Episode 46: The Div Commander: Commanding 1 Canadian Air Division as it prepares for the future and flying the CH-146 Griffon and CH-147 Chinook Part 1
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Bryan:Hey, everybody. This is your host, Brian Morrison, with a quick note. We have decided to start adding a blanket disclaimer for any episode where we interview a high level officer from the RCAF. We live in a twenty four hour news cycle, and comments can be overtaken by events very quickly. So to put a time frame on things, this interview was made in late February.
Bryan:Alright. We're ready for departure here at the pilot project podcast, the best source for stories and advice from RCAF and mission aviation pilots brought to you by Sky's Magazine. I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is major general Chris McKenna, a pilot in the RCAF and current commander of one Canadian Air Division or one CAD. Chris, welcome to the show.
Bryan:We're excited to have you here today.
Chris:Hey. Thanks very much, Brian. Really excited to do this today.
Bryan:Today for part one of our chat with Chris, we are going to talk about his early career, his deployments to Afghanistan, and his time as CEO of four fifty Tactical Helicopter Squadron. But before we get into any of that, let's go through Chris's bio. Chris McKenna joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1994 initially as an army reservist and then attended the Royal Military College of Canada receiving his degree in chemical and materials engineering in 1999. He also holds a master's degree in defense studies from the Royal Military College of Canada, which he attained in 02/2013. Chris earned his RCAF pilot wings in 02/2002 and served as a rotary wing tactical aviation and special operations aviation pilot in the RCAF.
Bryan:He has commanded at the flight, squadron, wing, and task force level and has served in a variety of command and staff positions, including postings in Canadian Special Operations Forces Command or CANSOFCOM units, RCAF HQ, and in the Canadian Joint Operations Command or CJOC HQ. Chris deployed twice to Bosnia in 02/2004 as part of NATO stabilization force and twice to Afghanistan with KANSOVCOM in 02/2005, '2 thousand '6 and as officer commanding or OC Chinooks in 02/2011 flying in support of Canada's combat mission. In 02/2019, he deployed to Africa as the commander of Canada's Air Task Force or ATF as part of the UN's multidimensional integrated stabilization mission in Mali. Chris commanded four fifty tactical helicopter squadron from 02/2014 to 02/2016 flying the CH one forty seven f Chinook, and he commanded one wing, the RCAF's tactical aviation wing from 2020 to 2021. From 2021 to 2024, he served as the RCAF's director general of Air and Space Force development, working to set the requirements and coordinate the acquisition for several key new RCAF capabilities such as the CC three thirty Husky multirole tanker transport or MRTT, the P8A Poseidon, and the MQ9B remotely piloted aircraft system or RPAS.
Bryan:Chris has over twenty six hundred flying hours in both special operations and conventional rotary wing aircraft. He is a graduate of the Canadian Army Command and Staff College, the Joint Command and Staff Program or JCSP, the National Security Program or NSP, and he has earned US Army senior aviator wings. Chris is an officer of the order of military merit and has been awarded the Meritorious Service Cross and the Meritorious Service Medal. Chris was promoted to his current rank of major general in 02/2024 and currently fills the role of commander of one CAD, commander of Canadian NORAD region, joint force air component commander, commander of search and rescue region Trenton, and also operational airworthiness authority. He is married to a retired Canadian Army Health Services officer, and they have two lovely young girls.
Bryan:So let's talk about Chris's career, we'll start with his early days. Chris, you joined the CAF in 1994 as infantry in the reserves serving with the Canadian Grenadier Guards. What motivated you to join the CAF?
Chris:Yeah. Thanks, Brian. I appreciate the intro. And, yeah, I think I joined because of my family linkage to, service. So I had a grandfather who was in the infantry in World War two and landed on d day.
Chris:And he lived to be a hundred. So I actually got to know him really well. He only passed away about ten or twelve years ago. And I think he was a big sort of motivator in my life in terms of serving Canada and serving in our armed forces. And I I joined into the infantry probably because of him, and I spent about eighteen months as an infantry reservist, in Montreal.
Bryan:Okay. So you attended RMC and received your degree in chemical and materials engineering. What made you pursue this field of study?
Chris:Yeah. I, well, I wanted to be an engineer, in in terms of a degree program, and I wanted to I was sort of really interested in STEM. I'd gone through high school in in Quebec and Montreal, and I'd I'd done Sageup for two years there at a civilian Sageup before I applied to RMC. And I was really sort of more inclined towards the science and engineering. You don't get selected really for what engineering you're going to take until after your first year.
Chris:And the subjects that were sort of offered, they did not have an aeronautical program actually when I went for RMC. I think I would have taken that had I had one. I guess the normal surrogate would have been mechanical, but I was much more interested in some of the work, the aviation linked work that chemical was doing. They did neutron radiography on the horizontal stabs from f eighteens. They're looking at some interesting nondestructive testing things.
Chris:That kinda really kind of inspired me to to study in that engineering field. And to be honest, I loved it. It was an absolutely great program.
Bryan:Yeah. That sounds actually really interesting. I wouldn't have thought they would be doing some of that kind of, stuff at RMC, be honest.
Chris:Yeah. There's a small reactor there called the Slowpoke that, that is used for for sort of science and for engineering. And I I ended up doing my thesis in nuclear things. So it was just really it just interested me personally. I didn't think it would have massive application into a flying career, but it I certainly have benefited from spending some time in in engineering.
Bryan:Yeah, that sounds really cool. At this point, you were enrolled as a pilot in the regular forces. What started your passion for aviation and why did you pursue it in the CAF?
Chris:Kind of probably a funny story, Brian. I think my I loved serving in the CAF. Like I really liked being in the army, but I had done about a year and a half of this and I was on my infantry, basic course. And near the end of it, you do this long concentration of sort of offensive operations since we're doing, like, attack after attack as company as a company. And, we were supported by f eighteens on a particular attack.
Chris:And I can remember sitting there freezing cold in my little, shell scrape that I had to dig, thinking that there was probably a better way to serve Canada, and that F eighteen pilot's role looked a heck of a lot better than my current role. And in in that summer as well, we also had, Kiwis come and support F City air assault operations. So it really piqued my interest to be a tachel pilot as I spent my first ride in a military helicopter, in a military aircraft was actually in a RCF UE.
Bryan:So how did you end up applying to be a pilot then? Cause at that time you were in the reserves, right?
Chris:I was, yeah. You could do a component transfer at the time and that's pretty much what I did. I conducted my, they took some of my, I guess, CFAD scoring, etcetera. And I went to the recruiting center, did my application for OTP. And they offered me the opportunity to become a pilot.
Chris:They basically said, you know, here's the things that your scores will allow you to apply for. What are you interested in? An Axiopilot wasn't my first choice, believe it or not. It was like a second or third. And then they sent me off for a crew selection and it obviously went well and ended up as a pilot.
Bryan:What was your first choice out of curiosity?
Chris:It was actually infantry, which is weird. So maybe this is why I steered down the path towards attack aviation, but I was actually really interested in that. I think it would have been a really interesting career, but I'm I'm really happy with the choice that I made.
Bryan:Yeah. For sure. It's crazy to think that you put infantry as your first choice and they even bothered to send you to aircrew selection because I had always heard when I was joining anyways, like, okay. If you're interested in combat arms, that's great. Maybe put it down from one of your backup options.
Bryan:But if you put that as number one, that's where you're going.
Chris:I'm not sure how it's right now, Brian, but certainly at the time, I mean, I had the scores, I guess, to go into the to aviation. And it's funny. I look at so many of my friends and colleagues who I went through flight training with. So many of them were air crew were air cadets. So many of them had like just a passion for aviation from like age four, you know, they saw their first airplane.
Chris:I didn't have that actually. I I I sort of was inspired by my lot in life in the army and decided I there was something better.
