canadian Air Force on the West Coast. Wes, you want to tell us a bit about yourself and your story and your background? [00:07:35] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. Wes Jones joined the Coast Guard 2007, enlisted reservist and was on the Great Lakes, went to OCS 2011, right away to flight school and then Left Flight School. 2013, spent five years in North Bend, Oregon. It's my first tour flying the Dolphin and then got my first pick out of North Bend, went to Kodiak for four years in all patients. So I deployed on ships in the bearing a bunch of times. Loved that tour. And then I got my dream tour. [00:08:06] Speaker E: Which I heard about right when I. [00:08:07] Speaker C: Got to Kodiak, which was flying the Cormorant on Vancouver island and beautiful British Columbia. [00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd like to say we're doing this podcast because I want people to hear about this program, but really I'm just sucking up to whoever's on here so I can come do what you do. [00:08:22] Speaker C: Nice. Yeah, good start. [00:08:24] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. We're pumped to have you on. And then you have some of your fellow Royal Canadian Air Force folks with us. Is that correct too? [00:08:34] Speaker E: Oh, yeah, sure, dude. [00:08:35] Speaker B: Sweet. Ian? Ian, you there? [00:08:37] Speaker F: Yeah. Hey, guys, how's it going? [00:08:39] Speaker B: What's up, man? Thanks a lot for coming on. You want to tell us a bit about yourself? [00:08:42] Speaker F: Yeah. So I joined the air Force in 2010, kind of halfway through university, finished up my degree and then went to flight school in the Prairies. So Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Went through all three of our phases there. Ended up on kilos that took about two years. And then came out to Comox in 2015, right on the Cormorant, which was a super fortunate first posting. And been flying the Cormorant ever since. And then again, super lucky. I picked up a reservist job, still flying about three years ago, which is kind of like the golden ticket up here. So I'll be here on the west coast for the foreseeable future flying the Cormorant. [00:09:21] Speaker A: Very cool. [00:09:22] Speaker B: That's awesome, dude. Hey, can you tell us a bit about your flight school, man? I'm kind of curious what you guys go through up there. [00:09:29] Speaker F: Yeah, so I think it's pretty similar to yours. We start off on the two seater, the Grove 120, probably up to 20, 25 hours on that. They call it kind of a selection course, a little bit, I think, similar to what you guys doing at Cessna. And then from there we go on to the Harvard, similar to your Texan for about 75 hours. Yeah, I can like they're definitely a fire lead in kind of program for that phase two. And then after phase two, you either selected kilos, fighters or multi and then bounce the me back back to Manitoba, blew the 206 and then the 412. And then from there you select on what. What airframe you head out to. [00:10:15] Speaker A: Wow, that's a damn near mirror of what we do. Almost. [00:10:18] Speaker B: Yep. And then so is the jump from the. To the. So you said you. You flew the. [00:10:24] Speaker A: The 206. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Yeah. 412 is that was it. 206. You're like your. Your initial helicopter experience and the 412 was like instruments and stuff? [00:10:32] Speaker F: Yeah, that's it. So, yeah, mostly instrument flying in the 412. A little bit of clear hood just to get down most of our navies. Like when I went through was all the 206. But it sounds like they're. They're catching on to the. The new world with. With iPad navigation out there. [00:10:50] Speaker B: That's bad. So are you. So the Cormorant postings that you guys get, is that mostly search and rescue or is there any like a combat phase or deployable phase or. You tell us a bit. [00:11:04] Speaker F: Is purely search and rescue. [00:11:05] Speaker B: Cool. [00:11:06] Speaker F: So we got our base here on Vancouver island, and then there's two on the east coast where they fly to Cormorants. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Where, where. Where are they? [00:11:13] Speaker F: On the east coast to get gander in Newfoundland and then one in Greenwood, Nova Scotia. [00:11:19] Speaker B: Nice. [00:11:20] Speaker A: That's cool. [00:11:20] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. Wow. Awesome. Well, yeah, that. That is very similar. Mm, yeah. [00:11:24] Speaker F: Yeah. Like I said, almost a mirror you guys go through. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Sweet. So it'll be perfect when I show up there. That's awesome. [00:11:30] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you. Which job do you want? Do you want west coast or east coast? [00:11:34] Speaker B: West coast for sure. [00:11:35] Speaker A: Oh, west coast. Okay. [00:11:36] Speaker B: Beautiful out there. Sweet. Well, thanks. Thanks. Ian. Simon, you with us? [00:11:41] Speaker E: Yeah, I'm right here. [00:11:42] Speaker B: What's up, brother? Thanks for coming on, man. You might tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. [00:11:46] Speaker E: Yeah, my story's a little bit long story. So I joined in 97 as a combat engineer in the Canadian Army. Did that for seven years, then got out for a year, got back in into the Air Force because that's what I wanted. Right. Yeah, I wanted hotels, not tents. So from there I got in as a avionics technician and did that for about seven years until I was able to transfer over as a flight engineer, which is similar to a flight mechanic. [00:12:15] Speaker A: Okay. [00:12:15] Speaker E: And yeah, so in 2013, went through my training, got selected to cormorant and I started on the east coast in Greenwood, did about two years stint there and then they were run out of people on the west coast and I was forced to come over here and I've been suffering ever since for the past eight and a half years. [00:12:36] Speaker B: Funny. That's awesome, man. Cool. So when, so you're, you're training, I'm just trying to like compare it to the Coast Guard here. So for some understanding. So you go through your initial technical training, is it put on by the Royal Canadian Air Force? Are you guys farmed out? [00:12:52] Speaker D: It is. There's people that kind of. [00:12:55] Speaker E: There's two routes to go in. You could go in Civic street where you start at technical college, but then you joined. But I went through straight to the Royal Canadian Air Force, did all my training through them. And the flight engineer trade, you can't come into that trade from the street. So you need a technical background because of the airworthiness of it. [00:13:17] Speaker B: Okay. [00:13:17] Speaker E: And there's a prerequisite. So when I went in, I needed six years experience in trade with a release, which is maintenance release and C release, which is an aircraft release. [00:13:27] Speaker D: Qualified. [00:13:28] Speaker B: Oh, right on. So when you're like downrange or something, you guys break. So how much maintenance are you doing back home at home? [00:13:33] Speaker E: Home plate right now, not so much more these days. But whenever we go on the road, there's the daily maintenance that we need to do and then the odd inspection that would come up on the road. So the maintenance side here, they try to give us at least an aircraft with 10 plus flying hours so that if we do break on the road most of the times like we don't need to do the inspection necessarily on the road, unless like we're launched on a very long mission, then it's going to come up and we're going to. [00:14:06] Speaker D: Have to do it. [00:14:06] Speaker B: Gotcha. And how many, how many helicopters do you have on the west coast and if you know on the east coast too, since you were over there. [00:14:14] Speaker E: There are four helicopters in Comox right now with the one being in maintenance. So there's three flyers. And with that we're also. We also have the school here for the cormorant itself. [00:14:29] Speaker B: Oh, right on. Okay. [00:14:30] Speaker E: We need two lines of task minimum per day, so one for the school and one for the squadron. The east coast, I believe. Gander. They have two flyers and Greenwood has. [00:14:40] Speaker D: Two flyers as well. [00:14:42] Speaker E: They might have a third in maintenance over there. And it's all okay. It depends. And there's two in heavy maintenance over in Halifax, man. [00:14:49] Speaker A: So if you guys get launched out on a long search and rescue case, you can expect to be gone for a while and maybe not have a lot of coverage back home if like the other aircraft are down, huh? [00:15:00] Speaker E: Yeah, pretty much. So we'll try to get as much done as possible. But if it's something like anything hydraulic, where we don't have parts, we have to call the base and get an MRP and they'll send technicians over with the parts to do the most of the work. But we'll try to get as much preparatory stuff done for them. Very cool. [00:15:21] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. Wow, what a. What a long, really cool career. Are you staring the barrel of retirement? You sticking around? [00:15:30] Speaker E: I'm still sticking around. I'm already pensionable right now, but my contract ends in 2030 and I mean since it's not too hard on the body, I might as well just stick it through and work for the pension. I mean, I still have a mortgage to pay. [00:15:44] Speaker B: Amen, brother. Absolutely Sweet, man. Well, thanks for that. Cool. Nick, you up there? [00:15:51] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm here. How's it going guys? [00:15:52] Speaker B: What's up, man? I'll just let the Knicks talk. You, you can ask him. Nick. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Den. Tacos right here, man. [00:15:58] Speaker B: Tacos? How many? 10 tacos. [00:16:03] Speaker A: What's up, Nick? Tell us about yourself, man. [00:16:05] Speaker D: Yeah, so I joined the forces in 2006 in the army as a comp specialist. So a radio operator. My first posting was to Edmonton. I did a tour In Afghanistan in 2009, 2011, I got posted to work with special operations in Ottawa as a radio operator. [00:16:30] Speaker A: Okay. [00:16:31] Speaker D: And in 2014 I heard about this gig to be a search and rescue technician. Sounded like a lot of fun. Applied for the selection process, got through all that, did our year long course and first posting as a search and rescue technician was in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is one of our fixed wing only search and rescue squadrons in Manitoba there. [00:16:57] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:16:58] Speaker D: Yeah. After that I got posted to Gander Newfoundland, which is a rotary ring only search and rescue squadron we have here in Canada on the east coast. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Okay. [00:17:07] Speaker D: And in 2022 I finally got what I asked for and they posted me to Comox. We're kind of working on both working with the rotor wing guys and the fixed wing guys. [00:17:16] Speaker A: That's cool. So each, each job is what, a couple years before they decide they want to transfer you to the next one? [00:17:22] Speaker D: So our postings are like on average, I say three to five years depending okay. So it really all depends. You can always. There's no like set rule. Our Gander Newfoundland posting is in Canada. Here they consider that a semi isolated posting. So that one has a three year limit before they, they put you in and they leave unless you ask to extend. [00:17:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:46] Speaker D: But all of our other units, it's really up to promotions, career manager positions, all the standard military stuff. [00:17:52] Speaker A: Oh yeah, you promote, they probably want to move you out of there if. [00:17:55] Speaker D: I'm going to move you out there or somebody else has to come in and you know, they, that puzzle they try to fill there at the top. [00:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm really curious about your sartech school. The only thing I can lean on that might be comparable is the, our rescue swimmer school, which is not necessarily one year like in total training. It might be like a year and a half from the time you enter the training until the time you're qualified. But like we're strictly water focused. I understand you guys do water parachutes and a bunch of other cool stuff. Can you talk about that a little bit? [00:18:30] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So we are, in a lot of ways we have similarities to your swimmers. We also have a lot of similarities to your pararescue jumpers, at least for their domestic side of their operations. [00:18:42] Speaker A: Okay. [00:18:43] Speaker D: Where our focus as SAR techs or search and rescue technicians is really here in Canada, unlike we belong to the SAR system. So we're rarely ever deployed overseas or anything like that. But yeah, our training, we have a fixed wing and a rotary ring asset. So parachuting is a big part for the fixed wing side of things. So a lot of parachuting, survival skills. And then on the rotary ring side, you know, we have our mountain rescue skills, our diving capabilities. We're all paramedic trained. We're all trained by the same institution that trains paramedics here in British Columbia, trains us for our medical skills. So we have those qualifications. Very cool. We got a lot of skill sets. So like upkeep. [00:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna feel a little. [00:19:28] Speaker D: Bit like a jack of all trades master at none at some time. You're constantly trying to be proficient in multiple things. But it's fun, it's challenging and that's, that's kind of what draws a lot of people to our occupation is those people who enjoy that type of stuff. [00:19:41] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. What's, what was the attrition rate or what is the attrition rate for that program right now? [00:19:46] Speaker D: Do you know they get hundreds of applications a year. They choose 40 people for 40 of the best files to Go on our selection, and then it depends year to year, but we normally get about 10 some years, as low as nine some years, about 12 to finish the selection, about a quarter. And then our attrition rate for the selection is pretty high. Our attrition rate on course is a bit lower than that you'll probably. You normally have on a course of 12, maybe two, maybe three people fail off the course. [00:20:15] Speaker A: Okay. [00:20:16] Speaker D: But our selection process has shown to be fairly effective because we have a pretty good patch rate once you get on the course. