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All right, we're ready for departure here at the pilot Project podcast, the

best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF,

brought to you by Skies magazine and RCAF today. I

am your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is my budy, Paul

Goddard. Paul, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for being here.

Thanks, Brian.

Happy to be here.

Before we start, let's go over Paul's bio.

Paul completed pilot training in 2015 and was posted

to Triple Four squadron in Goose Bay, Labrador, flying the

CH 146 Griffin in the combat support role.

Over three years, Paul flew about 500 hours, including

tactical first officer training, SAR conversion training,

the Mudlake, Labrador evacuation Op, Lentis and

Kamloop Spec, and a small handful of JRCC

task missions, JRCC being Joint Rescue Coordination

Center. Paul was then posted to Greenwood, Nova Scotia, where

he was finally able to live with his wife Michaela and fly the

CH 149 Cormorant at 413 Transport and

Rescue Squadron. Over five years, Paul flew a little

over 1000 hours and completed the upgrade process

to SAR Aircraft Commander. During Paul's time in the Air

Force, he has been a deputy squadron operations Officer,

president and vice president of the Combined Mess Committee Unit

Flight Safety Officer and Pilot Section Scheduler.

Paul is currently posted to three CFFTs, where he is training to

become a qualified flight instructor on the CT 139

jet Ranger and teach phase Two and three rotary.

Today we will be focusing on his time flying the Cormorant in

Greenwood, Nova Scotia. Okay, so, Paul, we'll start

with our standard first question. Where did aviation start for

you?

Like many of your guests on the show, I was an air cadet, so

I joined, uh, when I was twelve. Did GlidEr, was

unable to do power because I went to RMC instead. And the

timeline wasn't going to work out on that. After that, it was just

military flying. So phase one in between, uh,

third and fourth year at RMC and then phase two right

afterwards. And I got really lucky and ended

up moving up a cohort because there was a guy

who needed to take some leave for personal reasons, and I ended

up in his slot and he came in in my slot,

basically for phase three. Okay, so that worked out really well.

Nice.

So, like a lot of us, you got a strong start in air

cadets.

I did, yeah.

Were you previously interested in aviation or did that kind of spark by going

to air cadets?

Yes, both. I, uh, think that it started a little bit

before that. Like, I always kind of wondered what I wanted to

be when I grew up and I chose not to

instead. But, uh, the air

cadet thing really cemented it for me that I wanted to be a pilot

and that I wanted to do that professionally, not just as a

hobby. And realizing that I'm wearing

glasses, your viewers can't see that, but realizing that my eyes

were going to be good enough because, uh, they changed the standard the

year before I was looking to apply.

Mhm.

And I would have been able to get in under the old standard anyway, as it

turned out. But that perceived barrier was going to have kept

me from applying to the Air Force. So when

that changed, I didn't self select

out and I ended up just throwing my name in the hat and here I

am.

Yeah, that's great. It's such a good program. There's just so

many of us that got our start that way. And how many people do you

meet in their teams that they're like, okay, this is the career

I'm going to do. And then they actually follow through with that. Uh,

they live the dream. I think it's a really neat thing.

Yeah.

And some of the skills that you learn there are

foundational, right. Like that ability to see

an end goal and keep doing every little step it

takes along the way to get there over such a long period of

time, like that focus and that discipline. I

really credit to my time in air cadets.

Yeah, well, even before you go to glider, you have to do

flying scholarship that year. You have to go to the classes every week.

And I started that when I was 13 in preparation

for applying to go to this scholarship when I was going to be

15, turning 16.

Right.

Yeah.

Before the year I actually made it, I did another year of basically

prep work. I've been working towards this since

I was 16 years old. I went to glider when I

was 17. So, yeah, it's a very

strong foundation. How, huh, did you find your flight

training experience in the forces?

It was good.

Very stressful. When I went through phase one, it was very much a

selection course. When I went through phase two, there

were so many students. There were, I think,

three or four courses in house ahead of me. And then by the

time I was leaving again, three or four courses behind

me, and I had a great group on my course

in my cohort. But on the whole, it seemed like the

environment was very competitive in,

like, I, uh, want to get what I want out of this

selection sort of thing. But I got lucky in

that the great group of guys and girls that I went through with all

wanted a variety of different cockpits to fly

in. And everyone ended up being able

to get their first choice because our course director was very active

in making swaps forwards and backwards, ahead and behind our

courses in order to make the math work out.

Mhm.

So because enough of us wanted the

various three streams, we all ended up getting the

first stream that we wanted.

It's interesting how based on people's

personalities, a course can be like. We've always

stressed that aviation is a team sport.

It is.

But a lot of people, especially in the early stages, don't realize that.

And they're like, I have to look out for number one. It's

interesting how much better of an experience it is when

you have people who realize this is the time to come together.

Yeah.

And just the group

banding together as a group and taking the time

to be people and not just coworkers and

not just people in competition for

various slots. Like, if you get to know the guy

who's sitting next to you in class and you guys study together,

you're going to build each other up. It can only go positively if you're

all lifting each other together.

Yeah, absolutely. So you got selected for

the Griffin, but now fly the Cormorant. Was the Cormorant the end

goal? And how did you feel when you were selected for Griffins?

Yeah, so I knew that it was coming. Um,

I said, I want to fly the Cormorant. And the course

director said, no slots this year. They're all, okay. Okay,

that sucks, but that's life. And so I was

happy to go to Goose Bay and get

into a yellow helicopter, knowing that that would keep

the door open to someday being a quamarant pilot.

And even if that didn't happen, then maybe I would end up going

into, uh, Trenton and flying primary

search and rescue with the Griffin instead of doing

primary search and rescue on the Cormorant. So I

viewed going to Goose Bay as a bit of

an adventure. It was a temporary thing, like every posting in

the military, you're going to be there for as long as you're there, and then when you're gone, you're onto

something else.

So make the best of it.

Enjoy the time you have while it's in front of you.

And if you go in thinking you're going to have a bad time, I

guarantee you will.

Yeah.

I mean, that's become such a theme for this show. The most

successful people are the ones who can be

happy anywhere and they can find the bright side

of a posting that wasn't exactly what they hoped for, or getting a

cockpit that wasn't what they hoped. You

know, those are the people who love their job no matter what.

For sure.

So you mentioned Goose Bay and kind of making the

best of that. Looking at it as an adventure, it's pretty

isolated. How did you find your time up there?