Bryan:So you earned your pilot's wings in 02/2002. What were your initial impressions conducting flight training in the RCAF?
Chris:I mean, they were really positive. Like I I did my, I was on the Slingsby Firefly in '97, did my, my initial, sort of the basic flying training course. And it was it was a really good course. I had a really tight team, but there was a really high failure rate on it. We lost about fifty percent of our people on that course, for a variety of reasons, air sickness or just, just skill set, etcetera.
Chris:So I, it was a bit of a nerve racking thing. It was a good introduction as we all have gone through that. Those of us who have wings, it was a good introduction of what was coming in Moose Jaw. And then I was the second, I think, course on the Harvard two. And so I was right at the tipping point between the tutor and the Harvard.
Bryan:Okay.
Chris:And so we sort of showed up and it was a little bit disorganized still, right? There were still some courseware challenges to work through, etcetera. And some growing pains on the aircraft that had a bit of an incident on the aircraft with an oil coolers. So was a bit of a delay in my course. But other than that, the actual training itself was extremely professionally delivered.
Chris:It was very challenging for me. Like I had done a lot of time, in engineering and all that kind of stuff, but I had not done a lot of flying. And so I had colleagues left in front of me who had had a pretty good background as either glider pilots or, or fixed wing pilots in the cadets. And they certainly I looked to them to to help me along. I was not the strongest pilot on my pilot car, so I'll be honest.
Bryan:Did you have any particular challenges?
Chris:I think for me, the instrument flying, like the rate the dealing with the rate of speed with the instrument, aspects, which definitely steered me towards helicopter in the end. I was on course with a bunch of great folks, including Jeremy Hansen, our astronaut right now. Oh Jeremy is a, was a class of mine at RMC and he was a coursemate of mine and was clearly the best pilot on course. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna mince words about that. But he, he helped a lot of us.
Chris:Like he really did reach out and mentor a lot of us in a way that is just just Jeremy's personality.
Bryan:That's awesome.
Chris:So we had a very tight team and we and we brought each other through the course. I think we had just one failure actually on the course. So it actually worked out pretty well.
Bryan:Well, flight training is definitely a team sport. Right? I mean, it should be anyways, especially on these courses. Like, there's obviously gonna be the individual effort that you have to put in, but it's a way, way better experience. We have a tight course that helps each other.
Chris:100%.
Bryan:Yeah. So you guys were one of the first courses on the Harvard two. Were you excited to fly the new aircraft, or were you, like, bummed out that you had missed out on the jet time?
Chris:You know, it's you know, it's funny. I I'd actually had four, five, five rides in the Tudor. So I'd done an OJT in Winnipeg. And, if you're gonna laugh at this, but lieutenant Kenny, so general Kenny as lieutenant Ken, was on OJT waiting for his f 18 course at the time. And I was this random officer cadet just sort of hanging out ops.
Chris:I do it on my on the job training. And and general Kenny, I guess, took pity on me or something, but he he took me flying. I've I've reminded him about this a few years ago that my first number of flights on the on the tutor were with him. As you know, introduction to aerobatics, introduction to more G than I'd experienced to date. And then, but I was really excited to be one of the first folks on the T6 on the Harvard.
Chris:And so, and it was, they were pretty shiny and new. They had like dozens of hours on them when I started flying them. And that was awesome. And we certainly, I don't know. We said we had a great it was a great vibe in Moose Jaw because things were all brand new and and a lot of fun.
Bryan:Yeah. They're really cool aircraft. I've said that many times, but I love the Harvard.
Chris:Me too.
Bryan:So when you were selected Hilo, was that what you were hoping to go?
Chris:Yeah. So I I was probably the most popular guy on my, on my phase two course. Because like from day one, when they ask you what you wanna fly, I was, I had done OJT at four zero eight Squadron in Edmonton for like almost two years because we had to wait a long time for our course, because of the transition between fleets. And so I was sure that I wanted to fly tac aviation. And so I put my hand up day one saying helicopters, please.
Chris:And so I think that for those in the course who are looking for a fighter slot or a rotor or a multi engine slot, you sort of become non dangerous to them, which is good. So I was I was pretty sure of what I wanted to do. And I'll be honest, I'm really happy with the choice I made. I I've had a great career flying helicopters.
Bryan:Yeah. We've kinda talked about that, that that was something you've been inspired to do since your infantry days. So that's, that's awesome.
Chris:Yeah. Absolutely.
Bryan:So let's talk about your time in Bosnia. You'd applied to Bosnia as a copilot for NATO peacekeeping missions as part of NATO stabilization force in the area. Those missions were notorious for putting peacekeepers in difficult situations. What were your experiences like there?
Chris:It was it was a great mission, for a young copilot. So I had gotten my wings, in 02/2002, and then I I pretty rapidly got my Griffin qualification after I got posted to four zero eight Squadron. And they were on the hook to ramp up and go to Bosnia. And we were doing fifty six day tours there. So two month tours and rotating through.
Chris:And so I did two of those. And it was in the 'three, 'four timeframe. So theater was quite stable, would say relatively safe. A lot of mines obviously on the ground.
Bryan:Yeah.
Chris:But very little kinetic anything. It was like kind of like being a cop in a bad town. It's would be my best way to describe it. And really the things we're focused on from an aviation point of view were human smuggling, and there was a fair bit of that. We spent a lot of time on the border, moving along, like flying at night on NVG with the searchlight, just looking to see if there was any smuggling and be able to cue ground forces to go and deal with that.
Chris:And then weirdly, and this was not intuitive, illegal logging. So I spent a lot of time looking for logging operations that weren't permitted. And then you'd get over top of it and be like, I can't see if they have a permit. You'd sort of call it in and figure out how the ground call signs can go in and investigate it. But there was a lot of crime, a lot of, like a lack of judiciary and a lack of constabulary in the country.
Chris:And so you were sort of filling that void as a peacekeeper at that point in the in the mission. The the biggest thing for me from an aviation point of view was, like, I learned a lot about weather, in in Bosnia. It was extremely challenging. Like, the weather stations were not, were not really good. You didn't have great, weather products to plan off of.
Chris:And you spend a lot of time in the low level environment on low level transit routes that sometimes puts you, very, very close to the ground. And that that country is is highly industrialized, full of wires. And so it is sort of graduate level decision making. And I was a copilot, so I watched my aircraft captain sort of move through that. And I got great mentorship as a young person in a really difficult operating environment from just aviation weather and aviation risk point of view, which I think is an awesome place to start.
Bryan:Yeah. I mean, those are the building blocks of decision making. Right? Like, those are your that's your bread and butter as a pilot is being able to make good decisions around weather conditions and obstacles and all those kinds of things. Right?
Bryan:So it kind of sounds like it was consolidating some of the training you would have received earlier.
Chris:Yeah. It was huge. Absolutely. And there were some hallmark events that occurred, like big visits of British royalty to a sort of hallmark project that were occurring. So we did do some security sort of event type stuff, sort of flying overwatch when I believe it was Prince Philip was visiting.
Chris:So it was actually really quite fun and exhilarating kind of work. And fifty six days you're in and out and then you get to come back and do it again. So I had two different sort of climactic sort of seasons that I was able to experience there. And I I just got a lot out of it. I think it accelerated my upgrade aircraft captain just that those those five months in theater, four and a half months.
Bryan:Yeah. Yeah. Deploying as a young FO is a really great opportunity for that as well to really accelerate your on the job training, get your OJT moving along quickly. And you just get a lot of experience in a compressed amount of time.
Chris:100%. The other thing on the Griffin, it's always been maligned a little bit as underpowered. And, many of the LZs we were going in and out of were very vertical. And so you'd have the power management of, and the finesse required to make sure that you could get in and out of these places with the passenger loads you had. Like, it really was an instructive thing for me as a young pilot be able to sort of manage the power on the Griffin and figure out some techniques to get in and out of these these tight confined areas.