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:20:22] Speaker A: That's smart. Yeah. Maybe that's where we are a little bit different, too. Like, if you want to be a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, like, you're going to get the opportunity. And I think that that might be why our attrition rate is a little bit higher. Someone might say 50% or 75%, depending on who you talk to. But, yeah, I think that probably makes sense to have, like, a good screening process prior to entering the program. [00:20:45] Speaker B: And where. Where's your schoolhouse for the Sartech stuff? [00:20:48] Speaker D: Our search and rescue school is actually here in Comox. That was the first time I've ever come to Comox and found out it existed and fell in love with it the moment I came here. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I'd imagine it's probably because of all the stuff you have to do, the mountainous terrain and the. The heavy seas. It's probably a good place to have it. [00:21:04] Speaker D: But surprisingly, very little of our training is done in Comox. Like. Like we do the medical phase out of the school, but then, like, when we go do our. For example, our mountain rescue phase, we do that out in the Canadian Rockies in Jasper. Oh, gosh. [00:21:19] Speaker B: Jeez, that sounds. [00:21:21] Speaker D: Yeah, same thing. The. The. The winter mountain stuff is out of Lake Ruiz. The parachuting is kind of a combination. Most of it's out of Eloy, Arizona, at the drop zone over there. Then we come back to Comox to focus on what we call the confined area, parachuting, where you jump into essentially little openings and trees and stuff like that. [00:21:37] Speaker B: That's so cool. [00:21:38] Speaker A: Do you guys. Do you guys do firefighting, too? If. [00:21:41] Speaker D: No. [00:21:41] Speaker A: Okay. [00:21:42] Speaker C: No. [00:21:42] Speaker D: No, we don't do far. I don't know why that's a different job here. That's the civilian job. They call those smoke jumpers. [00:21:47] Speaker A: Okay, gotcha. For some reason, I was like, man, these guys probably put out fires, too. [00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. Really, really cool, man. That. That is awesome. Thanks for that. If you want to pass the talk and stick back to Wes, Absolutely. Dude, Wes, what do you think man? That is like this is, this is sounds very similar, but sounds like these guys are doing some pretty badass stuff. [00:22:13] Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's pretty mind blowing. And even every day like I flew five and a half hours today and I, when I'm not flying or I'm just looking outside on a transit or whatever, I just can't believe I get to have this opportunity to be here. I fly with these guys and everyone else. The squadron, all the other pilots in the air crew are, they're so good at what they do. Part of that is I'll make a lot of comparisons to the Coast Guard just because it is very different. There's only one mission set, one mission set. It's SAR and within that it's maritime and aeronautical and then occasionally humanitarian SAR when we get asked by the province to go do some humanitarian missions inland. So your, your only focus every single day you come in to fly is sar. And that could be water work, that could be boat wasting, that could be high altitude mountain landings where you got to use your power management skills which they send you to be an AT on the west coast. You have to go to a month long civilian school in most of it's in the rockies to get 4 weeks and 25 hours a day. 5 hours MBG of just high altitude power management training. That's cool. And then we're like, we're doing, I mean confined area hoists within trees that are 200, 250ft tall. It, it's just a whole new set of skills that I grew up my aviation career on the west coast up in Alaska, flying around in the mountains. And I'd gone to hats in 2016 or 17 and that was great. I used a lot of that foundation to build my skills later on. But then this like mountain flying school here specifically, it's like hats on steroids just absolutely blows your mind all these new techniques you can use and apply. And then if you want I can just talk about the actual, the cormorant training here in Comox. [00:23:59] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean this is naturally going to go to how she fly. I'm really. Because you send me pictures of the school bus that you fly. And I'll tell you what man, I don't think there's a more different looking helicopter than the frickin dolphin right there. [00:24:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. [00:24:13] Speaker C: So it's a, it's a AW101 variant that was so British designed, Italian modified or British designed, Italian made, Canadian modified. That's my Best way to describe it. So it's the perfect star platform for Canada in the sense that this aircraft is capable of flying through severe icing. 60 millimeters, so 6 centimeters of icing. Holy cow, heavy turbulence. I mean, we take it up. We can take it all the way up to the Arctic ifr, like the biggest way to transit, especially in the winter here, is ifr. So while. While other platforms are really great for what they do to be able to take this school bus, because that's what it is. 74ft long, 64ft wide, it's a 30. Everything's in kilos. So I'll do my best to transition to pounds. It's like £33,000 of school bus that you can take IFR up to the Arctic on a mission with super long legs, fit dozens of people in the back. And all the gear that the Arctics need to do their missions, whether it's the mountain rescue, scuba, scuba equipment, para equipment, extra litters. I mean, it is robust. [00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah. You guys carry two litters? I think if I recall, there's a helicopter that flew down from. To Cape Cod from one of the east coast bases and they had like two litters. That's why you could stand up inside of it. [00:25:37] Speaker C: I mean, so much gear. We only ingress and egress, really, from the ramp in the back. I mean, it's. It's a lot. So the pilot training itself, I don't really have many expectations. I talked to my predecessor, Amanda Harris, when I got the job, and she's like, it's fire hose. It's different. She was a prior dolphin pilot, just like myself. But the training's here in Comox. So you do the move and it's 2e ground school kind of fire hose with three other pilots. Some one of them was right out of flight. Two of them right out of flight training. One was a prior L412. So Griffin guy, two weeks of ground school. So an exam every two days. Once that's done, then you start your contact phase, which just basically two flights where you're just doing pattern work. And then right after that you're out in the mountain starting to do combined area landing. [00:26:26] Speaker F: Wow. [00:26:26] Speaker A: Good Lord. [00:26:27] Speaker C: And let me just address confined area landings here and how it differs from what we have in the coast guard. I think 3710 says 25ft from the rotors to need a wing walker. Right? That something sounds about right. Yeah. Combined area landings here from the 10 to 2 o'clock for safe training practices. 10 to 2 o'clock. 10ft from the blades, 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock, 20ft from the blades and 5ft underneath the blades. [00:26:52] Speaker A: Wow. [00:26:52] Speaker C: And that's just. And that's for training. So you do your day confined areas. You start these big zones and you get your sight picture. And the, the whole recce phase here was mind blowing for me. Like walking through the A wall. We have something we call this eight S's where we go size, shape, slope, surface, shoot stuff and everything else you want to add. And it's a real quick brief. The power management for power available, power required to get in and out has already been calculated on the charts by the FE in the back. And it's very nice, choreographed team effort. [00:27:24] Speaker D: Wow. [00:27:25] Speaker C: To quickly get through all your power numbers and how you're going to get in the spot as a team. And I say as a team because your flight engineers hang out flight engineer door. Your startech team leads on the left side of a bubble window. Team members might be right side of the bubble or with the ramp lowered, sitting in the back to look at the tail. So all quadrants of the aircraft are covered. So you have this huge mammoth of an aircraft that you can get into these areas where the trees are 10ft off the front and 20ft off the back. And I really. They start off in the initial training of these big areas and you get closer and closer and closer and they want you to get to your limit so you can see actually how tight you can get. And the most, the most profound part of the training was my first night flight. It was like Justin Van Wagoner, who's a really great fe and Stuart Irvine is one of our most senior cormorant pilots actually in the world now after one of the other guys retired. And we get into the spot, it's really tight. You come into like 200ft over the trees and you go straight down and you land and put the collective down to zero. And then you look right, he's like, well, what do you think about those obstacles? Am I showing my spotlight? And there's this like 40 foot rock face 20ft from the blades at 3 o'clock. And I just couldn't believe it. I thought, is this safe? Is this like. No, this is the stuff you're gonna have to do here. And sure enough, I've had multiple missions where you're landing at night, some weird austere location 200 miles north of Comox to pick up some logger who rolled this truck down a logging embankment and random place that no one's ever landed before probably. [00:29:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:05] Speaker C: And that's what we're doing. You're coming these high hover at 200ft and you're getting con down to the bottom and the both the Startex and the SE and the other pilot. Other seat are telling you where the obstacles are and you're just going down under goggles in these spots and it's, it's mind blowing because I'd never done anything like that. [00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, we're looking at pictures right now. So we have your newsletter in front. [00:29:26] Speaker B: Of us, which is, which is great by the way. Man, that was really well written and, and probably touch on some of those points here a little bit later. [00:29:31] Speaker A: But yeah, but awesome pictures by the way. And Max actually showed me some of the pictures that you sent him. I think maybe today earlier. But I'm looking at this picture and the Description is a 180 foot vertical descent to a confined area LZ and you have this awesome waterfall in the background with a massive rock face. Dude, it's so cool, man. These pictures are wild. Mostly because I don't think I've ever seen a Coast Guard helicopter look like that unless. [00:29:57] Speaker B: Oh dude, you didn't do that flying around Mobile, Alabama today. [00:29:59] Speaker A: Oh wait, no, take that back. [00:30:01] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:30:02] Speaker B: Gosh, dude, what a. It's going to be hard to come back, man. [00:30:06] Speaker F: Yeah. [00:30:06] Speaker A: So do yourself a favor, just stay on the west coast. [00:30:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:11] Speaker B: Dude, that is, that is awesome. What is the power management like compared to the dolphin? [00:30:18] Speaker C: Well, I mean Dolphin, you've got 100 all day, right? [00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:21] Speaker C: They're putting more power output than the main gearbox can handle. So your power available is that. That's what you got. You got 100% in this. We've done. We will do mountain landings 10,000ft and. But if the temperature is too high, you're not going to, you're either going to over torque the engines or tit out. So our fe, when we do our power management checks, checking our pressure, altitude, wind and temperature. And he's running the charts in the back to see what your power available is that day. So we have, we have three, three engines, right? GE T7 hundreds are just like the H60 engines. Very, very similar. Okay. So three very powerful engines. So he'll run the numbers in the back and if we have a close torque margin. So we're going to go do a power available check to see if we can get into the zone. It's all stuff that we're taught in the mountain flying school and that we hone those Skills back here to see if we get to a spot. Oftentimes in the summer when it's hot, we're not going to land at that speed. But in the winter when temperatures are zero or below, like, we can go do that. But our power available is going to all dependent on the temperatures and pressure altitudes that we're at. [00:31:31] Speaker B: Okay. [00:31:32] Speaker C: So not every spot is the same. One of our safe training practices, it's a safe oei, so when we are doing hoisting ops to land, we need to have safe OEI or a rejectable area. Rejectable area means if we lose an engine and hover, we're not safe. Oh, yeah, I'll talk about that in a second. If we're not safe. [00:31:49] Speaker E: Oh, yeah. [00:31:50] Speaker C: We need to be able to settle down in the ground effect and safely land the aircraft in that spot just in case we lose an engine. Losing an engine, a dolphin, you're gonna, you're gonna delta 15 or whatever, you need to get out of there. For our safe training practices like this afternoon, we didn't have a rejectable area, but we were safe oei. What that means is when with one engine out, I can still safely hover this aircraft without moving an inch. With two engines, it's. It's a pretty incredible thing. And there's probably not many aircraft that can have that kind of performance capability. So, like Today we're at 2,000ft doing a confined area hoist in between some trees, and we had safe OEI with a huge, huge power margin buffer. So if we lost an engine there, I could just sit there, clean up the hoist, get our guys, and safely go out. [00:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. [00:32:32] Speaker B: That. So. So, Simon, I