It was a bit of a mixed bag. There were parts of it that were

really frustrating and there were parts of it that were

slightly difficult. Personally. We made reference in my

bio to living separately from Michaela. We weren't Married at the time that I went

up there. She was still finishing up her, uh, navigator training,

her axo training, and then made it over onto the Aurora

in Greenwood. So at least we ended up in the same time zone. But

all of the free time leave wise and all of the free

money ended up being spent on Air

Canada to make the trip down. So, uh, that worked out

well that way. But the great outdoors up

there is so much bigger. Labrador. The nickname

for it is the big Land. And, uh, it's called that for a reason. Right.

Like it's 6 hours on what is now a

paved road to get to Labrador City from Goose

Bay. And there's Churchill Falls in the middle, but that's

basically a gas stop and a hydroelectric

dam and the supporting economy that has

been built up around that community for those reasons.

So in order to get to Canadian Tire, in order to get

to Walmart.

In order to get to sushi, you.

Got to do the six hour drive one way.

Wow.

And then do the six hour drive back the other way. So if you're looking

for amenities, you're not going to find that in Goose Bay.

I like to tell people when they ask know, it's got

everything you need. It does not have everything you want by a long

shot.

Mhm.

So people who have younger

families who go up there and are like a really cohesive

unit end up having a good time because they spend a lot of time outside, they

spend a lot of time in the community with the other military

families. The other thing that's unique about Goose Bay is

the fact that you have to live on the

base. So if you're a single person, you have the

option, I guess, if you want to live in the shacks and eat in the mess and

do the regular thing like that. But the

PMQs are also available and that's basically where

everyone ends up.

Mhm.

So for that reason, it's a very

close knit community. When I was up there, mess life

was very strong, and there was a really good culture

of going out and seeing everyone and just being social

on a Friday night. And so those

two things make it easier to build a community

because the community is all here and you already have

something immediately in common. Even if the person

across the street from me is an MP, NCM. Um, I

can relate to them in a way that maybe lots of

people wouldn't choose to relate to each other if

they knew that I was in the military and they were a, uh, local. I was going to be

here for three years. THEY'VE BEEN THERE FoR 30. THEY'RE GOiNg TO BE THERE FoR 30

moRe. Right. So that sense of adventure that

everyone brings up to Goose Bay with them is what makes

it such a great.

Military community, in my opinion.

Yeah, it is really neat how those smaller

postings that a lot of people look at as maybe

undesirable are actually the places that have the

strongest community just by necessity and by the

nature of having a small location, for sure.

And that, like, I wouldn't recommend

Goose Bay to everyone, but I would

recommend Goose Bay to anyone who is looking

at that and thinking it might be fun.

Mhm. BECAUSE IT IS.

But if you're not interested in going there and having a good time,

like.

I said, you won't.

SO WHAT EXACTlY DOES THE CORMORANT dO? We haven't covered it on

the show yet, but we also have the Hercules and the SAR community.

How do their roles differ?

I'm going to back up a bit and talk about the SAR system.

SURE.

So there's three different regions in

Canada. The one that I participated in is the,

uh, Atlantic Search and Rescue Region, which is

coordinated by the Joint Regional Coordination center in

Halifax. And they

receive distress signals. Either it's

from the folks in Trenton who, uh, get the

satellite downlink, or it's from

the Coast Guard receiving a mayday call,

or whether it's from an area control unit receiving

a mayday call, or being relayed a day call in some

cases, or whether it's from a

provincial police force, whether it be the Royal

Newfoundland Constabulary, or whether it's, uh, the RCMP,

or whether it's the, uh, certetic Becc. Those are the main folks

who feed into the Joint Regional

Coordination center. And from there they make decisions

on who and what to task. They

get a lot of calls every year. Some of those calls end up going

to air assets to prosecute the

mission in terms of we're going to go out and either do a

medevac off of a boat or we're going to search for a lost

hunter or we're going to do lines over the water looking for someone

who fell in. Those sorts of tasks

are what we tend to end up with every once in a while. We also

end up with what we call humanitarian tasks.

So the lost Hunter would be an example of that where the provincial

police find themselves in a situation they

aren't resourced to deal with. Another example would

be if someone was hiking and they needed an evacuation medically,

but the provincial response was going to be inadequate

to the situation, we would go and do that.

We being the federally responsive SAR system,

whether it's an Air Force asset or whether it's a, uh,

Coast Guard asset. From there,

if you're tasking error asset, the

Hercules is higher,

faster, has longer endurance, longer range

than the cormorant does. They're your search platform.

And so traditionally you have Sartex in the

back that are trained and equipped to parachute out of the back

of the platform to go and render aid

to people on the ground until such time as

they can be extracted and people can be

stabilized in place and then

evacuated by other means because you can't

evacuate people out of the middle of the bush

using a Hercules.

Right.

And Sartex being our search and rescue technicians.

That's right, yeah. So they come from other trades after a period, uh,

of time in the forces already. So it's what we call a remaster

trade and they come with a set of

experiences and receive a set of training

after going through selection that prepares them to

provide medical and survival

aid to individuals in the least

hospitable areas and environments of our country.

Yeah, they're amazing people. They're, yeah, if you meet

them, they're so, so impressive and they can, they can do

anything.

And working with them every day keeps a pilot humble.

Yeah, no doubt.

If you'd like to know more about search and rescue technicians or

Sartechs, this is a great time for a shout out for my friend

Dylan Weller's podcast, the SAR Take. That's

the SAR take. Dylan is a

great guy and he's one of our Sartechs in the Royal

Canadian Air Force.

Yeah.

So those are the people that we are

delivering to a scene. And so

the other thing that a Hercules can do for a, ah,

cormorant is provide top cover. So when you have someone

who's on a ship oat 200, 250 miles

offshore and needs to be off of that ship

faster than they would be able to if they were just steaming

to shore. That's like a 25 hours trip if

the ship is making ten knots, right. That's some

reasonably simple math with some average

speeds and assuming a bunch of things go right,

that's your best case scenario. So if someone's

having a heart attack, that's it man.

Mhm.

They need help a lot faster than that. So that's when you send your

cormorant to go out and extract the

patient from the vessel. So we go out

and we insert a Sartech into a situation, whether

it's like I just described on a vessel, whether it's

on top of a mountain, whether it's uh, in the middle of a field

or a swamp. And a lot of the time we're doing that

by hoist. And then we will extract the

patient, usually in a rescue basket, uh, if

they're ambulatory, or in a Stokes litter, if they're not, and

then retrieve the Sartech as well at the same time, and then

get them to emergency medical care, whether that's

in the form of an ambulance at an airport, or whether

that's setting them down at an airport and

just leaving them be because they didn't

require any sort of medical assistance. But the situation

they were in was going to deteriorate to the point where eventually

they would, um. And so

we go and we do the rescue part of search and rescue

is basically what it boils down to.