Bryan:Which I imagine probably served you well throughout your your career in, tac hell, especially on the Griffin.
Chris:Yeah. A %. Absolutely.
Bryan:Next, started to make your way into the soft world. You applied and then tried out for b flight of four two seven special operations aviation squadron in early two thousand five. What was that selection process like for you?
Chris:It was, pretty exhilarating actually. I'd never worked with Kansoff before. And just for context, at that point, forty seven as a squadron hadn't moved across to become a special operations squadron. So all that really existed in terms of aviation support for JTF two was was B Flight four twenty seven, and four twenty seven Squadron was still considered a normal tachel squadron.
Bryan:Okay.
Chris:About one year later, it flipped over. One Feb of twenty six is when the squadron became a soft squadron, and everyone else had to sort of, you know, up their game into that mission set. And it's taken quite a while to consolidate that, but they're in a very different place now than we were back then. So it was a tryout and they only had a couple of spots per year, probably not unlike what the snowbirds do. Know, they have two or three folks who rotate out a year.
Chris:And so they offered to fly me out to, I believe it was Victoria. And we were, they were doing maritime counter terror, that is to say inserting assaulters onto ships, moving or stationary ships to do non compliant boardings. And so very challenging mission set. It certainly made me appreciate our brothers and sisters who fly the cyclone. It's a really unforgiving environment.
Chris:So they were doing that as a large training evolution for about six weeks. And they brought out two new pilots, myself and another friend of mine, who was actually already at four twenty seven but not not in the soft flight. And they, the way they evaluated us was rudimentary, I guess, based on what they do now, it was a much more rigorous process now. But they essentially went through a bunch of their lesson plans on how you do dynamic insert extract with the Griffin and what the techniques are. And it's a very different hands and feet and power management thing.
Chris:And so we walked through it in slow time with a lot of lectures. And then we did a very brief sort of familial, like a demo. And then we launched out and we set up and they conducted a demo, to a ship at anchor. And so they had the HMCS Annapolis along the FDU Pacific jetty in Exuenalt. And so the evaluator who was one of the standards guys from the flight showed me what a dynamic insert profile looked like.
Chris:And then, and then said, Any questions? And then he handed me control and like the doors were off and I'm flying on. I'm in an emergency for the first time. So all super uncomfortable. I'd never had to fly like that, before.
Chris:And then he said, Okay, show me one of those. So we did that for about an hour. And so just to see, and it was really an instructional trip. They wanted to see I think that you could learn something new and that you could adapt to sort of new techniques for power management, to make sure that you could be dynamic in the insert phase. I I didn't feel like I did super well, I'll be honest, Praia, but I think I did well enough.
Bryan:Yeah. Was there any form of special forces selection after that at that time, or was that not part of the process yet?
Chris:So at the time there was an interview with the flight commander, which I had done. And there was that, that evaluation period. And we actually stayed out there for longer than that. I had that one flight. And then we stayed out there for about a week, just to sort of see what the exercise was like and they got a sense of who we were.
Chris:And then they said, yeah, we're going to, at the end of the week, we're going to take you into the flight so you can expect to post in the summer. And then obviously move my family and we posted into Petalawa. And then I conducted my course in the summer of 'five. And so I think at the time it was about 12 or 15 ALPs, Air Lesson Plans. And so we did that course throughout that summer.
Chris:And then I was qualified as a, so I went from aircraft captain as a tech help pilot. I stepped down now as a co pilot for special operations aviation. As you learn all the different other things other than just hands and feet of insert, it's all the roles and missions you have to be expected to do.
Bryan:So what would you say was the biggest change as you transitioned from conventional tactical helicopter aviation to special operations?
Chris:I think the expectation of readiness, was the first one. So you're on a very short notice to move and once you're qualified and you've got, you've closed the experience gap with the key mission sets, you're expected to hold standby. And, and it's a very short notice thing. Like you were certainly not having a beer when you're on that. And you were certainly not very far from home or the base when that is occurring.
Bryan:Okay.
Chris:And so you really have to adapt your lifestyle. It's like being a star pilot, in many regards, you're just ready to go all the time. And that changes the way you live your life quite honestly. And I think people don't really understand that until they're in that. They realize, okay, I have some non discretionary things in my life now that I can't really give up.
Chris:And then just the way you think about where all your kit is, how it's placed, how you can shave seconds off of being in the air. It's really all about getting people onto the target to do something like a domestic counter terror mission. And really that was the focus of the flight back then. It wasn't so much international. They hadn't done anything in Afghanistan or overseas.
Chris:They were really focused on hostage rescue and domestic counterterror events.
Bryan:Okay. Speaking Afghanistan, after your conversion to SOF aviation in the February, you were deployed to Kandahar with Joint Task Force two or JTF two for seven months as an aviation planner and liaison officer. This was for the JTF two based Special Operations Task Force or SOTF that was based in Kandahar City in a compound downtown, not at the airfield. What was the task force mission at the time and what did your job involve there?
Chris:Yeah, was a bit of a baptism by fire. I had gotten qualified and then they were, the special operations task forces into Kandahar had been going since about 02/2005. And there was a rotation coming up that they were gonna, they decided they needed, once they did their first rotation there, that they needed more aviation planning expertise. And they needed someone who was dedicated to that role because they couldn't really do it from where they were. So while the task force itself based in the city was really going after insurgent networks, both in the province and outside the province, in Kandahar Province.
Chris:And they had a bit of a focus on the city. As you might recall, the Canadian conventional task force was coming in and they were coming down from Kabul just after Christmas of 'five and into 'six. And they were gonna establish themselves in Kandahar. And they were gonna operate in Zari Panchay and in Kandahar City and establish a really big footprint of three ish thousand Canadians who were gonna be operating there. And the insurance policy to that was having software.
Chris:So they could go after, you could imagine, IED manufacturing cells, you can go after insurgent leadership. And that was their role. And my role in that was when they would launch into an operational planning cycle, I was expected to go and source rover wing aviation, fixed wing aviation, any, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets needed to support that mission. And then fires assets. So fighters or like an AC-one 30 gunship, that kind of thing.
Chris:Wow. And so I spent all of my time, actually I lived at the airfield, but I would go back and forth all the time to finalize the planning. And some of these missions would come together quite honestly from a trigger to like I think four or five hours later, they would be rolling out and they needed that support really fast.
Bryan:That's intense.
Chris:It was quite a dynamic job.
Bryan:Yeah. No kidding. What was it like to work on the ground with JTF two as a young air force officer?
Chris:Yeah. I wanna be clear. I wasn't on the ground in the sense I wasn't, like on the on the X or whatever with them. I was in a support role. So I was either downtown at the main operating, at the Fort operating base that they occupied, or I was at the airfield.
Chris:From my point of view is I really had to up my game in terms of detail. The expectation of a a carefully choreographed, raid on a bad guy compound requires, you know, unbelievable precision, and you need a lot of enablers to make that happen. Very specifically, ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets. That is to say like a like an like an a remotely piloted aircraft in the sky with a camera looking at looking at the the target area. And it required, FIRE's platforms and rotary wing platforms to either do, like an assault role to move someone onto a target or to provide fire support.
Chris:And so I spent a lot of time in the deep details of every plan to make sure that not just the plan itself was serviced, but all of the branches and sequels that could occur if something went wrong just because there's so much at stake. Mhmm. Typically, these were very high risk missions that our guys are going to execute on behalf of Canada, and they deserved and needed, really responsive, air and aviation support. So that was a, that was a real life.
Bryan:So this was a pretty violent tour. What challenges and formative experiences did you have as a result of this?