want to. I want to get your perspective on this, man. I think that's the biggest difference from our flight mechanics and your flight engineers is you guys are actually running numbers. [00:32:45] Speaker D: Yep. [00:32:45] Speaker B: What kind of training do you guys get for that specific task? And because that, I mean, that seems like, you know, and from my perspective, that seems like upfront stuff. So it's really cool that you guys are doing that and running those numbers in back. [00:32:59] Speaker E: Yeah. I mean, it's a shared task. So to prevent pilots from being oversaturated, we run the checklist and we run the power charts in the back. And when guys go through the otf, which is our operational training flight school, they're taught how to read charts and read power numbers. And that's one thing that's really harped on big, is to make sure that we abide by the safe training Practices. So guys have to learn how to read charts in order to provide the accurate numbers so that we can actually do the training safely. And guys just can't just like wing out numbers left and right. Because if something does happen and we do lose an engine, well, we're going down. [00:33:42] Speaker D: Right. [00:33:42] Speaker E: And if we didn't have. And that's how we plan our altitude. So when we're running our checklists to do either a land horse or a confined area, we're making plans in case of an emergency and those numbers come into play. So if we're not safe, oei so that's one engine inoperable, then we know, okay, if we're doing a confined, we're gonna be able to reject down there. We might not want to fly away. So if we're working over water, then we'll plan. [00:34:14] Speaker D: Okay. [00:34:14] Speaker E: If we, if we lose an engine, we might have to fly away. So we're are already ready. The pilots are ready to do whatever they need. And if I'm poisoning in the back and the startech is on the way out, then they know what's going to happen to they, they kind of know. Okay, if he's more than halfway out, then I'll try to push him out or, and he might have to cut his cape coil or he's coming in and he's going to fly for a ride until he can safely make it back into the machine. [00:34:41] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. And, and you know, Wes, sorry you guys are passing the phone back and forth, but having done the work up front yourself in the 65, how much situational awareness and how much like how many, you know, how much essay does this give you with them working numbers in the back? Because I think that's awesome. [00:35:01] Speaker C: Oh, it's, it's, it's so nice. The only checklist that I'm responsible for is the start check. That can be done. It's optional. Be done to be done by memory or have your checklist out in front of you to do the starts and then every other checklist, whether it's taxi startech, part one, part two, all the other checks the FE in the back can. We'll read and go over so I don't have to be heads down. Both pilots can be up focusing on the task at hand. The only thing I'm responsible for is giving pressure altitude to temperature, winds and my calculated hog, which I can do in 45 seconds or less up front. And then he's going to run the charts and tell me my numbers. And then while we're doing the brief, which he's giving me the items that I need to cite for the briefs. I know exactly what's going to happen based on the charts that he gave me. It's so nice to have the checklist read in the back and not have a checklist sitting in my lap while we're doing especially high cast. Like. [00:35:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:54] Speaker C: Evolutions that are high cast saturation. [00:35:56] Speaker B: That is awesome. So how many times do you confirm the wheels are down? [00:36:02] Speaker C: Once. [00:36:02] Speaker B: Okay, cool. [00:36:05] Speaker F: The flight engineers, from where they sit, they can. They'll call the free landing check, but then they'll also look to see that we're not lying to them. They can see three green from. From their seat in the back. [00:36:13] Speaker B: I'm sure Wes has told you we like to. Everybody gets a little. Oh, Wheels confirmed down. Wheels confirmed down. Wheels confirmed down. [00:36:18] Speaker A: We take them down a lot. [00:36:20] Speaker C: I think it was nine times confirmed down before I left. I think you guys changed it to three. [00:36:24] Speaker B: Yeah, we're. Yeah, we're back down to three now, I guess, right? In theory. [00:36:28] Speaker A: I guess so. [00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Wheels down before touchdown and flight mech and pilot monitoring. [00:36:33] Speaker A: Well, we had a couple wheels up landings, I think, historically, so they wanted to. [00:36:38] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:36:39] Speaker A: Quadrupled check that we would have them down. [00:36:43] Speaker B: That's wild. Wow. Very cool. Great little, like, essay tool, man. I couldn't imagine how much that helps those checklists being done and back. Because, you know, sometimes I feel like on search and rescue cases, when you're out there in the middle of night over the water and you're like, heads down, doing checklists, like, constantly looking back up, like, that's pretty. Pretty spooky, dude. [00:37:05] Speaker A: It makes me think maybe we should just pass the trifold to the flight mech or the BA and be like. [00:37:09] Speaker B: Hey, man, I've done that in the past. And every time that I have, man, I've been like, this is awesome. [00:37:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, outside of single pilot flying, flying. [00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:16] Speaker A: Oh, really? Yeah. [00:37:17] Speaker B: Just to help out a little bit. [00:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And mean, we passed the red, red book back when we have an emergency. Yeah, that's really cool. So, Ian, you want to come fly dolphins now? After we've talked about all this stuff? [00:37:27] Speaker F: I don't know. I think I've been spoiled with just the ability to get up and walk the back. I need to go to the bathroom. [00:37:36] Speaker C: Do you guys. [00:37:38] Speaker B: You guys have a bathroom? [00:37:39] Speaker C: The strategic napping section of your 3710 for fixed wing guys applies to us in this aircraft as well. [00:37:46] Speaker D: Stop it. [00:37:48] Speaker C: We're able to walk on, you know, four or five or hour transits. We can walk to the back, take our best off for a sec to stretch. Use. Use the head if you need to. Which is not something. It's not like a actual. Everybody use your imagination. [00:38:03] Speaker B: But everybody's thinking this and I'm just gonna ask it. Can you take a number two in the head or is that frowned upon? [00:38:11] Speaker C: I think anyone who has enough creativity or imagination could. But no, it's generally not used for that. Simon Note. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Heck ye. [00:38:28] Speaker E: Okay, guys would have emergencies and we had the plastic bin and then when I moved over the west coast, they had just this tied bag and one guy had the food poisoning, so he had to run. [00:38:38] Speaker A: Oh no. [00:38:40] Speaker E: Trying to squat and not call it his own ship. So that's pretty fun. [00:38:45] Speaker D: We need a bit of plastic gin. [00:38:46] Speaker F: In the back now. [00:38:48] Speaker D: Oh no, that's contribution to West Coast. [00:38:52] Speaker C: That's what. [00:38:52] Speaker B: What we do in the 65. If you wait two hours, you'll be able to use the bathroom because we're not flying for much longer than that. Cool. Well, yeah, I want to. I want to also get to the. Probably the most, you know, exciting part about this whole thing. I kind of want to do a round robin and. And Wes, we'll go. You'll go last man. Because I kind of want you to compare some of the cases that you've had to some stuff in the Coast Guard. But I kind of want to go around Rob and just kind of very, you know, give us a. Give us the most impressive case that you've had and walk us through it and just kind of explain it. As Kenny Ingram would say, soup to nuts, man. Soup to nuts on this case. So. [00:39:31] Speaker C: All right, yeah, I'll pass the phone over to Ian, who I'll just say is the most humble guy you've ever met. He's our chief Jack here at the squadron. Super experienced, excellent pilot. When I. When he says he's a reservist, he's a full time reservist. He's got one of those gigs. Oh my God. As much as everyone else. [00:39:47] Speaker B: Sweet. So Ian knows. Ian knows a guy to just get me up there as a full time reservist. Canadian Air Force, sick. [00:39:55] Speaker C: I had. I had to buy some beer for Ian and tell him to come over and tell the story so he'll tell this one. [00:39:59] Speaker B: Oh, I'm excited. Let's go. [00:40:01] Speaker F: Yeah. So, yeah, big, big difference with pointed out is our mountain stuff. So about. About a year ago last January, we had some arctic outflow weather There. And so unseasonably cold weather from B.C. so Comar's to give you an idea of like it snows here once or twice a year and usually it clears up by lunch. But it was down like minus 10 here and then minus Celsius, sorry then minus 40 Celsius which I think equals minus 40 Fahrenheit in the interior. So we're on night shift and we actually just got back from a tasking. We've been stood down for about 11pm and I got a call for assistance for some hikers out in the Rockies there close to the Alberta border, close to 300 miles away from Comox. They'd gotten stranded on their way hiking up to a backcountry hut. It sounded like they were ill prepared and our ground search and rescue, the volunteer organization local to them, couldn't get there just due to avalanche risk. So we headed out, popped up to 10,000. It was definitely some odd, odd weather that I hadn't really seen before. [00:41:19] Speaker B: Sorry, sorry, let me interrupt. What's the service ceiling? What's, what's your limit for altitude? [00:41:24] Speaker F: 10,000. [00:41:25] Speaker B: Okay, so you guys are operating right at the limit. [00:41:27] Speaker F: Yeah, gotcha. And what's interesting about that night is with the, with those cold temperatures, temperature correction, we were at 10,000 and seeing 9,000 peaks above us left and right, which was definitely, yeah, new, new interesting concept that we had really experienced on the west coast myself. [00:41:46] Speaker B: And then, sorry, real real quick again because this is FAS to me what kind of deicing capabilities you guys have. [00:41:53] Speaker F: So we got engine anti, all the blades are heated so rotor D ice and like Wes was saying we can take up to 16 mils, about 2, 2 inches of ice there on any, any leading surface. [00:42:06] Speaker B: Dude, the 65 would be upside down at that point. [00:42:09] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:42:10] Speaker F: And as long as you're not taking it too, too quickly there with the accretion, you're not actually going to notice the torque change. So that's, that's yeah, 60 mils. They tested up to 100 plus mils and barely any torque change. We've obviously got our procedures if it sticks really quickly, but nothing too crazy. [00:42:35] Speaker A: What a beast. [00:42:37] Speaker F: At those temperatures. We weren't picking up anything that night. [00:42:39] Speaker B: Okay. [00:42:40] Speaker F: We were VFR kind of over the top the whole way out. So we came across a lake that we tried to let down on, hoping there was some better visibility, but dropped down with no success. And for a little bit we were kind of jumping shoreline to shoreline. Well, we made a plan to pop back up, kept on trucking fortunately, weather cleared up and we got to the site and yeah, the good thing about hoisting at 6,000ft when it's minus 40 is you got really good engines. So we were able to do it, but came across the valley and like, the fortunate thing with these guys for all the decisions they made that got into the situation is they, they left their inreach on and they stayed put to where they initially called. So they were in their exact position with headlamps and we picked them up on the first pass up the valley. [00:43:35] Speaker A: Very nice. [00:43:37] Speaker F: Yeah. So flight engineers ran the numbers, determined it wasn't going to be too, too bad. Rolled in the hoist and put our STARTEX in. And then when our flight engineer put the Startex in, there was some confusion about why the StarTechs weren't going anywhere or doing anything on the ground. [00:43:55] Speaker B: Sorry. And you said two. So you guys, you guys roll with two star techs typically. [00:43:59] Speaker F: Yeah, yeah. Normal component to startech. The team lead, the more experienced them and generally a team member who's anywhere in their first one to three, four years at the startech. So put them both in and realize after they were stuck in about three feet of snow, which explained why the hikers had gotten stranded. [00:44:21] Speaker B: Oh wow. [00:44:22] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:44:23] Speaker F: So initially, so they got the, got them in and we were kind of low on fuel at that point. I remember our flight engineer asked how much fuel we got and kind of calculated, okay, you got two minutes per hoist. So about a hundred foot hoist and our flight engine. I'll give a shout out. Colin Nepar was fairly new at the time, but he just, he crushed it. He was the reason we were able to get everyone out on that first tank of gas. So yeah, about a hundred, 120 foot hoist, which startex were here to kind of explain how little their hands function toward the end of that. But got everyone but out. Everyone out. And then it was about a half hour transit up to Prince George, which is kind of the main hub for central to northern B.C. where we've taken these guys. Rolled out and there was definitely lowest gas I've seen. We talked about landing in fields kind of spot in farmers fields with lights on in case we needed to take shelter. But the star gods were looking upon us and we picked up a tailwind. [00:45:32] Speaker B: Nice. [00:45:33] Speaker F: Yeah. Which always, always helps. So rolled up and had about 10 minutes of gas call for the pre landing check. And we've got an unsafe here malfunction. [00:45:43] Speaker B: Oh no. Hold on. Sorry, sorry. Let me, let me interrupt because this is Just this is great, like content here. What. So you