Okay, so to really simplify what you

just said, the HERC is the search

portion typically, and the cormorant is typically the rescue

portion when you're dividing up search and rescue.

Right.

And there's large amounts of overlap too. Right. So when the

Hercules is doing top cover, they're participating in the rescue

by acting as a comms platform. They find us wins. On

the way home, they've saved me needing to refuel twice to

get home.

Dropping flares for illumination, that's huge, that's a game

changer.

And we can get into that more detail a little bit later if you want to.

Sure.

And for searching, the Cormorant is

capable and allowed to fly a lot lower

and a lot slower than Hercules can. So

we overlap search areas as uh, the

Searchmaster will dictate in order to

provide the right kind of coverage in the right areas.

Okay, it's complex.

It's usually complex, yeah. There's a lot of moving pieces.

Yeah.

What is the training and upgrade process like for a Cormorant

pilot.

Nominally, you have two years from when you

arrive on squadron to become a fully mission

capable SARAC, which means

that you have to hit the ground running. So you start,

uh, out coming off of the OTF in Comox, go to your

home unit, whether that's, uh, in Comox or in

Greenwood or in Gander. And then you are

a Fo one. So you start

basically being trusted to

learn and to keep the blue side up on the

AI and to be as helpful as you're

capable of being in any given moment. But you're just there to

soak it all in, get better at flying,

and learn how to eventually

become that AC.

I just want to break in for a couple acronyms there.

Yeah, go for it.

OTF is operational Training flight Fo

first officer. AC is aircraft commander, and

AI is attitude indicator.

Sorry for that.

It's okay. We speak in acronyms.

Yeah, it's alphabet soup over here.

That's why I'm here.

Yeah. Okay.

And then, uh, from there, you'd become an Fo two. And

at that point, you've gotten the blessing from

standards to fly nightboats with

just any AC, as opposed to needing to do other training

and standards. That's the most challenging thing that

we do, is a nightboat. And I think we're going to get into that a little bit later. Again,

referencing back to the flares. But that's that stage of

your training is just getting good at that stuff.

While you are an Fo two, that's your opportunity to continue

and get really good at flying the aircraft.

And you need to be really good at flying the aircraft so

that you don't have to think about that while you're trying to think about the

mission. There's no brain space to do both at once.

And so then after that, you

become a fo three, potentially at the

same time, but not necessarily at the same time.

You can become a utility AC. So you would be

allowed then to do ferry flights, example, between

Gander and Greenwood, doing a tail swap. You can do that

between, uh, Greenwood and Comox. I did that as a utility

AC. There were three of us pilots on that

crew, along with an FE and a couple of Imp techs,

and we were again, just doing a tail swap. But while you

are an FO three, you are acting

as an AC during simulated. And

potentially, if you have the opportunity and things

work out well in terms of luck and the level

of complexity of the mission versus your level of ability at that

given moment, you might be the acting AC on an

actual task mission. And then

after that, you go through your upgrade trip.

There's build up to this in terms of, uh, like

Rons.

Ron stands for remain overnight

simulated taskings.

Running training days yourself. And at the

end of it, someone comes out from, uh, Sarset.

Sarset is search and rescue standards evaluation.

And training, and sits in the jump

seat. And you and an Fo two or

better sit together in the

front and make all of the decisions and do

all of the flying in order to demonstrate your

competence and run those

scenarios through to completion. And if they're happy

with the fact that you are safe and

effective and efficient enough, then

you will be granted the SAR AC

category, and then you can take the crew out and do

SAR.

Wow.

So that's a pretty involved upgrade process.

Yeah, it is. And historically, it

hasn't happened in two years.

Mhm.

That's honestly too much. And, uh,

pros and cons to needing to write almost every single

pilot an extension. Right. If you think that this is something that the

person's capable of, and it seems like

this is going to be

achievable, why not do the paperwork?

Mhm.

But the counterpoint to that is you shouldn't have to do that paperwork for

80% of the pilots that are going through. So

there's room for improvement. But

that's the policy that we're left with right now.

Yeah, and it's a little above our pay grade.

Exactly.

Those are things that they hopefully polish over time.

Exactly. And things are improving as well. Like

the binder that you need to complete has

evolved, and it's creating a

situation now where people are better trained. And

recently we upgraded a Sac with less than 500

hours on type. And I credit that to their ability as an

individual. Highly, uh, competent young man. And

he's also been given these opportunities

that were very prescribed

and laid out at the right intervals. And I think that he is a

sign of the success of the system and the fact that it is

evolving.

In the correct direction.

We're seeing that people are getting less and less flight time as we

move towards simulation and a bunch of different factors. So

it is important for those upgrade processes to become more and

more efficient.

Definitely.

So we often ask what a normal day looks like, but in

SAr, there are very few normal days. Can you tell us

what the schedule is like at 413 Squadron?

So there are a couple of caveats to this.

Like you said, what is normal? M. Um.

But when you walk in in the morning, if

you're on standby, you should expect that

you're going to be liable starting when

you first walk through the doors. And also before that, at 05:00 in the

morning, you can get a call as early as then. And then at 04:00

in the afternoon, you can be released from JRCC.

Assuming there's been no tasking in that.

Time, JRCC is the Joint Rescue Coordination.

Center, and then the night crew takes over.

Okay.

So at 04:00 in the afternoon, that's when, if

you're on what we call slash, um, you've done your

crew rest. You are at home on calL,

potentially going in on a night flight if that's what's

on the fly Pro, and then liable

completely overnight. Again, whether you're

airborne on a night trainer or asleep at home on your own bed

until 05:00 the next morning.

Okay.

That's when the day crew takes over. On the weekend,

it's a little bit different. So there is

a slash crew for the whole weekend, effectively,

and a backup crew. So when you're on standby,

historically, you've been on RP 30. So 30 minutes notice to

launch. When you're on slash, you're on RP Two, which is 2 hours

notice to launch. And when you're on backup, you're on RP Twelve. So

12 hours notice to launch.

Okay.

Those are airborne times. So coming along with that response

posture requirement is a geographic restriction for where you

can actually live. And, uh, that's true at all of the SAR

squadrons. So the larger

geographic area for Greenwood, if, uh,

memory serves, goes all the way out eastbound to Windsor.

That's right.

But for 413 Squadron, it only goes.

Out as far as Burwick.

So it's more restrictive in order to be able to meet

that two hour time frame.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So if you're on standby and it's a flying day,

usually you'll do two sorties, one in the morning, one the afternoon.

We like to get out and do lunch

somewhere else in order to be able to stretch our legs, get out of the

local area that we see all the time, especially at night.

We see it all the time. And then it also affords us more

opportunity to work with different boats. Our bread and butter

of what we do for training largely revolves around,

hey.