Chris:I would say fatigue management was the first one. It's an extremely intense experience and there was no leave in the middle of it or anything. I was just straight seven months in a combat job. And I was one of one. I lived on Counter Airfield.
Chris:I had a certain major that worked with me, a master warrant officer who was the other sort of liaison officer for the ground side of things from JTF-two. And Kim and I would coordinate all of these aspects, but we couldn't really spell each other off. Like I couldn't really speak ground maneuver in the way that he could, and he couldn't really speak air maneuver and fires and ISR and all that stuff the way I could. We did our best, but I'll tell you, like, just managing the tempo and the speed. And then the second one would be flexibility.
Chris:Like, you'd be down a path planning for, like, six or eight hours. Like, you have you're pretty much ready to execute. You get pretty emotionally wedded to that plan. And then the entire op environment was so dynamic that it could change 90 degrees the target you're going after, the operational area, the assets you had at your hands, it would shift. And you had to just sort of park that emotionally and just move and pivot and execute.
Chris:So to me, that was the two big ones, fatigue management, and being flexible in your in your execution.
Bryan:Yeah. And I imagine learning about that flexibility and execution really served you well as you move forward with your career in tactical aviation.
Chris:Yeah. Absolutely, it did.
Bryan:Yeah. So you've alluded to this a little bit, but you were living on the airfield. You were working in Kandahar City. So a unique experience you had for a young pilot was spending lots of time in convoys in Kandahar City, which as you have put it, could get spicy. Did you have any particularly tense stories from being in these convoys?
Chris:Yeah. They're all a bit tense, think. And I, you know, I I don't know, if you play a contact sport, Brian, but I played rugby. I played rugby as a as a younger guy. A lot of a lot of Canadians played hockey.
Chris:There's a sort of feeling you get before you go and play like a pretty big hockey game or rugby game. Like you get that feeling when you get into the convoy, because there's a couple of things as an Air Force officer, it's not your normal operating environment, right? So you were sort of going into a domain that is not your comfort zone. And so there's a bunch of skill sets that we don't necessarily have. Like I'll tell you that the training that was provided to me from a shoot move, communicate point of view prior to going is probably the best training I've received in my entire career in the CAF.
Chris:It was exceptional. It was intense, and it was perfect. But it doesn't give you the experiential aspects really to bridge the gaps. You you know what the academic answer is for a
intro:Mhmm.
Chris:Ambush left or ambush right. But until you're until you're sort of thrust into it. So I will say every time you get ready to go on these convoys, you'd have that. And I'm sure every one of our army colleagues feels that or felt that when they were in in the in the city. And so it's a bit of a risk scenario trying to work through what the SOPs are in the convoy.
Chris:Everyone had a role. Like you weren't ever just a passenger. You had to be able to get your gun up and defend yourself. And that obviously plays out, the way you sort of approach the mission set. It's very deliberate sort of movement through the city.
Chris:And I, you know, I did have a couple of incidents that were, that were really interesting. I, it got my training and the training of the guys around me got me through, got me through. And so, I will just say it's good to pay attention to the things that aren't traditionally air force skill sets, when you're on the ground like that because you are going to be a liability unless you've paid attention to how to use your weapon, how to use your comms, how to move tactically. Yeah, I'll maybe leave it at that.
Bryan:Yeah. Wow. That sounds really intense. So we've talked about this skill set that four twenty seven used but at four twenty seven, you qualified as a marine counter terrorism aircraft captain. You've sort of described the task, but what did this involve and how difficult was the training?
Chris:Yeah. I think it's the hardest it's probably the hardest mission set that four twenty seven does, for a variety of reasons. The first of which is the operational environment is entirely unforgiving. The maritime domain is something I really took for granted, that my colleagues on the Cyclone or the Sea King before that, they are living in a very contested degraded environment, just from an environmental point of view. And so for tech aviation in a helicopter that does not have a fourth axis autopilot, that does not have a radar, you're at a pretty significant disadvantage in that operational environment.
Chris:And the mission set was really anchored on the Vancouver Olympics, although it's a pervasive, we hold this mission set to this day or they do. But we were really focused on getting ready for the Olympics and being the force of last resort. There'd be a maritime threat that presented itself in the Straits Of Georgia or in Vancouver Harbor. And if there was indicators and warning that there was something coming, we could preempt it by getting people on the deck of that ship. And so really the mission set was up to six ship, low level, out to sea, to go and intercept, track, and then conduct a combined surface and helicopter assault, a non compliant boarding on a vessel of interest.
Chris:And that's what we had had spent all of our time doing, and it's it's an interesting math problem. It's like a train leaves train leaves Calgary, train leaves Toronto kind of thing, where you gotta figure out where you're gonna meet and where that ship is gonna be in the future. And then there's just a hands and feet aspect of, dynamically decelerating your aircraft to get on top of a of a rope down point and then hold it to put eight or more assaulters down the ropes and onto the deck of the moving vessel. Mhmm. You know, you're you're monitoring power on that moment.
Chris:You're monitoring where your wingman are, because there's typically up to maybe four of them who are inserting simultaneously on a big vessel. And you're monitoring where your where the sniper overwatch aircraft might be. And so you start with just trying to just trying to figure out how to how to not kill yourself in that in that environment and how to be value added and not a liability, and you work your way up to be a lead for that. And that takes a couple years. Certainly it takes a lot of experience and it's a really perishable skill set.
Chris:And all of that on goggles, obviously, at at night.
Bryan:Oh, wow. I didn't even think about that. I was picturing this all during the day. That's crazy.
Chris:Yeah. Tricky. And I'll be honest, the worst part of most of these mission set was not the actual insert. It was transiting thirty, forty miles offshore in a type six ship, low to the water, and very low illumination. The with the ship, what it appeared, to be honest, was a relief because it usually had some lights on it and you could your goggles would would work better over top of the ship.
Bryan:If you guys had no radar on board, how were you guys getting were you getting conned onto the ship or how does that work?
Chris:Yeah. We would typically work with a CP one forty or any sort of aircraft that might have a radar that would give us the information we needed from that radar to get in behind the vessel. I think hopefully going forward, if we look at a new aircraft for that mission set, having your own radar would be a very big deal to be able to operate the maritime environment, Not just from a surface search point of view, but also from a weather point of view. It would be really useful.
Bryan:Yeah. For sure. You mentioned this is still a mission that four twenty seven does. Do you know, has it changed much since you did it?
Chris:I think, it has changed in the sense that we had such a small cadre of folks that had to hold standby for that, prior to the, changeover to a full special operations aviation squadron. Then through obviously a huge professionalization of how they deliver their training, how they qualify their crew, how they keep them current, The funding levels in the unit now allow us to obviously allow them to do a lot more of it. I would say the depth of pool that has to, that is available to support that mission set is much higher than it was when I went through it. And the training opportunities are likely higher. Okay.
Chris:You can imagine we did a lot of training focusing on the Olympics very specifically. And then I think it zoomed out a little bit now with a bit more optionality. So it has changed in the sense that I think it's more professionalized. Not to say that we weren't, it's just that's what we had at the time.
Bryan:Oh yeah. I mean, I was in four hundred squadron in the year of the Vancouver Olympics and they were I believe they were coordinating most of the domestic operations surrounding the Olympics for Tack Hell and the training surrounding that, I mean, was probably most of that year at least was devoted to that. Absolutely. I felt like I could vote
Chris:in British Columbia by the end of the the workouts.
Bryan:Just for listeners who are interested in hearing a little bit about that switch from conventional tactical helicopter operations to special operations for 04/27. We do touch on that a little bit with our interview with colonel Dan Coots.
Chris:Yeah. Why not?