talked about you guys were super low on gas. So in the Coast Guard aviation here in the US we talk about warranted risk and like, what kind of things were. Were really the risks we're willing to accept for certain things like saving a human life or whatever. So when you guys are talking about low on gas here, like, were you guys operating within the realm of like your guys's standard operating procedures? [00:46:13] Speaker F: We were. I mean, it was about a half hour transit and with the transit from where we hoist them up to the airfield, it was all vfr. So we had landing options at all, at all times. We wouldn't have gotten to the airfield. Yeah, I don't think there was any extra risk on this case. There is absolutely. Aircraft commander, they're free to make their call. And like, they're. The first line in our order is say that, you know, to stay preserved human life rules can be broken in our order. That's one of the very first caveat. So generally. Yeah, but in this case, I think the risk level, other than us landing in a field with it being minus 40, there's no additional risk to the aircraft and running out of gas. [00:47:01] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, sweet. So unsafe gear malfunction. Go. [00:47:05] Speaker F: Yeah, malfunction. And I was with first officer who was getting close to upgraded aircraft commander. And I remember he called for the checklist and the flight engineer response was a pretty long checklist with 10 minutes of flying to go for gas. So we quickly recycled it and again, Star Gods wrote that night and it came down the next time. I think the reaction, the reaction from the crew at that point was less fear and more just okay, what else is happening after a five and a half hour leg? [00:47:39] Speaker B: Because that's all. That's all hydraulically actuated, I'm assuming, right? Your gear. [00:47:43] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:47:43] Speaker B: So the checklist is probably going over different hydraulic malfunctions and we have something similar. And yeah, the gear. The gear malfunction emergency is pretty lengthy. [00:47:53] Speaker F: Yeah, that's one of our lengthiest yellow page items there. But yeah, gear came down and landed at 5:30am and went to. Yeah, went to get gas in the fuel trunk. Fuel truck pump was frozen, so we ended up overnighting over. Dang. That day. Yeah. Spent some time. Prince George. [00:48:18] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:48:19] Speaker F: Success. I don't know if we save lives. We definitely saved some digits, some hands. [00:48:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a solid one. [00:48:26] Speaker B: That's a great. That's a great case, man. [00:48:27] Speaker A: So when you said minus 40 degrees at altitude, that's In Celsius. [00:48:33] Speaker F: I think it's the same. I think it's Celsius, Fahrenheit. That's where they meet. [00:48:36] Speaker B: They. They meet at negative 40 Celsius and Fahrenheit. [00:48:39] Speaker A: Oh, they do. [00:48:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the, it's the. I stop. Yeah, don't ask me to explain it because I'm really not sure how that works. [00:48:46] Speaker A: I had no idea. [00:48:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. There you go. [00:48:48] Speaker A: That's really cold. [00:48:49] Speaker B: That's very cold. [00:48:50] Speaker A: That's all I know. [00:48:50] Speaker F: Yeah, very memorable. [00:48:52] Speaker B: Gosh, that's a really cool case, man. That warranted risk stuff. It's fun. Like different countries, different services, but same mission. We have a lot of similarities. [00:49:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say there's a lot of parallels there. It seems like. [00:49:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I was in the aircraft with you. I felt it. [00:49:07] Speaker A: You were taking a dump in the back. [00:49:09] Speaker B: Exactly. Dude, that's awesome, man. And then so just to. Just a couple more questions here, like. So yeah, in one calendar month, how many duties are you standing? And is it 24 hour duties or like how do you guys break that down? [00:49:24] Speaker F: No. So I think that's the one thing Wes can maybe agree with us is how we stand it. We're Monday to Friday kind of 8am to 4pm, we're RP 30 minutes and then anything outside of that is RP2. So for example, like Wes and I are going on call this weekend. We'll go on call Friday at 4 until Monday at 6am but we'll both be at our respective homes or somewhere in the vicinity of the base. [00:49:49] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:49:50] Speaker F: So we call, we call it a two hour response, but generally I think our average is for the rotary wing side. We're up before one hour. Everyone's pretty good with respecting that and getting airborne. [00:50:03] Speaker B: So you're Monday to Friday and Friday to Monday. [00:50:07] Speaker F: Monday to Friday you got a day shift. We call it standby. Okay. And then every evening during the weekdays you gotta. We call it Flash. Don't ask me why it's called Flash. We've been called Flash. But you guys know. No idea. Yeah, and there'll be a two hour response from home as well. And then week, week nights, most weeknights, Monday through Thursday we'll have a trainer as well. So you'll be on call, you'll come in for your night flight and if nothing's brewing, you'll finish your night flight and head home. [00:50:38] Speaker A: It's really not bad. [00:50:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not bad. So you don't sleep in some dirty old duty bed. That's been warmed up by the person before you. [00:50:44] Speaker F: Yeah, I think the work life balance, like, everyone can really appreciate that. I know there's been talks of us kind of tightening that up, but I just don't think we have the manning in any of our sections right now. [00:50:56] Speaker A: I was going to ask that too. Now, is this. Has it always been this way or is this in response to, like, manpower shortages? [00:51:04] Speaker F: I think it's always been this way. Okay. Yeah. [00:51:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. [00:51:11] Speaker E: About 15 years ago and more, they used to have two crews. So you'd have the training crew and the standby crew. So a day standby crew would still go out flying and you'd have a training crew flying during the day. And for the night, the standby crew or the slash crew would remain at home and there'd be a night training crew flying in the nights. But then we just ran out of people because no one wants to join. And then I'll join doing a workaround and that we're at what we can now because people have been talking about standing up training crews, but we just don't have enough people. [00:51:48] Speaker B: Okay. Okay, cool. Sweet. All right, I think that's all the questions I got for you, Ian Simon. I want to hear. I want to hear a case. Man. [00:51:58] Speaker E: Wow us for me. Sure. I can talk about one. So I was back in Nova Scotia back then, and they'll relate to just how much room we have inside the machine. We got cast to a car that flipped on an island with. So it was a teenager driving the car with three other minors. They flipped the car into a ditch. So we got there, we had three reds and one yellow. So the color is the. Is how. Like how they categorize the medical severity of the medical injuries of the patients. [00:52:38] Speaker B: Okay. [00:52:40] Speaker E: And so I had four people in stretchers in the machines with one nurse and one mom with. And we departed with three startechs as well from the wing. [00:52:53] Speaker B: That way we already knew if you put all that in the 65, the wheels would be completely out to the side and it would just be absolutely destroyed. That is. Oh, yeah, that is wild. [00:53:06] Speaker E: We had one person on the stretcher, another on the stretcher on the floor parallel to it, one behind the stretcher on the floor, and then one up against the cabinet in between the flight engineer seat and the forward cabinet. And then you had three start techs, plus a nurse working on the four patients. [00:53:25] Speaker A: I had incredible. [00:53:26] Speaker E: The mom on the front right hand seat, you know, in total disrepair. And I had no room in the backside to Be in the front. So I was just like managing helicopter stuff with the pilots up front and then trying to take care of the mom at the same time, which was kind of hard and definitely out of my comfort zone too. [00:53:47] Speaker B: Simon, do you have any medical training? Does. Do you guys get any? [00:53:50] Speaker E: No. Besides first aid? That's all I have. [00:53:53] Speaker B: That's. I mean, so is that. Is that an annual requirement or like, how, like, what is your first aid experience? [00:53:59] Speaker E: For us, it's a three year requirement. So it goes from anything from like bandaging, broken bones, strokes, heart attacks, kind of like same first day that if you find somebody on the street that you can help them. And that's the level that I have. And like most pilots, they have the same level of care as well. Only the startechs are more advanced qualified than we are. But at least so much I could do. [00:54:25] Speaker B: At least you know the language, though. That's the awesome thing again, that we don't. We don't get in the Coast Guard. Our rescue swimmers are the only basically medically trained personnel in the helicopter. [00:54:34] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. And then so we're pretty full. So we're flying our way back to Halifax and we're gonna land downtown at one of the navy yards in the parking lot. And it's that day. It was kind of particular, all the planes flying into Halifax to the airport, which is about, I want to say, 15 miles west of the city. They're all flying over the city to make it to the airport port. And we're talking to tower trying to clear into the city. And they were telling us to do a circuit. But our. Our moniker was Rescue was the rescue call sign. [00:55:14] Speaker D: So we did. [00:55:15] Speaker E: We didn't want to turn around because we had some patients that needed a urgent care. So by talking to tower, getting them to know it, it was. It blew my mind because you could see all the planes that were spaced like about four or five miles in between, and I could see like maybe five planes. And then they turned around a couple of planes and they just went in the circuit to open an airspace so that we could fly into town and then land. So that was. That was pretty cool to see from my point of view. [00:55:44] Speaker A: That is cool. When you guys go out on these search and rescue cases, do you change your call sign? [00:55:50] Speaker E: Yeah. So right here we're called Snake for the squadron, but if we get a mission, we're called Rescue. [00:55:57] Speaker B: Okay, so whether we're Rescue Snake or just rescue. [00:56:00] Speaker E: No, just rescue. So today we start the day at Snake904. And then we get tasked and we'll become Rescue904. [00:56:07] Speaker A: So it'd be cool if you guys are Rescue. [00:56:08] Speaker B: Snake would be sweet. [00:56:11] Speaker A: Or Snake Rescue. [00:56:12] Speaker B: Rescue. [00:56:13] Speaker A: Oh, shit, we're in the Amazon now. [00:56:15] Speaker B: It's a different mission. [00:56:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:56:18] Speaker E: I don't want to confuse too many people by having too many names, so keep it simple. [00:56:22] Speaker B: So when you got cleared into town, is that because you guys are going to hospital paddle? [00:56:25] Speaker E: Yeah, because if we landed over at the. At the airport, it'd be too long for the ambulance ride. [00:56:32] Speaker D: So we were closer to the. [00:56:34] Speaker E: To the city downtown, and we basically landed in a parking lot in the shipyard right downtown in upper city. And four ambulances from two different hospitals just came in. And then we loaded up the patients with the Startex and the nurse, and then they all just dispersed into town. So we just shut down and went over to the local rescue call sign, call center and just waited for Startex to come back. And then they started to trickle back two, three hours later from taxis after they've handed off their patients. [00:57:08] Speaker A: Wow. [00:57:08] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:57:09] Speaker E: Yeah, it was a good night. [00:57:10] Speaker B: Holy cow. [00:57:10] Speaker A: That's a good one. [00:57:11] Speaker B: Yeah, because I guess they want to continue because they're paramedics, so they want to continue care. Yeah, but for us, exactly. Our higher level of care is the ambulance, because we pass them off to usually paramedics. Usually. Yeah. [00:57:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And these guys are probably better at doing a proper handoff with, like, the medical people. [00:57:28] Speaker B: Right. [00:57:28] Speaker A: Where we. We're kind of like the flatbed Toyota pickup. We, like, load up our folks and take them to the hospital and say, okay, here, you got. You got a person. Yeah, here's their chief complaint and maybe some vital signs. [00:57:41] Speaker C: Yep. [00:57:41] Speaker E: You know, typically that's what the sartic do. They get in the ambulance to do a proper handover and then they get off. But these kids need more urgent care, so they just got loaded out of the ambulance, and the ambulances were just basically taxi drivers. [00:57:55] Speaker A: Oh. So the work in route with the. With the ambulance. That's cool. [00:58:00] Speaker B: Really cool, man. [00:58:01] Speaker A: Nice. [00:58:02] Speaker B: Very cool. That's. That's a really. That's a really neat case. And then. So how many duties do you stand a month? [00:58:10] Speaker E: I typically fly. I would say about 10. Yeah. 10 to 12 times, maybe a dozen times a month. So it varies between day standbys and night flashes. And with the odd weekend call out. And sometimes, like, you just don't get called on the weekend. If you do that, you can get called for a long time. [00:58:30] Speaker B: Sweet. So. And then you're looking about how much flight time per flight? [00:58:35] Speaker E: A typical day is five hours and a typical night is about two and a half hours. [00:58:39] Speaker B: Nice. [00:58:40] Speaker E: Yeah, I average between like 25 to 30 hours on a normal month. But then you know, you got to add time off course loadings and courses. So sometimes like I fall