Can we get a boat? We try.

So we're working with the Canadian Coast Guard and with the

Coast Guard Auxiliary. And, um, when we do boat

camps, we also contract for boats sometimes just to get a lot

of variety to work in different conditions, work in different

geographic areas of the SRR.

What's the SRR?

The search and rescue region. Okay, so SRR Atlantic

encompasses all of

the Atlantic provinces, all of

Labrador, and a good chunk of

eastern and northern Quebec. And I believe

Quebec City is just outside and is in,

uh, sor. That's managed by Trenton as opposed

to by Halifax.

Okay.

So as well, when you're doing an Ron. So I remain

overnight. So the aircraft doesn't go to bed in the hangar at

home, it goes to bed somewhere else. And the crew

will generally be sleeping in hotels in SAR.

We'll get to that selling point in.

The future, and

we try to get.

Very good spread out coverage of where we're going

on those rows in order that by the time you're in AC,

you've seen most of the southern SRR, which is where we

do the vast majority of

our calls to. And then

on a night trainer, usually you'll just do the one sortie

and it'll be out to do a boat and

then back all on the same tank of gas, generally.

Okay.

Or land work again, really in a

reasonably small circle around the airfield.

Mhm.

And that's just probably doing some kind of confined area

work at night.

Yeah, confined areas and hoisting really are

the two big ones. Uh, sometimes we do airfield

work. We tend to try not to do night circuits just to be

good neighbors. If the weather is keeping us in Greenwood, though, we

end up doing a lot of confined areas in and around the

airfield, sometimes on a particular night.

And the reason that Paul's saying they're trying to be good neighbors is I

used to live in the PMQs in Greenwood, and when the cormorant goes

over, like, your dishes are shaking in the cupboards, it's

quite a powerful, loud aircraft.

It is, yeah. I was doing circuits one night with a

relatively junior fO, and the Facebook group for the

neighborhood that I live in is right under

downwind, and it was lighting up, and just,

uh, not understanding why we're doing

what we're doing really triggers some people.

Yeah, well, you got to get the training in at the end of the day.

Right.

You need to be competent and proficient.

That's it. Yeah.

And like I said, I do try to be a good neighbor, and I believe that everyone at the

squadron feels the same way. And, um, when we can

avoid it, we do avoid it.

M so what was the

hardest part.

Of the job when you started?

It was

realizing that you can't help.

Everyone and

finding the grace to give to

myself that this is just not something that we can

do tonight.

And trusting the AC was

just doing.

Everything that we could and sitting there in the other

seat for long enough, you see that people are working hard

to try and make things happen. And when we do turn missions off,

it's not done lightly. It's done for the safety of the crew and the safety of

the aircraft. One of the things that people

say in SAR is you shouldn't create a second

emergency.

Mhm.

And that's true. And you have to learn that early on,

even though it is not always the easiest pill to swallow.

You want to go out, you want to help people, you want to save lives. And

sometimes that just can't happen that night or that day, for whatever

reason.

Yeah, I imagine that would be really tough. I've

known SAR ACS who had to make that call,

and it really weighs on them.

It does, absolutely. I'm fortunate not to have

had that decision

myself.

Mhm.

To have to make that decision. But I've been part of a

crew when we have decided not to go, and there were good reasons. I've

been part of a crew where we had to delay the mission.

And you always feel better about that. It's like we

made the call, the safe call, and we went out later

and managed to do it anyway. And that worked out well.

So when you're first struggling with this,

how do you overcome that feeling?

Um, you just sit with it, really, and

sort of readjust

the way that.

You look at the job.

The job at the end of the day is bring home the crew.

If you can bring home the aircraft, even better. If you can save

a life, even better. But at the end of the day, if you haven't

brought your crew home.

You shouldn't have left.

The cormorant is an extremely capable aircraft,

including outside of the SAR world. Can you tell us about some of these

capabilities?

Yeah.

So it's quite a large aircraft. It's nicknamed the

flying School bus, and for good reason. If you were to put the

ramp down and if it were capable and, uh, ignoring

structural load issues, uh, if there weren't any seats in the back.

I drive a Mazda three. I can fold my mirrors in and drive it right

up the back and park it in the cabin.

It is huge.

It's massive. And it's difficult to understand

how large it is until you're standing beside it.

And the downwash

from it is substantial. It only has one disc.

When you say disc, you mean the disc shape that is made

by the rotor spinning?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

So it only has one main rotor system providing lift to the

aircraft. And because it's so heavy and because the

disc is reasonably small compared to its size, the

downwash is substantial. When I'm trying

to get the point across to people

who we're going to help, and I'm telling the crew

across the radio, we have Hurricane force

downwash that seems to get the message across well enough. But

otherwise, we've showed up to boats and they've had crab

traps and lobster traps all over the top. They've had

metal tables which have been blown over before by crews.

If it's not bolted down, it's leaving the deck.

Mhm. So it can lift a lot, it.

Can carry a lot, it can go quite far for a

helicopter. Its endurance is in the realm of five or

6 hours, depending on. Yeah, depending on how much fuel you're

able to take because of the payload. And

it gets relied on for a lot of SAR like things

that are not necessarily SAR. So we

spoke a little bit about the humanitarian missions already, but other things

that it does is it assists with exercises undertaken

by the NORAD community. So that's starting to

happen more often where we're asked to

preposition an asset in a part of the country where

it isn't normally in order to be able to respond

to a potential ejection if required.

So almost using you in like a combat support role.

Yeah, exactly. And that is going to

become more prevalent, I believe, as

the Sartex have been

removed from combat support and we are now

using medtechs in that role instead.

That's right.

I forgot about that. But Vic mentioned when we did his

interview that the role of combat

support and SAR are in the midst of some adjustment right

now.

That's right.

Yeah.

I'm very good friends with one of the CEOs of a, uh,

combat support unit, and they were telling me that the

medtechs are exceedingly capable people

and they're very good at their jobs and

they are not given enough

credit because they're not Sartex. And that's

the only thing that people see is the reduction in the capability,

where what we should be looking at instead is the

fact that they do bring all of these things to the table

that we just wouldn't have without them.

So the other things that we do sometimes is, uh, support

other components of the Canadian Forces. So

there are people in the forces who

do very demanding and kinetic activities that

require the ability to be evac

quickly and effectively if something were to go wrong,

and especially in a maritime environment, one of

the best tools for the job is a cormorant. So we will be asked sometimes

to assist with those things.

Okay.

The cormorant is a fairly complex helicopter.

Where do new pilots tend to struggle when they start on the

cormorant?