Bryan:So after Afghanistan, you served as the executive assistant or EA to the deputy commander of the RCAF, but you quickly tired of this and volunteered to go back to Afghanistan on the CH 47 d Chinook. Canada took a unique approach to training our pilots to fly the Chinooks to Afghanistan. Can you tell us about that?
Chris:Yeah, Brian. Sure. I I love your characterization that I tired of being an I will just say it was a really good experience. And certainly my CEO thought it was gonna be really good for me. I learned a ton about the air force that I did not know about, quite honestly, all the other capabilities.
Chris:So I spent about eighteen months in that. And then an opportunity came up as we started operationalizing the Chinook in Afghanistan. I thought that would just be such an interesting place to serve. And I, you know, I had really enjoyed my tour in Afghanistan. I first wanted, I thought this would be kind of a neat way to continue to serve.
Chris:Was really comfortable there by the end of it. And so what had happened is there was a report that was issued essentially into many of the deaths that Canada had sustained in IED. And what are the enablers that Canada should be looking at for Afghanistan? And one of those was to introduce heavy lift helicopters. And so very interesting.
Chris:So the government essentially bought or agreed to procure FMS for military sale through the US government as is, whereas. So they bought helicopters that were already in Afghanistan. They bought six of them, CH-forty seven Delta helicopters, US Army. They were up in Bagram and they had them essentially prepped, painted and then shipped down to Kandahar. And so right around the end of 'eight is when the first helicopter showed up.
Chris:And we started putting crews into that in the fall or the February. And so the training scheme was interesting. So we took experienced TAC aviation pilots like me, and then we invested them down into Fort, it's called Fort Rock here at the time. It's now called Fort Novicell in Alabama. And they put them through CH-forty seven Delta Aircraft Qualification Course or AQC.
Chris:And so about a four month course, with a month of ground school, three months of flying, I would say about forty hours total on that course to fly. And really good instruction, honestly, like a tremendous instruction. Like the ground school is the best I ever received in my career, if I'm being honest. The US army does a really good job on making you deeply understand the airplane, the the mechanics of it, which was good. It served me well in Afghanistan.
Chris:And then the flight training was a bit more limited than I was used to in the sense that it was really the aircraft handling and find areas as emergencies, run on landings, sort of emergency procedure stuff, off level landings, etcetera. So all the little bits and pieces that we would look at in a standard maneuver manual, tasks sort of assembled, You do a day check ride, night check ride, and an IFR check ride. And then you pop out with forty hours on the airplane, but you haven't really had to operationally employ it. And so that was the challenge is that we had to bridge that gap a little bit. We did it in two ways.
Chris:One was we sent all of our crews to The UK and we did our a five simulator a five day simulator concentration that was tactically focused. And so the Brits tried to imprint upon us how they tactically employed their Chinook. And that's that's all well and good, but the cockpit is different. Mhmm. And so you you were executing these these sort of air assaults in a different cockpit where things were in different places, so that was tricky.
Chris:And then they also added on what we called seasoning. So they would take us and put us at US Army National Guard units, and you'd fly there for two weeks. And And it was real hit or miss. I went to the California Guard in Stockton, California. I spent two weeks with them.
Chris:And it was a bunch of sort of older Chief Officer 4s. And in the US Army, Chief Foreign Officers fly. And so it's a it's a different story. They're like your, I would say like senior captains on your unit. And so a Chief Foreign Officer four is a very experienced public rate, probably twenty five, one hundred, three thousand hours.
Chris:And they would just get their arms around you. And to be honest, it was amazing. That was the juice of this program, was them training us. Because they would take you and say, okay, I know you're gonna be in Kanahar in a month and a half. So let's just do night aerosol dust balls to off levels.
Chris:So you have to land on a on, you know, 10 degree pitch or 15 degree pitch, and just repeat over and over and over again. So I just, that's all I did really was air assault landings with them. And then they took us into the mountains. So we went into the Marine Corps Mount Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. It's at like 8,000 feet.
Chris:And we're assaulting up into 10,000, and using US Marines to do it. And so just the experience was unbelievable from a power management and a hands and feet point of view. I don't think we would have succeeded without that.
Bryan:Yeah. And I just wanna translate a couple helicopter terms there, and you can let me know if I get these right. Sure. So air assault I'm assuming an air assault landing is just like a very large group of helicopters landing together to offload troops. Off level is landing on a, as you said, a pitched ground.
Bryan:So keeping the helicopter itself is level. Right? And you're landing on a on a off level terrain.
Chris:Correct.
Bryan:And then a dust ball is as a helicopter comes into a very dusty environment. Obviously, anyone who's seen a video of it, a ton of dust blows up and you lose visual references and you have to still be able to land in that.
Chris:Yeah. Exactly right on all on all three counts.
Bryan:Right on. So you said you came out with about forty hours of experience plus your time with the National Guard. That's not a ton of experience on type to deploy to Afghanistan with. How did you feel about this approach?
Chris:Very, very nervous, Brian. Have to be honest, like, by the time I got there, there had been two rotations, two six months rotations on the helicopter in theater. So the first OC was a guy by the name of Major John Knoll. He stood it all up on the Chinook and that was probably the riskiest point we had. The aircraft delivered kind of in o eight.
Chris:And then it transitioned to a guy named Darryl Adams, who's now a colonel, and then a guy named Jeff Wedman, who I took over from in the summer of, twenty ten. Because of the Vancouver Olympics, the six month tours went away and we actually did nine and a half, ten month tours. We extended two of them, sort of took the middle tour out and gave that to the Olympics. And so it was almost a year long, tour that we do. And so, we got into theater, the training system had been sort of set.
Chris:The teams had figured out what worked and what didn't. And so they, I arrived in theater probably with about fifty, fifty five, fifty three hours on the airplane, no more than that for sure. And I hadn't really used any of the defensive stores on the aircraft. I hadn't really used the secure communications. I hadn't really flown with guns, ever or conducted aerial gunnery.
Chris:It's all the things you would expect you do in workup training. And so the training package really focused on that. So you did about fifteen ish hours, fifteen to eighteen hours through a series of ALPs. It was proficiency based. If you got it quicker, you did it quicker.
Chris:But it was really focused on dust landings, gunnery, and then the tactics, the specific tactics of flying very, very low or conducting tactical transitions from that very low environment of 35 feet above highest optical up to above a threat band. So getting above small arms fire, essentially. And so the tactical, the things you would have gotten on an OTU in Canada were sort of jammed into like eighteen hours, thrown at you intensively, day, night, and sort of wrapped all around with a familiarization of the entire area of operation. So you saw at least one forward operating base, like at least once before you went in there, like in anger. But I was an aircraft captain.
Chris:And so I was, I did my check right as an AC and then right into it and right into it as a, an operational aircraft captain and ended up leading air assaults within, you know, two or three weeks of being qualified on the line.
Bryan:That's wild. So you led the Canadian helicopter forces in Afghanistan or CHFA Chinook flight from July 2010 to April 2011. What was your role in that?
Chris:Yeah, I was a flight commander for, so it was like a normal flight commander job. So you were in charge of essentially all of the air crew. We didn't have command and control of the maintenance element that was under our Samuel or our maintenance officer. So I had, about six crews in theater any given time. And the way that we worked it is the, flight warrant officer and myself, we did the ten month tour.
Chris:But my crews would rotate in six month blocks but they were all staggered. So every month or so, I had two crews arriving, two crews leaving. It was like that for the entire tour. So we managed and held all of the Chinook capability, for the ten month period, under the leadership of myself and my, flight warrant officer.
Bryan:Okay. And I guess with that rotation system kind of ensures that you never have, like, you know, all of your Chinook pilots at once don't have experience in country?
Chris:Yeah. It was I'll be honest. That was designed as the mitigation against the fact that you couldn't do theater mission specific training collectively before deploying as, like, a task force as you would expect we would do for other missions. Because it was such a new capability that we didn't have any Chinooks in Canada to fly on. That was the only way to do it safely.