to like maybe a 10 hour month and some months I got a 40 hour month. [00:58:58] Speaker B: Nice. Yeah, sweet. That's awesome. Ian, I should ask this question to you. What are you looking at flight times per like semi annual or. I don't know if you guys calculate and close out semiannual or do annual logbook reviews, but what do you. [00:59:13] Speaker F: Yeah, I think a good year is about to 250 to 300. [00:59:19] Speaker B: Wow. [00:59:19] Speaker F: Yeah. Yeah. How does that compare with you guys? [00:59:23] Speaker B: More, more. [00:59:24] Speaker F: Yeah, 300 hours at our logbooks recently and like we had a couple guys that are somebody close to, to upgrade AC and they're, they had a good year. Like they're up at 350 and I see some, I see some 400. [00:59:39] Speaker B: I would say we're probably in the, the 2 forties is like a good year, an average year. And then 250s, 260s is like a good year. But yeah, again we're only flying, we're only flying two hour sorties. [00:59:53] Speaker F: So yeah, like Wes said he did, he did a normal training day today. [00:59:56] Speaker D: And he got six. [00:59:57] Speaker F: Six and a bit. [00:59:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. Yeah, sweet. All right, I'm going to pass the mic over to Nick. How many tacos do you want? [01:00:05] Speaker A: 10 tacos. [01:00:08] Speaker B: Cool man. [01:00:08] Speaker A: I want 10 tacos from Del Taco. [01:00:10] Speaker B: Can I, can I make a request, Nick? [01:00:12] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. [01:00:13] Speaker B: I want you not UNIX our den tacos. [01:00:16] Speaker A: Okay. [01:00:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you have any cool search and rescue stories from where you deploy from a fixed wing aircraft and parachute? [01:00:23] Speaker D: I do have a really good one actually. [01:00:25] Speaker A: Yes. [01:00:25] Speaker D: I was going to ask you if you want to do a fixed wing or rotary. [01:00:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to hear about you just jumping out of an aircraft by yourself just downrange. [01:00:33] Speaker A: Maybe we can do. Would you say fixed wing? [01:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:36] Speaker A: So fixed wing first and then rotor wing second. [01:00:38] Speaker B: You know, screw it. [01:00:38] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, we have a little bit of time. [01:00:42] Speaker D: So my first posting as a startech, I was in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I don't know if you, you guys ever heard of Winnipeg, but it's probably one of the coldest places on earth. [01:00:51] Speaker B: I'm a, I'm a Minnesota boy born, you know. So I was gonna ask you what you guys favorite hockey teams are and if, and if anybody said any other team than the Wild I was probably gonna delete this episode. [01:01:01] Speaker D: Well, I, I grew up in Montreal, so I'm a Habitat, so I can't get it out of me. So I was posted to Winnipeg on my first tour. You know the standard startech progression as you start as a team member. I got my team lead upgrade around the third year, so I'm a junior team lead at this point. I'm probably like six months into the, the job as a team lead. I have a few, few missions, nothing too crazy. I remember coming in to work one Friday. We're supposed to go flying, but it's, it's January in Winnipeg and it's, it's in the middle of a deep freeze and I think it was like minus 45 or something crazy like that Celsius. So in those cases, when, when the wind chill, when the wind, when the cold and windshield is past minus 40 in Winnipeg, it's like, okay, guys, we're not flying today. We're gonna be off only. [01:01:53] Speaker B: I like how that's, that's the factor. It's like, oh yeah, it's minus 40, we're just not gonna fly today. [01:02:00] Speaker D: That's the factor, right? So I'm like, oh man, no training today. I guess, I guess I'm gonna go and do some admin or something like that, but horn goes off, run upstairs and we got, got an ELT hit on a 406 for a plane crash up just north of the of Yellow Knife. So when it's bag in the fixed wing covers a huge area like the bread and butter of that squadron is really going up north. That's why it's a kind of like a fixed wing only squadron. So, so yeah, so we get on the plane, start her up and start making our way up north. Me and my team member start getting all our gear together. Okay, 406. We know that it's going to be a pretty reliable hit. Getting more information. It's sounding, it's sounding, you know, legit because a lot of the, a lot of these ELT hits are, are sometimes nothing, right? [01:02:54] Speaker B: Oh yeah, preach. [01:02:56] Speaker D: We know it's super cold. We know it's super cold. [01:02:59] Speaker F: What'd you do? [01:03:00] Speaker B: What would you tell it was cold? Did you go outside and throw a cup of water in the air? And if it freezes before it hits. [01:03:04] Speaker D: The ground, we know it's cold. So we're getting all our survival gear. So all this stuff kind of paint the picture. We're getting all of our gear together, we're getting all of our environmental gear together. And then we get on scene and we start looking for the, for this plane crash. [01:03:19] Speaker B: And you're in the fixed wing aircraft at this point, right? [01:03:21] Speaker D: Yeah, we're in the fix. When our fixed wing star is a bit different than what I've, I've done some training with your, with the 212 Squadron PJs and seeing what they do. Our fixed wing looks a little bit different. We got our, our paradors are just big windows so we got a really good view for searching. We got the ramp. So it's really, it's really converted to be a good, a good start. Fixed wing platform. [01:03:44] Speaker B: So what, what, what is the fixed wing platform? [01:03:47] Speaker D: It's H model hurt. We're using what we were using at the time here at Comox. Right now we're kind of, we're kind of transitioning from that Herc to the Kingfisher. But this is on, this is on the hurt. [01:03:57] Speaker B: That's a sweet plane too. [01:03:59] Speaker D: Yeah. So we're looking, we're looking and it's, it's snowing, winds are high. And eventually the team member spots the plane on the side. Just sees not really the plane, but sees kind of like the passenger window side. So we come back for the AC tells me, he's like, man, we don't have much fuel. We found the plane crash. If you guys are ready for a jump, I can give you three passes. One pass for observation, one pass for streamers, one pass for jump. Perfect. Right? And at this point here anticipating it. We're already like prepped and we're in our parachutes and we're ready to jump. We're just, just trying to get confirmation of the aircraft and, and get our streamers out, give us our wind drift indicator. So, so we know where our exit point is going to be to safely land into, into our, into where we want to go. But me as a new guy, I'm looking out the window and I'm like trying to find a place to land close to this closest plane crash. I'm not, I'm not really seeing anything because up as you go north, the more west you go, that tree line pushes more and more north. You know what I mean? [01:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:10] Speaker D: So we're pretty far north, but, but we're still inside the tree line. [01:05:13] Speaker B: What altitude, what altitude are you guys at? [01:05:17] Speaker D: So we were at 2500ft and that's. [01:05:21] Speaker B: A, that's a jump altitude for you guys. [01:05:24] Speaker D: So when we do static line jumps, our lowest for operation is 1500ft. Yeah, yeah. [01:05:31] Speaker B: And are you guys Always static line. Or do you, will you, will you do it without the line? [01:05:36] Speaker D: So we, we, we qualify to do free fall and static. Although for missions and stuff like this we're going to do static line because we, because we're going to put gear on us and jump and stuff like that. It's just, it's just static line. And then our kind of bread and butter is to like for parachuting and our mission profile is really getting in about whether we don't want to be parachute for too long. It's really like get me to a safe altitude, get me in so I can see where I'm going and get me in this tight spot. I don't want to be stuck in these high winds for a long time. Right. The low lower is kind of like the, the, the work jump, let's call it. [01:06:10] Speaker B: And then what do you guys have multiple shoots that you're working with for controllability. [01:06:16] Speaker D: So we have a, we call it a C star 7A. It's a 300 foot canopy. We have our main and we have a reserve. Okay. Yeah. That's not too dissimilar of what you guys have in the US actually the exact same model. I think your PJs jump at the same, exact same parachute than us, except it's a 360. So 360 square foot canopy. So a little bit bigger than ours. [01:06:36] Speaker C: Okay. [01:06:37] Speaker D: I think that's to account for more weight because they're normally tactical jumping, you. [01:06:40] Speaker B: Know, because Americans are heavier. [01:06:45] Speaker D: So back to the story. So I got three passes is what he tells me. Right. And then we got to go back fuel because they're like I'm bingo fuel and I gotta go all the way back to Yellow Knife the fuel up. And we flew from Winnipeg direct there. We're talking about a four or five hour flight station. Oh wow. This is above the Arctic Circle, by the way. [01:07:02] Speaker A: Damn. [01:07:03] Speaker D: So this was, this was not above the Arctic Circle. Yeah, so it was, I think it's 30 is in our Arctic Circle. This was above 60. [01:07:13] Speaker B: I mean close to the Arctic Circle. [01:07:15] Speaker E: I mean that's close to the Arctic. [01:07:17] Speaker B: So pretty. [01:07:18] Speaker D: It was, it was in, it was in the Territories. Right. So like adjacent to Alaska here, not necessarily in the actual Arctic Circle. So yeah, three packs. So he comes around to do one pass and I'm still looking for, for my drop zone here, where am I gonna land? And, and, and all. I can't really see an opening. All I could really see is I could see where the plane parts are at this Point. [01:07:48] Speaker A: Geez. [01:07:49] Speaker D: And I could see what looks like a cut line and like a swath in the trees. So I'm in my mind, I'm like, you know, the time is like, I don't have much time here. I'm like, man, should I jump in there that I could land in there? Should I jump in there? [01:08:01] Speaker B: But I'm interrupting, I'm interrupting you a lot. But I have like, it's obviously super cold out, right? You're, you're about to exit the aircraft in minus 40 degree temperatures. How do you know these guys are alive? Like what is like, like are you don't. So you're jumping on the basis that, like, hey, I'm just gonna go down there and see what's going on. [01:08:23] Speaker D: I'm gonna go down there to see if there's any survivors, right? Oh yeah. So in this case here, there's a little bit more to the story in terms of like parachuting out. You know, we are talking to our joint rescue coordination center. You know, in the rotary ring world, it's pretty easy. I just hoist out, hoist in. I got my in and out all the time here. I'm just like, okay, if I parachute, how am I getting extracted? Yeah. And, and, and they're like, well, we have the Canadian rangers, which is kind of like a reserve force that's all over the north. And they're like, the Canadian rangers are leaving this town called Wadi. They're on their way on their snowmobile. They should be there in about an hour or two to meet you. Right? [01:09:02] Speaker A: Okay. [01:09:02] Speaker B: Okay, that's not bad. [01:09:03] Speaker D: So we have like, we have like an extract action plan gotcha place here. And, and we're gonna go down, we're gonna, we're gonna look at the plane crash. We're gonna see if there's any survivors. If there is, we're gonna give the medical treatment and we're gonna wait for the rangers to come on the snow wheels and they're gonna take us back to the nearest town, which is a town that's about an hour away called Wadi. A small, when I say town, I mean a tiny little place, right? But anyways, I'm not feeling comfortable with this SWAT in the trees because I'm seeing plane parts in there. And I'm just like, man, if it. There could be broken stuff in there, I could get injured. So I decide to jump on this, like, I see this frozen lake, I'm like, I'll just jump on this frozen lake. [01:09:41] Speaker B: Probably from what I'm Canada, when Men are made of steel. [01:09:46] Speaker D: I probably estimating from, from just my eyeball here that I'm like, that looks like a 600 meter. So half a mile, maybe just under half a mile walk. [01:09:56] Speaker A: Okay, I can do that. [01:09:57] Speaker D: That's easy. I'm a starter. We do this on selection. I'm ready for this. Right. So first pass observation. The, the AC because of the weather, didn't give me a good line. I didn't see it. Then he's like, okay, next pass, streamers. He gets a good on this one. I see my frozen thing, my frozen lake. I see my plane crash. Drop it, get the streamers, parachute, land on the frozen lake. [01:10:17] Speaker A: Nice. [01:10:18] Speaker D: Have all my gear, put my snowshoes on, put my backpack on, got my medical gear. Team members, okay before they leave, they're like, hey, do you need anything before we leave? And I'm just like, yeah, can you just do me a favor? Fly over me. Fly over the plane crash. I'll get a bearing, put it in my gps. So he does that. I'm like perfect, go get fuel, come back. But I'm put into my GPS now and it's 900 meters, not 600. Like my eyeball was saying. I'm like, that's not a big deal. But one thing, I kind of underestimated them. And I found this out pretty quickly as I got off the lake was really like how much snow there was right there was like, like, like I'm not a super tall guy, you know, I'm five nine on a tall day and like I'm trying to walk with my snowshoes and it's so cold up there and the snow is like so powdery. [01:11:10] Speaker B: Dude, I. [01:11:12] Speaker D: And like every step with my snowshoes is like the snow is still over my waist. You know what I mean? [01:11:18] Speaker B: Man. Dude, I know how you feel those. So much confidence in concealed with snowshoes and then you go out and get the ass kicked by some like really light snow pack. [01:11:27] Speaker F: Yeah. [01:11:28] Speaker D: Oh. So this track, this 900 meter track was