Energy management is something

that you have to learn early

on, and you have to learn very well. And it's

a huge step to move from a 412 to

a cormorant. We're talking maximum gross

weights of, uh, 11,900 pounds

for the Griffin, versus

14,600 kilos,

or 15,600 kilos if you're

taking a full fuel load on the cormorant.

So about triple what the Griffin can do?

That's right, yeah. So we can take

almost a Griffin worth

of, uh, fuel in the cormorant.

It's insane.

So that aspect of energy management

catches people off guard, especially in the early stages. So it's

important to just take things slow, take things step by

step. And you need to get good at

flying the machine without needing to think about it that

much in order to be able to later on

do all the mission management. And that's where

people will start to struggle, is as they're handed those

things. SAR is a

messy, gray,

nonlinear tree of decisions that you need

to make in order to affect an outcome. And it's always

changing, always changing. And that's one of

the things that, personally, I struggled with, is that I would have a really

good plan, and we would go and start to prosecute it, and then

things would change, and I

wouldn't allow myself the

flexibility to change my plan. Uh, and

that very quickly got beaten out of me in the fo three phase. But

when you're doing tabletop exercises, it's like we're going to go and do

this, and it's like, okay, cool.

And then when you have to go.

And do it in an actual

aircraft.

You need to be reactive without being.

Too reactive, if that makes sense. And just allow

the changing variables to feed into

your decision making loop and change your plan

accordingly if it becomes able

or necessary that you should do that.

So it sounds like, to me, I always ask,

where do people struggle? And then the big question is, how can they overcome

that?

Right?

It sounds like the only way to overcome this is

experience, practice training, experience.

Chair flying, and giving yourself the grace to learn

without beating yourself up about it.

Yeah, that would be huge. Especially when you were saying

you started out fairly rigid in your planning.

And it's hard when that doesn't work, when you have

an idea of how things are going to go and then it doesn't go that way.

That's right.

That can be really demoralizing.

Yeah. Your plan has to

change. It can be a great plan on the ground, but as soon as you get new

information, you need to make a new plan.

One thing I like that you've mentioned a couple of times is how important it

is to learn to fly the aircraft really well, because

eventually the whole point of it is to employ it in

a, uh, mission.

That's right.

That's a big thing that is different about flying in the

RCAF versus flying in the civilian world. If you're flying in the

civilian world, in most roles, your job

is to fly the aircraft. You're flying the aircraft to fly

something from A to B. So your main purpose is

flying in the RCAF. Often you're learning to

fly so that you can go accomplish a mission and use that aircraft

as a tool. So the flying part is just a means to an

end. The real meat and potatoes of what you're doing is

the tactics and employing that aircraft to get the job

done.

Yeah, and we see that crossover to the civilian

side of things. A little bit narrower, uh,

on the helicopter side, because there are people who do power

line survey, slinging, firefighting, long

lining, all of that kind of stuff is very

similar in that you're using the aircraft

to accomplish a task. It's not just you're taking off

from point a flying at, uh, cruise

altitude X, to end up at point

B with whatever the payload is.

But we take that to an extreme

in SAR. And when you're flying, for an

example, when you're flying IFR, IFR is

what you do to get to where you are going to do what you need

to do. And maybe what you're doing when you

finished that to then get home again afterwards.

Mhm.

So if you have to spend a lot of mental energy flying

IFR, then you're not going to have enough mental

energy to fly your mission in the middle of your

flight and do the thing that you need to be

doing, which is potentially a nightboat in

the.

Dark with fog

over the North Atlantic.

With flare illumination and an

aircraft somewhere above you, and

having the brain space to untangle all of those things

getting to and from on scene. It

needs to take so little of your bucket that

it's not impinging on the other thing that you need to.

Do when you get there. Yeah, for sure.

What is the strangest sarcall you've ever gone out

to?

I've rescued a couple of EPIRBs, which

is a, uh, Beacon. Basically, it's EPIRB,

but what it is is a beacon that

is released from a boat after it

sinks, potentially, or in the

cases that I've been involved in, it was knocked off or fell

off, somehow enters the water, self activating,

sends a 406 signal up to the SArSat,

comes down to CMCC Trenton, goes across to

JRCC Halifax.

CMCC M is the Canadian Mission Control center.

And they say, we have an EPIRB going off,

and we need you to go and investigate it and potentially

rescue whoever was on the boat that may or may not have

sunk. And in both cases, it's just like a,

uh, can of Folgers, except it's yellow and it has

an antenna, and, uh, it's just bobbing there in the waves

because it fell off of a boat. So that's the strangest one

I've been involved in. There are also people that have had to

find out that they were in a

landfill, like the EPIRB had gone off in a landfill after

it had been disposed of improperly.

Oh, no way.

Right.

So we're getting, as an organization, as

a larger SAR system, a lot better about identifying the fact

that it is in a landfill or in a dry dock and

not using SAR assets, primary

SAR assets, to investigate it as a real

emergency. There's some filtering that's

happening now.

Right.

Because that's a big use of resources.

Absolutely. It's expensive to launch a Hercules in a crew.

It's expensive to launch a cormorant in a crew. And what it means is

that asset is potentially unavailable

either then or later on for something that's actually

going on.

That's right.

Helicopters can go almost anywhere. What is the coolest

location you've ever landed or flown out of?

We flew out of Saglic in

northern Labrador. It's a disused airfield that was built by the

Americans during the war. It was part of the Atlantic crossing

routes.

Oh, you mean the VHF route that you can take?

Yeah.

So neither of us can remember the name of it, but essentially, there was a

bunch of stepping stones across the Atlantic from the days when

people couldn't fly just directly over the Atlantic Ocean.

That's right, yeah. And it also. It formed part of

the defense of North America as well at various points in

time. So we were staging out of there and

flying into the Torn Gat Mountains National park

with the permission and Cooperation of Parks Canada in

order to conduct mountain flying as an

exercise. So we would wake up in the morning, go

out and fly in those mountains, landing at, uh, various

locations, and, uh, then fly back at the end of

the day and stage there again for the following day. And we

did that. The squadron did that over a two week period and sent two

crews up. And that was where my

helicopter had a run in with the polar bear one night.

Yeah.

Well, you know what the next question I had was, what's

the craziest situation you've ever found yourself in on the Cormorant? So

I imagine that's the one.

So, woke up in the morning and was

told by the AC that our flight

engineer had gone down and done the walk around and that

the helicopter had been attacked by a polar bear. And I

just looked at him and I laughed because I thought he was joking. There's no way

this is real, right? Like, you got to be pulling my leg.

You thought this was, like, part of a scenario or something?

Absolutely. Or not even so much a scenario as

like, uh, let's see if we can get one over on, like, is he

awake today?

Yeah.