Chris:And to be honest, it did carry the day. We did bring everyone home on the Chinook, although we had a couple of
Bryan:weeks
Chris:to talk about later.
Bryan:Yeah. For sure. So how had things changed in Afghanistan from your first tour?
Chris:I'll say really significantly, in a way that was far more kinetics or far more violent on my second tour. If you recall in 02/2005, when I went there for my first tour, Afghanistan was like the second tier show. The US had invested deeply in Iraq. They had most of their key forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan was kind of what they would call an economy of effort operation where they only had about, I would say about 30,000 troops in theater total. It sounds like a lot, it is, but it's a very big country.
Chris:Mhmm. And by the time, by the time I came back in 2010, I think there was about a hundred and hundred thousand troops. And Kandahar as an airfield exploded in terms of its size. So my first tour, there was just the stuff, the the area south of the runway that we would be living in. There's a whole new complex to the north when I got there and that's where we flew out of, on the north side of, Canada Airfield.
Chris:And so the operating base had expanded quite significantly. The context had changed because there was way more density of troops, which meant there was way more violence because they were in contact with the enemy.
Bryan:So the has more than a few hands and feet gotchas. Can you tell us about a few of these quirks?
Chris:Yeah. The the Chinook is an amazing aircraft to fly, and I'm I am now emotionally attached to it for the rest of my life. I, I truly and fully love that airplane. It is it was a beautiful design that persists, you know, from 1962 to today. But there's a few gotchas.
Chris:I I guess the first from my hands and feet point of view is that, cyclic isn't cyclic. So that's your that's your, yeah, your control stick. So normally, in a in a one disc helicopter, if you push the the stick forward, the whole disc tilts forward and your the the resultant vector pushes you forward. In the Chinook, it's differential collective pitch. So if you push the cyclic forward, the forward rotor reduces collective pitch and the off rotor increases collective pitch and allows you to transition forward.
Chris:And so there's some little gotchas that go with that. But the big one is, the cyclic position on the ground because of that, because of the, if you push forward on the cyclic, the off roader lifts off the ground more. It's a very dangerous aircraft, if you add a bunch of forward cyclic when you land. And so in a Griffin, if I was to land a Griffin on a run on landing, I put a bunch of forward cyclic in, all I would do is the aircraft would just would just run on a bit longer or faster. There'd be no danger really.
Chris:In the Chinook, as you land, if you put forward cyclic in, the aft wheels will come off the ground and you will kneel the aircraft. Like, put a whole bunch of pressure on the front oleos, and this is a condition where the aircraft can flip can flip over very, very easily. And so in the checklist for the Chinook, there is a cyclic, neutral sort of call you have to make as you land. Flight control's neutral is the call. And so I, as my, in my, one of my first missions, was actually tasked to fly our defense minister to Masungar.
Chris:It was like 45 degrees Celsius, very, spicy day, lots of shooting going on in the area. So I went out there with the Griffins, and I landed, in Masengarde, did a nice dynamic landing, landed it, put it on the ground, and I did not pay attention where my cyclic was. And sure enough, I kneeled it. And they as the defense minister was walking off the ramp, the ramp came up off the ground. He sort of stumbled And I was like, oh my god, like day one, I'm gonna get fired.
Bryan:Oh, no.
Chris:No one got hurt obviously. And I learned like my aircraft sort of my copilot who was a bit more experienced than me at this point was like, hey, maybe center the cyclic and don't hurt your defense minister. So it was kind of a moment.
Bryan:Oh, man. I think most of us either have or will have one of those experiences. I had general Huddleston on board when he was our wing commander when I was flying as a new FO on the Aurora out in Hawaii. And we also had on board our previous American exchange pilot who happened to be in Hawaii at the time. We brought him up for a flight.
Bryan:So we're all sitting in the back, and it's my turn to land. And I get called up, and the American turns to me and says, don't f it up. And I laughed, of course, and I had had no issues really in in on the Aurora. And, of course, I brought it in for the hardest landing I had on my entire career on the Aurora, really thumped it in with my wing commander on board and everything. So I think we've all had had one of those.
Chris:We have. Yeah. There's a few little gotchas with the airplane. And I guess the other gotcha is the dust landing. It's just a it's a real technique thing on the Chinook in Afghanistan.
Chris:It's like fine, talcum powder. And it just builds and builds and builds and you go to zero vis very quick. So you have to fly a very specific prescriptive approach through windows, like gates. And, it takes a little while to get used to that. And so if you don't do it right, you can end up flipping the aircraft over because you'll have lateral drift in the terminal stages of the approach.
Chris:You'll just shear the gear off and flip over. Mhmm. So there's a lot of risk. And as a Chinook pilot in Afghanistan, I think I probably did over a thousand Dust Bowl landings, so you end up doing a lot of them.
Bryan:Wow. So this is something we eventually intend to do a full episode on with the copilot of the aircraft. On 08/05/2010, Blowtorch '6 '1, a CH 47 d Chinook was shot down in Afghanistan. Can you take us through that day from your perspective?
Chris:Yeah, sure. Brian, it was a tough day and it still sort of sits burned into my brain. I will say the outcome was really good. Everyone got home safe. So I'll spoil the end to begin with, which I think why we can talk about it so easily.
Bryan:Yeah, for sure.
Chris:That day was an interesting day where I was not flying. I flew a lot in Afghanistan. I flew about five hundred hours in ten months, there. So I was flying almost every day and it would be, it was rare that I wasn't flying and when I wasn't flying, I was doing some sort of painful administration thing. And this day, my crews would rotate, so was writing their PERs.
Bryan:And for the listeners, the dreaded PER is the old evaluation system. It stands for personnel evaluation report. It has been replaced by the PACE system, and they were written annually as well as for deployments.
Chris:And I was in my office and someone came in to grab me. They bring me down to the ops center. They said, you just got, and I asked them what for? And they said, like, just come to the ops center right now. So, you know, walk in there.
Chris:We had a feed from the predator, UAV in there so you could watch things live that would occur in theater. And I literally walked into the image of one of my Chinooks that was now crashed on the ground on fire. You can see the flames all around it and you can see my people, like crawling or running away from it. And so I'll tell you, like, don't think I've, it was like a gut punch. Like I don't think I was ready for that No kidding.
Chris:Moment emotionally, because it's tough, right? To manage your own emotions and then realize you got to do something. You got to do something about this. This is, this is going to be bad. That particular crew had had a normal day, a normal tasking day, and they weren't doing anything, abnormal for the for the theater.
Chris:So they had been tasked to what we call a ring route. So you would just sort of move people and stuff all around theater, sort of bouncing between forward operating bases. And our planners would have pulled together probably 50 or 60 requests for movement into this cohesive plan. They did that every day for the next day. And so these guys went way up to the North Of Kandahar, up to a US soft base and did some insert stuff there, and they had to do some slinging up there.
Chris:And so because of the slinging, they had an extra crew member because one of our crew members had to go into the hole. There's a trapdoor. We can look at the load that's on the hook. So when the flood engineer did that, we had to put another person on their gun. So we had a six person crew instead of a five person crew.
Chris:And so they went into Masungar, which was a forward operating base about, 25 kilometers or so, west of Canahar City. And it's a Canadian forces base, like massive, like a company, a company plus size base. So very big tanks there, a lot of labs there, so pretty safe. And they landed in there and they offloaded all their passengers and loaded on a bunch of new ones. And the ones that they loaded on were, it was actually a recce from the tour that was coming to replace the guys who were there.