ended up being like two and a half hour slosh right in, in northwest and then all this snow and again I'm hucking my medical gear. We have environmental clothing because we know it's cold. We have, you know like a rifle that we carry for protection because we're in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. [01:11:55] Speaker B: What kind of rifle you guys carrying? [01:11:57] Speaker D: So we have three America at the time our rifle was a 40 odd six. The model, I forget it was a really old rifle. We just upgraded to 308tikka. And we also have just their classic Remington shotgun. So one of the two is what we grab. [01:12:19] Speaker B: So your primary concern at that point, I. I guess you got grizzlies up there. [01:12:26] Speaker D: Over there in the Northwest Territories, you don't have grizzlies. Okay. But you'll have black bears. There's a lot of Wolverines, wolves. [01:12:33] Speaker B: Dang, dude. [01:12:34] Speaker D: All kinds of stuff, right? [01:12:35] Speaker B: I can't. [01:12:36] Speaker D: I think the wolves would probably be the thing that I'd be the most afraid of up there. But. Yeah, maybe even the wolverines, they can be pretty aggressive. [01:12:42] Speaker B: That is wild. So. So you guys get kind of choose your own weapon. You're like, ah, I'm gonna choose the odd six over the. [01:12:48] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. [01:12:49] Speaker B: That's crazy. Yeah, we don't. We don't send our rescue swimmers down with guns. [01:12:53] Speaker D: Oh, no. [01:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah, just the two on their arms. [01:12:59] Speaker B: All right. Sweet. Sorry to interrupt. [01:13:02] Speaker D: Yeah. So as I'm doing this launch, the first thing that comes into my mind is I'm like, you know, being a good Canadian boy and having done a lot of snowmobiling, I'm like, these guys are not getting here. Like, they're not gonna be making it here. There's no freaking way they're making it here. This snow. Right? But, like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these Canadian rangers are. Can pull something out of their hat. But it's snowing and there's tons of snow and super windy. And so eventually, we keep walking. We keep walking. We think this walk's never gonna end. But eventually I start smelling the fuel, Right? [01:13:35] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [01:13:36] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:13:37] Speaker D: We should be close. Keep walking. I get to that cut line that I, for an instant, contemplated jumping into, and I realized that the cut line was not man made. It was airplane made. It was a plane that hit it. [01:13:50] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Holy cow. [01:13:52] Speaker D: You got, like, trees now. It looks kind of like. I don't know if you guys are from the 90s and played the old Mortal Kombat games, but it looks like the pit from Mortal Kombat with broken trees, stumps everywhere. Yeah. The planes in hundreds and hundreds of pieces everywhere. [01:14:04] Speaker A: That's not good. [01:14:05] Speaker B: That's a big plane for it to make it look like a cut line. [01:14:07] Speaker D: Yeah, it was. It was a King Air. It was a King Air. It was actually a passenger. It was actually a passenger. Plane didn't have any passengers on. They were going from Yellow Knife to the town of Wadi to pick up passengers. So it was just the pilots at the time. So they didn't have any passengers. On, but it's looking grim. I'm like, I doubt anybody survived this. So, you know, put our stuff down, start looking, start finding remains. No survivors. [01:14:36] Speaker B: That's too bad. [01:14:37] Speaker D: Eventually we get back, the plane gets back, and they're like, yeah, rangers, they got stuck. They're not gonna make it. We've talked to JRTC that they have a. Hello, hello, asset that they're gonna contract up, y'all, that's gonna come pick you up, but they can't make it into the sweater, so you guys are gonna have to stay overnight. [01:15:01] Speaker A: Oh. [01:15:04] Speaker D: So in our Herc, we have survival gears, right? We have a what we call a. We have just like toboggan, because. And it's like a toboggan packed with survival gear. It has, like, arctic survival gear. It's got, like, a nice tent, and. [01:15:18] Speaker B: You'Re towing that as you're walking. [01:15:20] Speaker D: No, it's in the plane. [01:15:23] Speaker B: Okay. [01:15:23] Speaker D: You have the capability to do supply drops. [01:15:27] Speaker B: Right. [01:15:27] Speaker D: Type parishes do it. They throw it down to me. [01:15:29] Speaker B: Sweet. Throw down a. Throw on a piping hot pizza, too, while they're at it. [01:15:34] Speaker D: Yeah, well, it's got. It's got our imps, which. Which is our Canadian version of your mre, but inside of it. So. Yeah. So, you know, talk to them. We get the. The bundles. Dispatch come down, set up, step up our tent, and yeah. Waited the next day until we got our extraction. Coroner at that point didn't want us to extract any of the remains, which was. Which was pretty easy because they wanted to do the TSB flight report, which is our Transport Safety Board fight for it. See exactly what happened with this plane. So they. They kind of took all that stuff going on, but, like, they were finding plane parts hundred feet away. Wow. From where that was. [01:16:18] Speaker A: Geez, man. [01:16:20] Speaker D: Funny story. I did end up reading that TSB report a year after when it came out. And apparently that plane took off with only one altimeter. And as they were coming in, they lost their second one and essentially just flew into the ground. I think I remember reading like a 750km an hour. [01:16:38] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. [01:16:39] Speaker D: Yeah, it was a pretty crazy story. And then a bunch of questions came up about this company who's like a very small airline that only places really small communities regarding their safety and their. And their stuff that they were doing. [01:16:51] Speaker B: Gosh, thank God for the safety boards and making travel safe. That is wild, man. [01:16:59] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:17:00] Speaker B: So you guys set up camp, Right. And, you know, start a fire and do those things. [01:17:05] Speaker F: Yep. [01:17:06] Speaker B: This is a silly question, but when you guys get extracted. Do you break down camp and bring that stuff back with you or is it like kind of single use stuff? [01:17:14] Speaker D: So in this case here was a forget them. I'm not as smart with aircraft as the rest of the crew here. I'm just a grunt. Just so I don't remember the type of aircraft it was, but it was a really, really small aircraft. So we couldn't really extract the gear. We left it all there. We did go back there I think in the summertime to try and get some of stuff back and all the stuff got mailed back to us. But I do remember getting. So the next day the weather is clear, get picked up by the chopper and they found a safe place to land towards the end of this like cut lines where they were they. And then this is a private company. So their, their rules are like whatever will pay you to do is kind. [01:17:58] Speaker A: Of like we will get you out of there, brother. [01:18:02] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. So that I remember going in there and I'm like, hey man, if, if you can. And you can pick up our two parachutes. Just, just this is the spot. Flew over there 15 seconds later where we landed and we picked up our parachute. I just remembered the two hour walk. 52nd flight was a two and a half hour walk of flashing through the bush trying to get to this place. [01:18:21] Speaker B: Dude. Wow, that is wild, man. That is, that is really cool that you guys get that kind of survival training for that. [01:18:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So when you guys go out, you really have to make sure you have your stuff in order. [01:18:35] Speaker D: Yes. So we get a certain rest. Like our survival training. I would say out of any faction of the Canadian forces is probably one of the best. Maybe if you go to the Canadian Rangers up north, these guys do a lot of like northern type of. Northern type of survival training. But ours is really more broad spectrum. Sea survival, land survival, winter Arctic. We kind of do everything through our course. So it's like kind of our. Within our are folk in the military, I would say Startex probably have the most training in that, in that domain. [01:19:06] Speaker A: That's cool. [01:19:07] Speaker B: Really cool, man. Really, really. [01:19:08] Speaker A: Are the star techs the one that are running the survival course. [01:19:12] Speaker D: So for the air crew. Yeah, we have Startex at that school that run it. Yeah. [01:19:16] Speaker A: Nice. [01:19:17] Speaker D: Yeah, I think we have like four or five star techs over there. And it's not just StarTech but StarTechs are like the warrant officers, the senior guys of the squadron that run the courses. [01:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. [01:19:31] Speaker B: Sweet. Dude. Quick, quick helicopter story. [01:19:35] Speaker D: Okay, Helicopter story. So now I Spent four years in. In Winnipeg. And I'm, you know, I'm a. I'm a team lead. Feel super proficient on the fix wing. I'm a paramaster, as one would say. And. And now they're like, Nick, you spend too much time on the fixed wing. You need to go. You need to go get some rotary ring experience here. [01:19:54] Speaker B: Take your. Take your den tacos and go. [01:19:58] Speaker D: Great. We got a great place for you. Newfoundland. [01:20:01] Speaker B: Hey. [01:20:03] Speaker D: So they post me to do for land. So I start flying on the cormorant here in Newfoundland. And, you know, like, all my skills, you know, look, scene management, medical, all that stuff, I'm super good at the time, but I just never had flown on the rotary ring. So stuff like our. Our water hoisting, our swimming boat hoisting, all this stuff was like, completely foreign to me. So I'm going through the checks, but at the same time, they're like, oh, Nick's been around four years. He's experienced guys, so he's gonna get this quickly. So, yeah, talk about fire hose. It was. It was fire hose from day one, right? Eventually they. After a month, I get my team member upgrade. I remember that month. I flew 80 hours that month. [01:20:43] Speaker B: Holy cow. [01:20:45] Speaker D: And then right off the bat, they're like, we need team leads. Nick, you're gonna start. They didn't make me a team lead right away. Obviously, I'm going through the training package. But they're like, you're gonna be acting team lead now. So I'm flying with the team lead. But again, everything we do, the missions, training, I'm kind of like acting and getting debriefing. I'm kind of going through the processes. Ganders are very busy for calls. And then my one weekend we get called out and for a boat on fire, it's about 50 nautical miles off the south end of Buren, which is like, on the south of Newfoundland there. The. So we go out there and a lot of times like, oh, yeah, the classic boat on fire. We're gonna get stood down and turn around here. But we got there and we go over there and we actually find a life raft, right? And as we get there, there's the JRCCR rescue coordinates, coordination center start calling all other assets to the area. So there's a Coast Guard vessel still about an hour back, and there's this, like, massive tanker in the area. [01:21:54] Speaker F: They're. [01:21:54] Speaker D: They're not far, right? So we get over there and the tanker. The tanker has comms with the people on there because they had, like, a survival radio on channel 16. And so do we. [01:22:08] Speaker A: Oh, really? [01:22:09] Speaker D: They're like, yeah, we're going to. There's three people on there. One guy's hypothermic through because he's got a cut in his suit, but he's mentating. And then we're having this discussion on who's gonna pick him up. And in the end we have. We're like, we're gonna go get him. There's a guy there who needs medical attention. We're gonna hoist down. That makes sense. Cool. So my, my team leader looks at me, he's like, hey, Nick, you got this? I'm like, cool. Can we go on private for a second? We go private and the guy, his name's Cookie, so I'm gonna call him Cookie. So he just, he's just like, what, man? He's like, dude, I've never done a life raft in my life here. He's like, what? What? Like, you want me to run this? Like, I don't even know what to do here. He's like, well, what do you think you have to do? I'm like, I don't know. I'm gonna go down with the guy. How about I go down with the guideline? I'll establish a guideline. You'll come down with the caller, pick up the two last two first guys, and we'll put the third guy in the basket. He's like, that's exactly what I would do. I'm like, sweet. So go up and we do that. So they, they hoist me to the water right next to the life raft. I climb into it. Right away. These three Newfoundlanders are just like super happy to see me, I bet. [01:23:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:21] Speaker D: The sea state at the time is. Is not the worst, but it's not great. It's about ten foot swell. Okay, that's pretty nasty for Newfoundland. There's. It could be a lot worse, you know, especially for that time of year. Yeah, I've definitely been a lot worse after that. But. But I'm in there and they're all trying to rush me and I could feel like the raft trying to call. I'll try to come to me. I'm like, this thing is going to flip. So right away I'm just like, hey. Just like, I get very directive at that point of like, stay over there one at a time. I'll call you. You come here. Don't move if I don't tell you. Do you hear me? And they're all just like, yeah. I'm like, okay, perfect. So I'm kind of like, on the wall of it. And I remember I'm just kind of like, squeezing the wall of the life raft with my legs, and I'm holding the guideline, and I'm kind of feels like I'm riding a bull a bit because it's like kicking me up and I'm trying not to fall off of it. Cookie's coming down with the double grabs the first guy, takes him up, comes down to grab the second one. I remember the hook hit him in the mouth and he chipped the tooth. [01:24:23] Speaker A: Oh, shit. [01:24:25] Speaker D: Which I still bug up to this day about when every time I talk to him. Damn. You know, bring them