So turns out it was real. And, uh, I sent

you the link to that one. You can find it on the CBC.

It's still there.

And if anyone is interested in seeing some of those articles, we'll

be putting the links into the show notes.

That was pretty interesting.

And the response for how do we now

get helicopter parts up to

northernmost Labrador was really. It

was interesting in retrospect. It was frustrating at the time to watch

how the logistics had to unfold in order to get pieces

from Greenwood all the way up to Goose Bay and then from

Goose Bay all the way up to cyglic.

Yeah, that sounds like it would be pretty complex.

It was a little bit, um. Triple four squadron ended up bailing us

out, so that was great of them to do. Um,

and, uh, it just, again, goes to show that, uh, aviation is

a team sport.

Yeah, absolutely. So you've said to me in the

past that you don't get shot at. The weather is your enemy.

SAR in the Cormorant means you'll be doing challenging operations in

poor conditions. I would imagine that hoisting from a ship in bad

weather would be one of the most difficult situations. Can

you describe some of the dangers involved and what it feels like?

Yeah, that's where you make your money. You're there in

the hover. Maybe you have arrived from an overwater

transition down, which is allowing and

directing and supervising

and safeguarding the aircraft

automation to bring you down to

a hundred foot hover over whatever sea state

is underneath you and you can come

within a quarter mile using a radar paint

of your target, which in the case that we're talking about here,

is going to be a boat, quite large boat,

potentially, uh, a shipping vessel, a

cargo container vessel. And

at that point in time, as long as you can see

the 100ft down to the

water and you're quarter mile forward

corresponding to your radar paint, a, uh, light

which is illuminating the target from the target,

then you can proceed.

I don't know how that sounds to someone who has no experience flying over

the water, but to me as an Aurora pilot, that sounds

crazy.

It's horrifying. Yeah, absolutely. You're like sitting there

in the left seat with the AC, who probably has done

this 20 or 30 times

before in the right seat. And you're looking out the window

at that light and going, there's no way, man, why are

we doing this right now? And the answer is to try and save

someone. And the helicopter will keep you

safe and will allow you, if you

treat it nicely and use the automation the way it's

designed, to then close with that

vessel until you can fly off of

it visually, using a rat out hold function to

keep the collective in the appropriate position

so that the helicopter is going to

then descend or climb to an altitude

that you've set it to, corresponding to how high you want to be over

the deck of the vessel while you're hoisting. And

then the helicopter holds your heading

and you are now flying

against, uh, spring pressures. And

with the aircraft trimmed out, tracking it

in and out along a visual reference line over

the vessel which is.

Moving in the dark, you may or.

May not have a horizon because maybe the Herc broke that night, maybe

it's there and it's providing you flares, which gives you a horizon

inside your ping pong ball, which it's a game changer,

those flares. And you then will

put a live

person on that hook in the form of a

Sartech, hoist them out to the deck, which again

might be rising or falling 30ft, might be pitching

1520 degrees, depending on the sea

state, and put them onto the

vessel to then go and render medical aid or potentially

just put them on the vessel long enough to get someone into a rescue.

Basket and then do the whole thing.

Over again to get them off. So when you're doing your

insertion, generally what you do is you

insert two Sartex and a piece of equipment. So that's

three, move into the rest position,

wait for them to do what they need to do because you can't

afford to leave the hover because

it's such an intense

and difficult procedure to arrive back in that

position that you're better off just burning the

fuel instead of trying to

end up burning more fuel anyway to come back to that

position. And then you need to then go

in, recover a, uh, Sartech, the

equipment potentially from the rest if there's good guideline

available. And then the second

Sartech again. So you're doing this six times

in the pitch dark on night vision goggles. So you're

looking through toilet paper tubes now down and

right, and you are leaning out over your

seat probably three to six

inches. Your right shoulder is out

of the seat, your head is probably two

inches from the window, and you're looking down at like

a 30 degree angle at your references. Hopefully

you have the ability to scan up from time to time underneath your

goggles if you're wearing them. Some people tend not to, to look

at your horizon, which is supposed to be your primary reference, but let's be

honest, maybe it's not there. And you

have people who are dangling from a one,

uh, piece of cabling with a hook

on the end and trying not to bash them off the.

Side of the superstructure on their way up.

I just sort of tried to picture myself doing that

and it feels so uncomfortable and

so scary. The first time you do

that. It must be outrageous.

It's daunting, absolutely. But you don't

start in that situation. You end up there.

Right.

So that's how we get through our upgrade process, is to go and be.

Able to do that after maybe less.

Than 500, maybe more like 800 hours on

type. When you start out in Comox on the

OTF, you do it to the, uh, black duck,

which is. It's like a tugboat sort of situation.

And you're doing it in the Georgia Strait, which is a

relatively calm body of water because of how

confined it is being between Vancouver island and the mainland.

And you are generally doing it with a lot of cultural

lighting around and you're not doing it in

fog. There is training limits that apply as opposed

to the SAR limits. So you need to crawl

before you can walk. You need to walk before you can run. And what I

just described to you is running full tilt with your eyes

closed in the dark.

Yeah. Right.

So even when you open them, it's a little disorienting.

So that's as bad as it can ever get.

It's almost always better than that.

How does that feel?

It's daunting at first. Absolutely.

And when you're there, it's

tense and.

You need to be able to relax enough to be able

to do it right. Like it's all about fine motor control

and the interface that you have

with the machine. And so you're using

your proprioception in your joints. Hopefully you've

anchored your wrist to your thigh, you have

your feet guarding the pedals, but you're allowing the aircraft to

fly. Your heading, you have your hand on the

collective, but really it's the aircraft keeping you

out of the water. So all you need to think about now is

moving your fingertips and you just

think forward and right. And it doesn't

matter that the

boat is pitching, bobbing and

weaving, you're just flying your line in.

Mhm.

And as long as you can keep the helicopter steady and just make those fine

movements as you're doing it, everything is going

to be a lot smoother. It's when you start overthinking it, it's when

you tense up and allow gross motor control to

take over. That's when things start to go sideways.

And people can get hurt.

Yeah, that just sounds crazy. As a fixed

wing guy and as someone whose

distances are normally measured in hundreds of feet above

the water and much larger fractions of a mile

from a vessel, that's crazy.

Yeah.

So from a fishing vessel or like the Coast Guard

cutters, we tend to, uh, for

hoisting, be 35ft off the water when

you're doing a boat to something that small, simply to maintain

visual references.

Wow.

Uh, because when you lose those virtual references,

you lose the ability to not hit the boat for sure.

Right.