Chris:So they had sort of leadership in the back. They had majors and sergeant majors from the outgoing and incoming tour together in the back, and then a whole sort of flotsamajetsam of Americans and aid agency people, etcetera, because we moved everyone around the theater. They took off out of there and, when you interview, the co pilot, he'll probably tell you the story, hands and feet story of it, so I won't ruin it all. But they took off out of there, dropped down low level and they were going to a pretty proximate, a little Fort operating location, which is the Pansway District Center was their next stop. And it's like four or five kilometers away, but you're always trying to mix up your routes in and out.
Chris:And so they went a certain route, they went down to low levels. They were probably at about 50 feet, at a 120 knots and they had their Griffins in tow. And then they got hit with what we believe was a whole bunch of machine gun fire from the bottom. And what we believe was a rocket propelled grenade that hit their left main fuel tank Wow. And caused it to explode.
Chris:So you can imagine that moment in in the sky. And then a big fireball, obviously from all that gas exploding, the airplane stayed together, which tells you everything you need to know about the Chinook. And then it wrapped that fireball wrapped around the back of the airplane. And just the way the airflow goes in the Chinook is it all came into the cabin. And so you end up with, like, a ton of smoke and everything just pouring from back to front in the cabin.
Chris:And so flames and smoke. So the ramp you can imagine the ramp flight engineer is sitting on a seat on his gun facing aft and got pretty much enveloped in that and was wearing all his So, so I'll tell you like, Nomex is a thing and definitely respect Nomex. It's really good. Saved everybody.
Bryan:No kidding.
Chris:But then you can imagine the chaos. Right? Like the airplane's shuttering now, it's starting to come apart, big chunk of it's falling off. And then between the pilot and co pilot, co pilot was flying I believe when the RPG hit and the pilot took control, the AC took control and this is where I credit him with an enormous amount of foresight or courage because you want to continue to a safe place, right? And in front of them about probably 1,800, 15 hundred meters away was the Ford operating base.
Chris:Or we could take it and put it on the ground right then and there because it's definitely a critical emergency, but they'd just been shot at, so you got to think there's bad guys on the ground. They had to make a really tough call. And I think personally I would have been lulled into the maybe I can just make it. Yeah. Right?
Chris:Maybe I can just make that pub. But Bill took control and just said, Nope, right to ground and just leveled it and took it right into a field straight ahead. And weirdly, was a report that it was a hard landing, but everyone, from the thing, from the incident are like, No, it wasn't a hard landing actually at all. You put it down onto the field and then they conducted an evacuation. And there's just some really interesting moments in there where, as an example, a lot of our gunners were army reservists.
Chris:And, so these are inexperienced young corporals and they had some incredible foresight. One of them took the pin out of the C6, the door gun, the left door, and he threw it out. So it opened another opening for people to get out because that normally you would not be able to get over that gun. And about five or six people got out in that that exit. And I think if they hadn't had that, they might not have lived.
Bryan:Wow.
Chris:But everyone got out of the airplane and they kind of got behind a wall, between, they put a wall between themselves and the airplane, but the airplane started burning and, we carried like 7,000 rounds of ammunition on the airplane. So it started cooking off and all the flares were cooking off. So they initially started on the airplane side of the wall and I think they jumped over figuring, I think I'd rather face the enemy than the blowing up aircraft. And they did that. And then, I mean, there's a story that goes with that that I'll let the copilot tell you.
Chris:But the quick reaction force from Asimgar saw this occur, it was about two or three clicks away and they were already dressed. They just come in from another incident. So they just got in their labs and they drove and they were there within about ten minutes. And so the guys had a short little exchange, not an exchange of fire, were getting shot at. But the army guys on the ground who were the passengers, that's their environment.
Chris:My earlier point, they kind of took over a little bit and said, okay, we're going to set up a perimeter fence and they were coordinating with the aircraft captain and the crew. And then obviously back in the talk, we were trying to work through, hey, how do we de risk this? I have to launch on a rescue mission now. So we ended up, getting together on my end, a crew. There was just, I had just enough of a crew to assemble a Shinnek crew on that side of the airfield.
Chris:And there was a couple of Griffins that come back for another mission. We all got out. I gave a hasty brief. We got a, the aviation battalion commander told me to go outside and get started and get ready to go do the evacuation of these guys from the shoot down point. We thought we were going have to do.
Chris:Of course, Chinook I started didn't have much of gas in it. So I took the Chinook and the two Griffins out to the FARP, where are we refueling point to get gas? I rapidly got a bunch of gas and then we launched at which point my, the op center called me back and said, okay, it's sorted now. There's a QRF on the ground, but stay, come back here, stay running just in case. So I dismounted then brought it back, dismounted, went into the operation center and it was kind of sitting there fully kitted for a couple of hours while we figured out what the best course of action was.
Chris:And then we went and got them that evening. And so the folks on the ground, they'll put into a lab, they got driven back to the Fort Operating Base. And then I flew out there and picked them up. And the best thing I heard all day was Bill's voice on the intercom. He put his helmet in and he got in the airplane.
Chris:I'm like, Hey buddy, how are you? He's like, I thought a bit of a hard day, you know? So we had a chat all the way back to Canada. We purposely did it, went down to the desert where there was no threat. It did a transition up high and we came back high level.
Chris:So it was just chill. There was no reason to smash the aircraft around or fly tactically. And I did like a normal approach back into Kanahar and we brought those guys right to the hospital. Yep. Just to make sure you never know, right?
Chris:We want make sure that everyone got checked out by the flight surge. So, not just the air crew, but all the passengers were looked after. The air crew kind of got a, got a look at, from the air crew medical side. And then we all would sort of reconvene that night in our barracks.
Bryan:Yeah. I it's funny. I I remember that day. So Bill was in my squadron. Right?
Bryan:He was from four hundred squadron. Yeah. And I remember working I was I believe I was working in ops that day or whenever the news hit anyways. I'm I'm not sure how long it took for the news to get back to Canada, but we were working in in squadron ops at four hundred squadron when this all happened. So I remember that day quite well.
Chris:Yeah. It was tough.
Bryan:Yeah. Yeah. So I'd imagine there was considerable fear to get back in the cockpit after that incident. How did you manage this apprehension amongst the crews?
Chris:Yeah. It was I'll tell you, Brian. It was tough. Like, all of us, me included, had some apprehension about going back out. I think that's natural for any one of us, but
Bryan:For sure.
Chris:The discussion I had with my standard, officer, the discussions I had with my CO, and I had an awesome, flight warrant officer by the name of Jake Boucher, ended up becoming the one cat chief. Jake is just an inspirational guy and and just a great singer and COO. So him and I had a lot of talks about how we approach this, tonight. You know, in the end, the analogy, quite honestly, is the way the army deals with a mobility kill on one of their vehicles. So they would hit an IED, the vehicle would be hurt, the crew would be unhurt, vehicle would be extracted, the crew would go back, have a day or so to reset, but they'd be expected to get back into a new lab and go do their job.
Chris:And so that was the challenge that night, was trying to convince everyone, like, we're gonna take a pause, like a one day pause, take a breath, look at our tactics to make sure that what we were doing wasn't reckless, and have a look at the incident rapidly. What do we need to tweak to make sure we're still doing this safely? One of the decisions at that point was, well, we're gonna flip this to nights. So we're going to do even the mundane things we're going do at night, which dramatically increased the hands and feet risk and the environmental risk, but it reduced the operational get shoot down, get shot down risk.
intro:Right.
Chris:Because they just can't see you. And so that was a pivot. And then we sort of had like a lot of talks as a team, like, so tomorrow, you know, we're, we're in combat. The ground force, they need us back in the air tomorrow. They need the Griffins in the air over top of them to protect them and they need us flying them out to the fog because I I don't wanna have our hesitancy result in them now doing more convoys and getting blown up.