up. Does the third bring me the. The basket. We get the hypothermic guy in. We go up and everything. Okay. The paid. The hypothermic guy wasn't so bad. But what really stuck with me on that one. And it still pictures it in my mind. It's like I remember being on the fly for after having only this, like, parachuting fixed wing experience. And I'm just on the point. I'm on this wall and I'm holding the guideline, and I'm looking up and I see the core mount just hovering there. [01:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:24:56] Speaker D: It's night. I look on the other side and I see this tanker that's just this. Man, I'm on the. On the water base, and this tanker is like 100ft high. Massive. [01:25:07] Speaker A: Damn, that's spooky. [01:25:09] Speaker D: And I'm just like, man, things have changed. [01:25:13] Speaker B: This is different. [01:25:15] Speaker A: You missed your wolves at that point in the tall snow, I bet. [01:25:20] Speaker D: But I would say out of all the missions I've done, that was probably not the most difficult, but probably the one I've had the most fun on that was just, like, fun one. [01:25:27] Speaker C: That's cool. [01:25:28] Speaker A: So quick question. Do you guys. Are you guys trained to pop the life raft when you're done hoisting the survivors out of it? So talk about that. [01:25:37] Speaker D: Yeah, people do talk about, like, oh, you gotta take your dive knife down and you gotta stab it. We talked about that. And we do do that. But, like, we don't want people to call on it. Yeah, well, we do it if, like, you know, we'll do it if there's, like, no risk to ourselves. But obviously, if it's like a super hairy situation and you just want to get out of there, just don't do it. [01:25:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:25:56] Speaker D: Mark the point. Pass it on. Right? [01:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:25:58] Speaker F: Yeah. [01:25:59] Speaker D: It was done in the past where they popped it because buddy didn't want. [01:26:04] Speaker E: To come out of the raft. [01:26:05] Speaker A: He's afraid of going, oh, a forced evacuation. [01:26:10] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:26:10] Speaker E: This guy was afraid of going into the helicopter and he didn't want to get hoisted because he has air sickness. And the startex, like looking at him, you got to come up. You got to come up. He's like, I'm not coming. They just stared at him. Pulled his knife out from the side of his calf, and as he stared him in the eyes, he just stabbed the raft and he put it back in. He's like, now you got no choice, buddy. [01:26:32] Speaker D: You're coming with me. [01:26:33] Speaker A: Oh, that's good, buddy. [01:26:34] Speaker E: Decide. Okay, I'm going. So they went up and that was it. [01:26:38] Speaker B: That's awesome. Then motivation strikes. Hey Nick, I want to pivot real quick because I got another water question for you. So you guys scuba dive too, right? [01:26:48] Speaker D: Yep. [01:26:49] Speaker B: What level of scuba training do you guys get? [01:26:52] Speaker D: So when we, when I, when I became a startech, the. Our scuba diving for rescue, we did what was called over water, confined space rescue diving. So this is like, you know, your overturned vessel and you dive into it. We used to have this mock vessel here in Comox. We train and over the years we, we don't do that anymore. We're just like, it's just not a capability that we upkeep. And they actually tell us you're not authorized to do that anymore. Ok. Mostly because like, we found that like it's, it's such a risky thing. [01:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah, seriously. [01:27:24] Speaker D: And, and the training of it, we're just don't train it enough. And it's really difficult to train us. We're just like. And even if you train it and you become really good at it, it's still just super freaking dangerous. Probably the most dangerous thing you can do. [01:27:36] Speaker E: Yeah. [01:27:37] Speaker D: So we, we don't train anymore. We're not authorized to do it anymore. So now we're kind of pivoting a bit in, in what we do. Like we're actually, ever since we stopped that, that I feel like the startech occupation is just like, okay, well what do we do with dive now? So now we're kind of pivoting more towards rescue swimming. So we're getting more training on rescue. We had a bunch of guys go on the Ahars. Ahars with the air crew. [01:28:00] Speaker A: Oh, nice. [01:28:01] Speaker D: I'll do a bunch of those techniques. We're building rescue swimming plans based on a lot of the stuff that the guys brought back from ahars. We kind of have like a course zero this year actually. And, and after for diving, it's mostly like searches, identifications of wreckages, stuff is overturned. Then we have this kind of like unwritten rule where it's like you can't put more than your half your body in it if you're gonna pull something out of it. Right. [01:28:25] Speaker B: We have fairly the same. Same thing, but I just think. I think it's really interesting. What kind of. So do you guys go like, you know, with the. With the crew and just go scuba dive every once in a while for funsies? [01:28:36] Speaker D: Yeah, I start text. Crews don't get to come, unfortunately. But we. We have a bunch of all of our skills. We. It's all like, all currency based, kind of the same as you would have as plants that park currencies are like, Nick, you got to get X amount of static run jumps a year. You gotta get X amount of. Of like dives a year. We have semi annual currencies for diving, which is a minimum of six dives semi annually. We have to go on dive exercises for them. We normally do one here on Vancouver island. And in the winter time every year we do like a Key west trip where we're like, we meet up with all the different squadrons. [01:29:16] Speaker B: Oh, I'm starting to realize why you guys dive. This is. This is painting the picture a little bit about that. [01:29:23] Speaker D: It's all about the diving Key West. [01:29:26] Speaker B: Are you kidding me, dude? [01:29:27] Speaker A: Go anywhere. [01:29:28] Speaker B: Okay. Really paint the picture now. [01:29:31] Speaker A: Oh, that's good. [01:29:32] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. [01:29:34] Speaker D: Yeah, so that's. That's our. That's our currencies for diving. But we got. A lot of our currencies are like our. Our kind of start tech, call it ground skills or. Or kind of currencies, medical stuff. [01:29:46] Speaker A: Y'all stay busy. Every week you have something new to do, something different. [01:29:51] Speaker D: Yeah, it is busy. It is busy. It is busy. Like, the. The. The pilots will get annoyed. Like, what do you mean you can't go on this. Rwand. [01:30:00] Speaker F: The Key West. [01:30:01] Speaker A: Come on. [01:30:02] Speaker B: It all makes sense. [01:30:06] Speaker A: Pilots are just jealous. [01:30:07] Speaker B: I gotta go to the bars. I mean, scuba dive. [01:30:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:30:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:10] Speaker D: Okay. [01:30:11] Speaker B: Okay, Cool, man. That's. Those are some really cool stories. We do this podcast, you know, a lot of Coast Guard crews, and we get a lot of great Coast Guard rescue swimmer stories. The out of the plane and parachuting thing is wild. That's really, very cool. I was very, very entertained by that story. [01:30:29] Speaker A: I like that one. [01:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really, really cool. And you know, maybe our rescue swimmers can jump out of the back of Casas. [01:30:36] Speaker A: I don't Know you can do anything once. [01:30:38] Speaker D: I've trained with a lot of swimmers and they're just like, man, I wish I could parry. [01:30:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, dude. [01:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah. We've had a couple brave souls that jumped ship and they became Air Force pararescue men. [01:30:51] Speaker D: Oh, nice. [01:30:51] Speaker A: Which was kind of cool. [01:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, they made it through, but that's more combat focused, I feel like. Yeah, because our. Because our, you know, our inland SAR is taken care of by our Air Force to a certain extent, but the lines are a little bit blurry about, you know, if the Coast Guard us are going to do it or the Air Force is going to do it, so. [01:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we're not going too far inland. No, do like coastal. Inland. [01:31:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, somewhat. [01:31:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:14] Speaker B: Cool. Wes, man, I want to. I want to hear your coolest cormorant. It's our story. And then. Yeah, go for it, dude. [01:31:24] Speaker F: His Arctic service medal that he. [01:31:29] Speaker B: Nick, is that a lot like the Key west service medal? [01:31:38] Speaker C: Ian likes to make fun of me because I did. I did four years in Alaska, 330 plus days on ships, and I never. I only went above the Arctic Circle once. And then within a month of coming here, I spent two weeks broken above the Arctic Circle. My first January here. In the last October or a year ago last October, I went up above the Arctic Circle with Ian and we had a. We got broken up there for 10, 12 days. [01:32:03] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. [01:32:04] Speaker C: All my time added up like, oh, man, I think I got above 21 days of darkness. [01:32:09] Speaker B: Heck yeah, dude. [01:32:10] Speaker C: And you know, in the American Coast Guard, you get. You got a piece of chest candy for that in Canada. You just come home. [01:32:19] Speaker B: Yeah, they're like, and what. [01:32:22] Speaker C: So I've been pretty lucky. I've had some really good missions since I've been here somewhere. You go IFR picking up icing, moderate turbulence, getting bounced around. And that's one I had a couple weeks ago. Taking off ifr, going to some inland medevac, some logging camp and leave ifr, shoot and approach the water, crawl up this really long, like 45, 50 mile. [01:32:46] Speaker D: Long. [01:32:48] Speaker C: Like Fior, basically to get to this spot one where I did like one day. I did like, it was like an 8 hour flight, 7 hours of it was IFR to go shoot and approach the water back. And that was the day before that. I got called out on a weekend for these three hikers that went up this 6,000 foot peak by Whistler. [01:33:08] Speaker D: And then they were. [01:33:09] Speaker C: They didn't come back. And we went out there in the clouds. We Just rolled in and we tried to go underneath, like 4,000ft, climbing up the clouds, so thick. Then I popped up. I got up 10,000ft, and I was looking down. I can't see the top of this peak. [01:33:21] Speaker A: Holy cow. [01:33:22] Speaker C: And. And then I'm just sitting up there at 10,000ft looking down, and finally there's an opening. So I go down this opening, not into the closet, but just above to this hole, and I see these footprints, and they're going up to the peak. And right just below the top of the peak, you can see a fresh avalanche slide. [01:33:38] Speaker A: Oh, no. [01:33:39] Speaker B: Wow. [01:33:40] Speaker C: Those. [01:33:41] Speaker F: Those guys. [01:33:42] Speaker C: We tried everything we could to get down there, but then the. The area forecast said it's going to be thick clouds for the next two weeks. And sure enough, the clouds came in. They were found two weeks later. [01:33:53] Speaker A: That sucks. [01:33:54] Speaker D: What? [01:33:55] Speaker C: One of the most unique missions I have. It wasn't challenging. It wasn't. It wasn't crazy by any means, but I was actually on call with Ian, and I think we were the backup crew that day. So the weekend, there's a standby backup group, standby crew gets launched, and the backup crew takes over 12 hours later. So we got called as a backup to this American fishing trawler that coincidentally, I think was the American triumph. And I was like, oh, man, I don't. I don't know if I was even AC at the time. I don't think I was. So I was like, I hosted that when I was in all pat. And he was like, would you want it? Well, yeah, I'll take it. [01:34:30] Speaker D: I don't know. [01:34:30] Speaker C: I think we left like midnight or something like that. The C130 blew top cover for us. And this. This is the part I wish we had in the Coast Guard so bad because the last time I hoisted that boat at night off Dutch harbor, it was dark, seas weren't crazy, winds weren't crazy. But this is dark, you know, in the Bering Sea. And so we get to the ship and I think we did a letdown. Didn't quite shoot and approach us. The left down, got below the clouds at 500ft, went to the boat. Very dark, no illumination, no mood, overcast sky. And then the C130 comes off to our 2:00. And I said, hey, here's our position. We would like you to provide flares. And so they drop parachute flares for 60 minutes straight while we do the insertion of the Sartex. [01:35:14] Speaker D: Holy cow. [01:35:15] Speaker C: Was it a litter? It was a literary. He was pretty. He was pretty messed up. [01:35:19] Speaker D: Wow. [01:35:20] Speaker C: So the entire time if the HERC wasn't there to drop parachute illumination, it would have been a pretty demanding hoist with the pitch of the boat. [01:35:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:29] Speaker C: And the way the winds were and the way the swells were. But with the parachute illumination through the clouds, it provides a horizon. Otherwise they wouldn't have seen it all. [01:35:37] Speaker A: Wow. [01:35:37] Speaker C: So for the whole hour long evolution, they provide continuous flare coverage about two miles away at our 2:00. Two or three miles away. And then their horizon. I would not have seen it. Just make the artificial horizon flares through the clouds. [01:35:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:53] Speaker C: So you're sitting there, the bowels, this American catcher, processors going up and down 20, 25ft. And then just beyond that, beyond their halogen lights, I see just very clear definition of a horizon through the clouds from parachutes. Parachute flares that will slowly extinguish. And they were so good at that job that by the time the first one extinguished, they already had a second one going. And it. If, if we had think of everyone in the Coast Guard who's done