And we've had it before, and I was in the back of the

helicopter where we have settled onto a fiberglass antenna

and punctured a fuel cell. To my knowledge, that's only happened once in the

history of flying cormorants. But frankly, I'm

surprised that we don't hit more boats more often. And it comes down to the

training that we are provided

and the ability to practice that

we're given. And you know,

when you're coming up to a boat, whether today is going to

be a good day or not, based on how tense you're feeling

and based on how your reaction to the

conditions are going, and there are situations where you

just won't put a startech on the hook for training because

it's not worth it. So if you can get some dry runs, not

even necessarily putting the empty hook down,

maybe that's what you need for the night. Maybe that's your

small victory, and every little bit helps, right? It's

all about making sure that everyone can come home

in one piece at the end of the day. And for training,

there are some risks that just aren't acceptable.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Now, we just touched on this a little bit when you talked

about sometimes the training you get is not the

training you expected, but it can be enough. You've mentioned to me that

in SAR, even if the outcome isn't what we were looking for,

the mission can still be successful. Can you give me an example of this?

Yeah.

So, one of the missions that I flew, we went out to

the easternmost part of southern

Quebec, and We were looking for, uh, someone who had

been fishing from shore, and we didn't

end up finding them. They had

tied themselves to an anchor point. It was like a

lobster pot that had been weighted down, and we ended up finding

that. And it was night, it was dark.

We were able to be high enough and shine our light down enough.

And there was enough light that night as well,

that on the MVGs, we could see the bottom quite

clearly. And all the way to the drop off, we were

able to crawl around at

130ft, looking straight down, using the night

sun, determined positively that they just weren't there anymore.

And the night sun is like a super bright spotlight, right?

Absolutely, yeah. It's bright enough that one of the things that you

can't do is refuel the

helicopter if it's been on within.

30 minutes because of the heat it generates.

Because of the heat it generates.

Wow. Yeah.

So even though we didn't find that gentleman that

night, we were able to say that he wasn't there

anymore. Search is accomplished. Rescue

just couldn't happen.

Mhm.

And that's frustrating, but sometimes that's

the way it is.

Mhm.

And the reason for the listeners,

if I'm interpreting this correctly, the reason that that

can still be a somewhat positive mission outcome is

because without that certainty,

the search may go on for days, weeks,

depending on, I'm assuming, various conditions, and

the search can end up using assets and people for a much longer

period of time. Even though it's very unlikely that you

will find that person.

Right.

And more than that, it's

about the people that they've left behind.

So we are able to say positively

we found what he was using to anchor himself and

he wasn't attached to it anymore. And if he's not back on

shore, then he's somewhere else.

Yeah.

And that's really sad to have to say to someone, and I'm glad that I'm

not in the position and haven't been in the position to have to do that to

someone directly. But that's effectively the

conclusion that I came to and the information that I had to

relay through RCC and Ultimately

that hopefully provides a little bit of

closure.

Mhm.

A measure of closure, instead of just

wondering.

Yeah.

And so when he doesn't come home

and the SQ are out and they're scouring the

shoreline and he's not on the shoreline, what's the, uh,

de Quebec? It's the provincial police force. And when they've

scoured the shoreline and he's not on the shoreline, and the boats

have been out and they haven't found him, and the helicopter has been

out, and they see what's on the bottom that no one else has been able to get to

or look at yet, then hopefully

there aren't any more lingering questions.

What would you say are the most memorable flights you've had on the

Cormorant?

The ones where you take someone

who, you know, would have

died and successfully relay

them to the next level of care?

There are people who, hand on heart,

I can say that I and the

crew directly participated in

saving their life.

For real, not

hypothetically.

That's pretty amazing.

It is.

And that is job satisfaction. That's

as good as it gets.

Mhm.

Those, for me, are the flights that are most memorable is when I can look back at

it and think, yeah, we did that.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

What is the best day you've ever.

Had in the cormorant?

We had gone out to the ILA Mele

and taken a young boy who

was potentially having acute appendicitis

from an outlying island to the main island.

It was, uh, from a nursing station to a hospital sort of situation

where we were increasing the level of care he was going to be received so he could be

assessed properly. And hearing

from the guys in the back just how stoked he was to be

on the helicopter and how

it was such a big deal for him and his parents to be on

board and to be able to give that to them

where they wouldn't have been able to get across on a boat that night because of the

weather, and just realizing

that we were able to.

Do that for them. Yeah.

So just giving them that positive experience, and it's

kind of interesting. It's a combination of, like, they got to

enjoy the ride, but also they're able

to have that weight off their shoulders of, is our

son going to be okay? Are we going to be able to get him proper medical

care you guys were able to provide, right?

Yeah.

And looking in retrospect, he

was going to be fine. And from the way

that he was behaving on the aircraft, it was clear to the Sartex

that that wasn't what was going on.

But if it had been or if it had been allowed to

develop into that, then him being

off of that island that night instead of after the storm had

been through, whether it was the next day or the day after, that could have made a

huge difference.

Mhm.

What is the hardest day you've ever.

Had on the cormorant?

There was a mission where we did, where there

was a fishing vessel that was sinking,

uh, the Mucktown girl. And it was off of the

coast of Kanso in Nova Scotia,

sort of south and east of Cape Breton.

And, um, it had

been towed by the Canadian Coast

Guard and the tow line broke because of the conditions

and it started taking on water.

And so everyone zipped up their immersion suits and hopped into

the life raft. And then while

they were getting off of the life raft

and onto the Coast Guard vessel,

four of them made it onto the deck and one

of.

Them made it into the water

and we found him,

which is good. But

when we took

him out of.

The water and brought him into the cabin and the Sartex were doing

CPR on him in the back, that's when it

became real that not everyone

that we bring into the helicopter is going to walk off of

it. Uh, and

that was a challenging day for

me. It was a challenging day for the Sartex

in the back. And just the randomness of

it, that's what I think I had, uh,

trouble with the most was why

was it this guy? Why didn't he make

it onto the deck?

Yeah, because they were basically home free.

Yeah, pretty much after a bunch of really

crazy incidents.

That's right.

And then we were going anyway

because they like to be

proactive with getting a cormorant into the air. Like I said, we have

2 hours to do it and then we have whatever

transit time it's going to take to get there. So by the time

this vessel needing a tow turns into

the situation where there's a man in the water now, if enough

time has elapsed, then the outcome isn't always

guaranteed. And that's sort of what we ran into that day.

Yeah.

And it comes back to the idea that

you can't save everybody. And struggling, um, with

that early on and reframing it made dealing with that incident

earlier, but it still took some.

Time to work through. Yeah.

How did you work through that incident in particular?

That one in particular? I took a day off.

Yeah.

That's what it comes down to when you're a shift worker,

you end up with days that you can sort

of place on the schedule as days off, where if you were meant to be.

In the office, you're not.

You use one of the days that you're out instead. And I

just went and spent time with the family, and that's what it's always

been for me, is, um, not

getting away from work or disconnecting from work

necessarily as the solution to these things,

but just getting the break and taking the pause that you need

to be able to come back to it fully.

Yeah.

As, uh, we've been talking about. Unfortunately, USAR folks

do see times where people don't make it. What is the most

preventable way you see people lose their lives?

It comes back to life jackets and

the decision whether or not to wear them. For me,

it's an easy yes, and I don't know where the line is between being on

a ferry in BC where I don't actually need a life jacket, and I'm

comfortable walking around on that boat, not needing one,

and being in a, uh, kayak. And

it just boggles my mind to see people

paddling around national parks without wearing them or

canoeists sitting on them to make a cushion because

the seat of their canoe is hard and it's hurting their butt.

I know people who have drowned because they weren't wearing their

life jackets, and I've searched for people all night

who have drowned because they weren't wearing their life jackets.

And it's a topic of conversation

that happens a lot in the cockpit and in the

lines of the Sur units when you go out and you're looking for someone who's

fallen overboard and it's like, well, were they wearing a life jacket?

And you feel for the family

of these people who end up in the water, they're not wearing a

life jacket. It's the North Atlantic. Like, it's got to be four

degrees.

Maybe, and it could get up double.

Digits later on in the year, like in the summertime.

But it's an unforgiving environment, and

not choosing to do everything you

can to.

Get out of that water just doesn't make sense to

me.

Yeah, we used to get briefed on the survival times

before every mission we flew over the Atlantic.

And without a survival suit, a lot of the year it's

minutes. So if you aren't wearing a life

jacket and you can't be easily recovered,

you're in trouble.

And something that people don't think about is the gasping

reflex.

Right?

So if you're not floating while you're

gasping, it's not going to go well for you.

So if you can keep your head above the water by

wearing a life jacket for long enough to get your

first scream out, and if you're in the water for 15

minutes while the boat's going the wrong way and someone notices and then they turn

around, your ODs are way better than waiting for a

cormorant to come and find you in the middle of the night. It's just

not going to go well.

Yeah.

All right, we're going to switch to a little bit of a, uh,

lighter fare in 30 seconds or less. If

I'm a pilot in training, why should I want to fly the Cormaron?

What makes it unique and who would it appeal to?

The direct impact that you can have on

people's lives is

huge for job satisfaction.

And if that appeals to you,

I don't need to say anything else.

If you want another reason,

it's the largest helicopter

that I know of that someone

was going to give the keys.

To you and say, go have lunch with your

crew. That's awesome. Yeah.

We're down to the last three questions. We always ask

these questions. What is the most important thing you do

to keep yourself ready for your job?

Everyone talks about getting in the books,

and that's true. So I'm going to pick something different. Get the rest you

need and get the recharge that you

need. When we have the opportunity to take

vacation, I always do. When we have the

opportunity to do things as a family, I

always do. And in Sar, where

shift work is challenging to manage,

sometimes in terms of family obligations, in terms of

lining up with regular weekends, you need

to take those opportunities with two hands and make the most of them.

So that's something that I've always made a conscious effort to do,

and I think it served me really well, and I

recommend it to anyone. Take the time you can with your family

to do everything that you can together.

Yeah.

You can't say this enough. The job in the Air

Force, it's never ending. And if you're not careful,

it will take over your life. You are responsible for

setting those boundaries and for making sure that you're

striking a balance, because there's

always going to be a call for you to come in and

do the job. You have to make sure that you're balancing

that.

That's right.

And give that same ability to the.

People who work for you. Mhm.

That's a really good point.

What do you think makes a good pilot?

The trick, and I'm still learning it, of

knowing when your best that day

isn't going to be good enough.

That day, if you wake up and.

You'Re tired, maybe you can push through.

Maybe it's a bad idea.

That's a judgment call.

Mhm.

And you want to put yourself in a situation

where you don't need your superior

skill to get you out of a situation that your

judgment put you in.

Mhm.

Yeah, I've heard that saying before and it's

such a good one. Everyone wants to be a hotshot

pilot. We all want to work hard and

be the best in the business. But

hopefully, like you've said, you're not putting yourself in a position

where you're using everything you have

because all it takes is a little extra and now everything you

have is not enough.

Yeah, that's right. That's not to say that you need to be

at 110% every day when you walk into work. Like there are

days where 90% Is all you

have and 90% is going to be fine, but you need to know

when that 90% is not going.

To be enough, which is a real check your

ego kind of situation.

Yeah.

Staying humble is key.

Yeah.

And like we say, aviation is a team sport. If you

need to call someone up to fill the roster instead of you, then

do it.

All right, we're down to our last question. I want you to picture

a young pilot, maybe one of the pilots you'll be teaching

soon at the school. If you had to give advice

to a new pilot, what would that be?

Don't leave anything on the table. When you

are in training, the

single most important thing that you can

do is decide that your

training is important. If you're

going through it and you're wishy washy about it, or if

you're going through it and you

decide, you know what? Maybe I don't need to study for that

test.

It's going to bite you.

And you don't want to be the guy

who at the end of the day has questions, did I

work hard enough for this? You want to work as hard

as you need to every time you need.

To and show up ready to go. Yeah, absolutely.

There is no room for doing it halfway.

That's right.

Okay, that's it for our questions today. Paul, I just want to thank

you so much for being here. Uh, I really enjoyed learning

more about what you folks do in the Cormorant. Uh,

I feel humbled thinking about some of the things

that you take on and. Yeah, just thanks so much for being

on the show.

Yeah, thanks, Brian.

All right, that's going to wrap things up for our chat with Paul about

search and rescue on the Cormorant. For our next

episode, we'll check back in with our guest from

episode 15, Scott Harding. At the time,

Scott was on phase one grobe. He has now

completed phase two, as well as his phase three

multi engine course. So we'll find out what life was like for him

as a student and where he's heading next. Do you

have any questions or comments about anything you've heard on the show, or would

you or someone you know make a great guest? Do you have some great

ideas for a show? You can reach out to us, uh, at

thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com.

We'd also love for you to check out our social media, where

we post videos for every episode we make

featuring footage from RCAF, Air crew and

members. And those are all found at at

Podpilot Project. It's hard to believe,

but we have been putting out the show now for one year.

We just want to thank all of our listeners for coming along on this

adventure with us. It has been humbling. It has been

a learning experience, but it has been so much fun.

And without you, the show would really be meaningless. So, from the

bottom of my heart, thank you so much for joining

us with that, we will close by asking

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