an offshore mission at night hoisting to a boat with no illumination. Just having something like that. Simple as continuous illumination to not to illuminate the boat. They illuminate the boat at all they did was give you horizons. [01:36:37] Speaker B: I'm laughing, I'm laughing at the stories. I had a really challenging case once and the only thing we had and think, you know, thank God we did have this. But the flight mech brought like the paper dinner plates, you know. [01:36:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:36:48] Speaker B: And chucks those things out and you know, sometimes they just go all over the place. But it's good for like a bearing sometimes. I'd much rather have flares than fricking paper dinner plates. [01:36:59] Speaker C: Yeah. So it wasn't the most challenging. It wasn't the most, most crazy unique. It was American Rescue. But I've never had that capability provided before. And it just made what. What could have been a pretty challenging, difficult evolution. But totally like honestly it's been by having that horizon illuminated by players. [01:37:19] Speaker B: That's really cool, man. That is very unique. Gosh, A lot of, a lot of lessons. I guess this is kind of a natural pivot to my next question for you. What do you. When you come back? Because you're gonna come back. I mean forcefully probably. [01:37:35] Speaker C: But yeah, I asked. It's a two year tour. I asked for my one year extension within 30 days of getting here and got it. So this will be my third year here. [01:37:43] Speaker B: But are you going to come back and fly the 65? Is that what's on the list? [01:37:49] Speaker C: I'm very thankful for my 2200 hours or whatever it was on the 65. I would like to supply Sikorsky product. [01:37:56] Speaker D: When I come back. [01:37:57] Speaker A: Cool. [01:37:57] Speaker C: I think the, the skills are more transferable. [01:38:00] Speaker B: Sure. [01:38:01] Speaker C: To that. But I would be happy to fly the dolphin, obviously. [01:38:04] Speaker A: Well, well, detailer listens to this podcast. So yeah, you're probably getting a 60 transition. [01:38:09] Speaker B: Sorry, we have to interrupt this program for Nick and I's plug. Nick and I are going to San Diego, both of us. There's going to be 165 in San Diego and Nick and I are going to man it. [01:38:20] Speaker A: So it's gonna be pretty sweet. [01:38:21] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:38:21] Speaker B: So if you want to cut west, there's an opening, man. There is an opening and you can come. [01:38:25] Speaker C: But yeah, I'd like. [01:38:28] Speaker B: Sweet. So what. So like I, it's, you know, as a lieutenant commander, I'm not sure where you are in the selection process for an 05, but I'm assuming you're gonna be in 04 coming back. So, you know, with, with limited challenges of being able to make decisions and implement changes. What are you going to bring back from the Canadian Royal Air Force and what are you going to try to be like hey guys, we really just should do this. Like, why aren't we doing this? We need to do this? [01:38:54] Speaker C: I think the Coast Guard for the last 10 years has been, especially after the major hurricanes, like we've been adopting this urban SAR posture. We're getting more calls out for inland missions. Just North Bend and Humboldt Bay for example, we're getting, they're getting calls up more inland, higher altitudes and it's not one of our mission sets. [01:39:16] Speaker D: Right. [01:39:16] Speaker C: It's not a mandated mission, but we're still asking these crews to go out 4, 5, 6,000ft, insert rescue swimmers to snowy environments in the, in the mountainous terrain. Everything here I have a very formal. [01:39:30] Speaker F: Or the. [01:39:30] Speaker C: What Canada has given me is a very formal inland SAR training platform like the aircraft, the program, the four week mountain flying school. Like to continue to do these missions. We've got to continue to just sharpen the spear and be better at these mission sets. I think some. I don't, I don't, I don't want to talk too. I've been out of the Coast Guard for two and a half years, but I'm seeing more missions getting further inland and more castings getting further inland. And I just have a. They've given me a different mission set that I've never been given formal training on the coast Guard that is just totally, totally different. [01:40:11] Speaker B: I mean. [01:40:11] Speaker C: Yeah, and here's one of the biggest. Here's probably one of the biggest things that I can think of. We did the National Starx this year in Comox, first time in nine years. And we had units, Coast Guard units come from Mobile, Astoria, Port Angeles, Sitka, and a C130 crew from Kodiak and got to fly on just some of our routine training spots that are around here. And I got to fly as an evaluator in the back for one of the crews from Port Angeles. And it was just like a landing in a circuit 3,000ft, another landing, a circuit below a glacier at 4,000ft, and a pretty, pretty young crew. No one had been the hats. But then between the mountain flying school and just being here for two years, be able to go in and sit in the back and explain all the techniques that I've been given over the last two and a half years from Mountain flying school and then the, the program here in Comox and coach them in very safely to these spots that otherwise, I mean, no fault to their own. But like, you get to the circ and you're doing a recce of the circuit at a thousand feet, and they're like, how do we get, how do we get in there? And. And just being able to use all the techniques that I've been given here from the amazing pilots around here to just coach them into the spot. Learn to read the winds, read the sides of the mountains, use your power management skills to get safely in the ground effect into the spot. And they did it. And they landed at both spots and they did awesome at it. And if I had not come here. [01:41:45] Speaker D: I don't even know if I would. [01:41:46] Speaker C: Have done that in a Coast Guard. Coast Guard asset. [01:41:50] Speaker B: Very interesting question. Is the, the, the Mountain flying school, is that mandatory for every single pilot. [01:41:56] Speaker C: For the, for the West Coast Aircraft Commanders? [01:41:58] Speaker B: Gotcha. [01:41:59] Speaker C: Oh, is it? Oh, it's actually, it's actually both coasts now. So, yeah, it's a civilian school. And my instructor there was one of the more junior ones, and he had 6,000 hours. [01:42:10] Speaker B: Good Lord. Do you guys do that? [01:42:13] Speaker C: That's at the lowest. It's either a 407, a star. [01:42:17] Speaker B: That was my question. [01:42:18] Speaker C: Three or, or EC 120. [01:42:20] Speaker B: Sweet. So you goes, you guys, you got just like hat, the hats model. You guys fly a different helicopter. [01:42:26] Speaker C: Yes. [01:42:27] Speaker A: School. [01:42:28] Speaker B: And it transfers over pretty well. The skills. [01:42:30] Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's 30 hours and then I think like nine days of ground school and then Fly afterwards. [01:42:36] Speaker B: Yeah, wicked. Dude, that is, that is awesome. I, if I were president of the Coast Guard, I would say yes, west can come in and do all the things he would like to do. Because I think Nick and I agree that, you know, we got to keep training the folks we got. I think we. The most recent couple of podcasts we did, we can share them with you guys too. We're about to release one tomorrow, but just of these crazy inland SAR cases, you know, and luckily we talk, we talk about the importance of hats and ahars that the aircraft commanders, at least one of the pilots on both of those crews had attended those schools and you know, they pulled out of that tool bag. [01:43:15] Speaker A: So, yeah, it's great. [01:43:17] Speaker B: The training's great and it's, you know, it sticks with you. Um, it's, it's amazing and it just kind of broadens your horizon and makes you a better pilot for sure. That's really neat. Cool. And obviously you don't want to come back though. Would you stay out there if you could? [01:43:34] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [01:43:34] Speaker B: That's awesome. [01:43:35] Speaker C: I mean, I love America and I love the Coast Guard. [01:43:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:43:39] Speaker C: It's just Vancouver is a unique place. I mean, I've got, I'm five minutes from the ocean, from my driveway, and then I'm a 25 minute drive from the 5,000 foot ski hill. [01:43:51] Speaker B: Gosh, that's amazing. [01:43:52] Speaker C: It's pretty good. [01:43:53] Speaker A: That is sweet. [01:43:54] Speaker B: That is awesome. And then I just want. Last question. The little thing that you sent us, the observe and report portion, talks about a reconstitution of the Royal Canadian Air Force. And all you guys can jump in on this. Was this a big sweeping effort that you guys, that, that happened to like, to, to tamper down collateral duties and make sure that the primary mission was focused on like, what. Tell me about that transition. [01:44:21] Speaker C: I mean, you just summarized it. [01:44:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:44:24] Speaker C: To be honest, I mean, it, it comes down to something as simple as if there's a, if there's a retirement or changes command, instead of having everyone on a, on a boat, on a, on a base practice their parade formation marching for two days straight, they. Something simple as that is that. No, it's going to be seated and we're going to do a retirement. Instead of like four days of practice getting ready for it, it's going to be one hour. Everyone's just going to take their seats. Like the manpower issue, the same thing that the Coast Guard's dealing with right now, they're going to refocus everyone's primary job and collateral duties to make sure it's just focused on the tip of the spear for mission efficiency. So was it like a huge sweeping reform? I can't speak to the whole caf, but I can speak to here at the unit, which is. Yeah. Instead of taking three or four days to prep for a change of command, we're going to do it minimum as necessary to make it formal. That's just an example. I mean, you summarize it. [01:45:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And Ian, have you seen a big. A big. You know, I'm not sure if you guys share the same collateral load, you know, as we do, but, you know, are you guys mostly just like aviation centric as far as, you know, collateral duties and all that? [01:45:34] Speaker F: Yeah, I think so. I mean, everyone's got their, their secondary duties. I don't think that's gonna go away. But I think actually you know what's nailed the. At the nail the head there. Like, I think that's one of the biggest things is like their change of command parades is. I think it's the direction was RCF wide is they got rid of. Yeah, and I think it stayed. But yeah, there's lots of that. [01:46:00] Speaker E: It's just ceremony there. [01:46:01] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:46:03] Speaker B: Well, that's awesome. I mean, sounds like you're doing great things. And this is also my formal interview for the job. So if anybody's in charge of. [01:46:10] Speaker F: Yeah, I don't want to sell it more, but I don't think Wes has talked about where our simulator happens to be. [01:46:16] Speaker B: No, he did talk about that. He was texting me all last week about it and I was kind of pissed off and I didn't want to bring it up, but. Why don't you tell folks where your simulator is? [01:46:24] Speaker C: The simulator for the cormorant is in Oxford, uk. Yeah, Oxford. Google it real quick. You can learn all the amazing facts about it. The first simulator during the T course or the OTF here is two weeks and then I went back six months later for another one. Went back six months later for another one. I just got back last week from UK with Ian and Simon and it's a pretty good gig. It's a pretty great simulator. It's one permanent part of posting over there and his whole job is just to run the simulator. [01:46:53] Speaker A: That is awesome. [01:46:54] Speaker B: Hey, Ian, do you know where our simulator is? You ever been? [01:47:00] Speaker F: It's even better than Oxford. [01:47:01] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:47:01] Speaker B: You've ever been to Mobile, Alabama? [01:47:04] Speaker F: It's on my bucket list. [01:47:06] Speaker A: It's like Key west but in Alabama. [01:47:10] Speaker B: Oh man. [01:47:13] Speaker A: It'S the Las Vegas of the south, basically. [01:47:15] Speaker B: It really is, man. That's what it is. Hey, Wes, what's your favorite hockey team now? Hey. [01:47:26] Speaker E: Hey. [01:47:26] Speaker D: I'll just say. [01:47:27] Speaker C: I'll just say I don't watch hockey, but I am in a curling league. [01:47:30] Speaker B: Oh, good. That's awesome. [01:47:32] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:47:32] Speaker B: Do you guys have. Did you. Did they get you playing broom ball yet? [01:47:37] Speaker C: No, no, no broom ball, but. But I'm on the Saturday beer league for curling. That's part of my Canadian transformation. That's a close dog at the hockey. [01:47:48] Speaker B: You are transformed, my friend. [01:47:50] Speaker A: You can be an Olympian. Come back to the States. [01:47:53] Speaker B: Hey, guys, really appreciate this. This is a great podcast. So much good storytelling, great info. Like, I'm learning a lot. I can't wait to see you guys next year. I know there's. They've already selected the person who's going up there, but, you know, it sounds like, you know, you're gonna pick me over him, so that's great. But no, really appreciate it, guys. What you guys do is innovative. It's badass. And you guys, you know, are like definitely leaders of the industry. So keep doing what you're doing and man, it's super impressive and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. [01:48:24] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you guys. [01:48:25] Speaker C: Thanks for extra calling us and asking. [01:48:27] Speaker D: Us to do it. [01:48:28] Speaker C: Kind of cool. [01:48:29] Speaker B: Cheers, boys. And go wild. Die but never let go we live. [01:48:40] Speaker A: We die Cuz you can't save every. [01:48:44] Speaker B: Soul Got to take every chance to show that you're the kind of man who I'll never look back Never look. [01:48:55] Speaker A: Down and never let go Sa.