Chris:So the the conveyance or the argument I made to the team was like, really need us and we can't give in at this moment. This is a super important we get back on the horse. And so that's what we did. We did, a one day pause, looked at tactics and we did a check ride, not a check ride, a stands ride for each one of the air crew. So they got a chance to go up and just do an easy trip.
Chris:So we went out, we went out into, the desert, we got to do some shooting. They did a little bit of dust landing practice. They did some approaches to the airfield. It was very, very low intensity, just to make them sort of comfortable back in the airplane. And then we did a bit of another check-in where we asked them, okay, so are you good to go tomorrow?
Chris:I think, I think, I think we're good. And everyone typically on the surface says yes. And then I will just say it's a real journey because as a, as a leader for both myself and with Jake Boucher, we had to spend a lot of individual time with people and in different ways. Yeah. Just adapting who's the best guy to talk to that person.
Chris:So sometimes it was Jake, sometimes it was me, sometimes it was Padre or a buddy. So just managing who the person is that needs to talk to that person and get them through it, And then just staying like staying close, like checking in with them routinely. So I flew with Bill afterwards for a bunch of admissions, just because, well, when we got along really well, he's a friend of mine and it was comfortable. So, but not everyone had the easy path. So some folks flew for a little while and just said like, and they're rotating out and they're like, you know, this actually wasn't great.
Chris:I'm not in a great place. And there's some folks who actually ended up really one of them who didn't end up flying again.
Bryan:Okay.
Chris:And so it was tough, but you really had to sort of apply a lot of empathy to the problem and just work through it. Yeah.
Bryan:Yeah. We saw that on the Aurora fleet when aircraft 103 went off the runway in Greenwood. You know, it takes time. Everybody reacts in different ways, and it takes time sometimes for those reactions to surface. And you'd think, okay, this was quite a while ago, and then all of a sudden you'd realize, like, this person still needs reassurance or yeah.
Bryan:Like you said, it takes a personal approach.
Chris:Yeah. And some injuries from, I mean, it's still a, still a really traumatic event and some injuries from that don't really manifest for a number of weeks. It's just one of those leadership moments where as a flight supervisor, get to spend a lot, a lot of time walking the line, talking to your people. Then just be honest, being in the cockpit flying with them. Yeah.
Chris:Be it a flight engineer, a gunner or a pilot. Yeah.
Bryan:Yeah. So next you were the CEO of four fifty Tactical Helicopter Squadron in Petawawa, Ontario. You were only the second CEO of the squadron and you had to receive and operationalize the new CH 47 F Chinooks. What new capabilities did these new aircraft bring with them?
Chris:Yeah. So I guess, first of all, it was a Chinook in Canada, so which we hadn't had yet. So, obviously, we were we were, you the demolished Chinooks we flew in Afghanistan ended up in a boneyard. They ended up going down to Davis Monthan and getting wrapped up. One of them went to the Air Force Museum.
Chris:So they were not flying when they came home. There was a discussion about that and that was sort of, that was rejected. The infrastructure in the aircraft kind of arrived coincidentally. I think there was about a six month period where we had to host a couple of aircraft over at 427, but they built this unbelievably beautiful, if you haven't been to 450, really encourage it, infrastructure for the new Cape. And then all the simulators obviously installed there.
Chris:So a big training focus. But the Cape, the aircraft itself was a whole step level more capable than the D model Chinook. So the first was it had a dual digital automatic flight control system. So it gave you a fourth axis autopilot. So with the fourth axis autopilot, this aircraft offered us the ability to do a lot more automation.
Chris:And then you didn't have to do the things like we did in Afghanistan, where you had to sort of fly through gates and conduct a procedural landing, which is a little bit risky. In this case, the dual digital automatic flight control system, a couple of flex of the button and the aircraft will just sit in the hover and you can maneuver it left, right, forward, aft in one foot increments with a click of a button, or you can move it up and down in one foot increments. So you could be fully enveloped in a dust ball. You have a Doppler based or an Eggie based embedded GPSINS based hover display, and you could land and take off like that if you needed to. So that was the big one.
Chris:It really de risked degraded visual environment, that is to say snow or dust. So for Canada's context, super important. Yeah. And then the second was it had 30 modifications from a normal US army Chinook. Some of them are small, some of them are large.
Chris:We were, we were going to be putting that counter missile system on it that was a very advanced and we did. That required a lot of power. So that's a big power redesign for the aircraft and a bigger APU. It had bigger generators on the engines. And it had things like a power down ramp cause the Chinook itself is just of gravity.
Chris:It just falls with gravity, that ramp. You had deep snow. You need to have a hydraulic ramp to push that ramp down through steep snow, things like that. And then the biggest one for us, for the Arctic context is it has fat tanks. So we call it so pretty much double the fuel capacity.
Bryan:Okay.
Chris:So an F model Chinook is at 13,400 pounds of fuel. And so that allows you to do about 600 miles in the aircraft, which is pretty good for a helicopter.
Bryan:So from a flying and maintenance perspective, what challenges had to be faced in terms of bringing this new aircraft online?
Chris:Yeah, Brian. It was it was, it was like starting something brand new from scratch. And I think we all underestimate every one of our fleets that we bring on how much work that actually is. So to get a maintenance, an accredited maintenance organization up and running, trained, and then have a quality management program up and running, have a supply chain that's linked in to the way you record keep for maintenance. Like we just, we all come on squadron and that's there, right?
Chris:So when you start something new and this was not like even, you know, out with the old and with the new, there was nothing before. And we're starting from the ground zero. Building relationships with our, the OEM with Boeing who had a big office in the building and building relationships with our training partner from CAE. And so there was a lot of storming going on, right? Trying to figure out the relationships and trying to figure everything out.
Chris:And the biggest takeaway for me was how dedicated people were to make it work because they were both civilian and military, Boeing CAE and the CAF and the RCF. But then it put a lot more stress on the mid level. Like I would say the A level C releaser in the maintenance world, supply techs, master corporal corporals, we're just getting pushed to their limit because there's not that many of them. And then, you know, you're just carrying a lot of risk in terms of the procedures aren't fully gelled yet. So you're just carrying risk and everything you're doing.
Chris:And as you mature the aircraft and go through its test and eval, it's getting better and better and better. But that first chunk of time, you're putting a lot on the shoulders of really junior people and they feel it. They get stressed out and burnt out. And it's not because I'm, hopefully it's not because I'm pushing them too hard. They're just super professionally want to get it done and they put a lot of pressure on themselves as well.
Chris:There's only so much that you can control.
Bryan:Yeah. This time in your career must have been exceptionally challenging. How did you feel by the end of it and what strategies did you use to push through?
Chris:So the fatigue management piece walks in. I mean, got qualified pretty quickly on the airplane. I was actually allowed to go out to the squadron before I took command and do my course. So I was actually qualified pretty much when I took command within a couple of weeks and I had to fly a lot to generate more aircrew. And so it was one of those double edged swords where you're doing the thing you love more than anything in the world, which is flying.
Chris:But as a CEO, you know that every hour you spend on the airplane is an hour you're to have to also spend back in the office because you should have been there doing CO stuff. And so you end up with these very, very long days as a CO. And actually, I mean, everyone was doing that, but I think it's sort of acute for the CO. And so fatigue management, trying to make sure that you have, you're surrounded by good people and you actually, you download trust and you download authority to your people to allow them to operate a bit more autonomously than maybe in other squadrons. And then just really monitoring your people.
Chris:Cause there was times when people would just, you know, be really emotional about something or they would act out of character and you're like, this is probably because they're exhausted because they're trying and working so hard to get this thing off the ground. Yeah. I think being compassionate, empathetic, even though it's pressure on us to get this thing off the road, you gotta do it safely and effectively, and that's the hard part as a CO is navigating that.
Bryan:Yeah. I can only imagine. Okay, Chris. That's gonna wrap up part one of our chat. Thanks for telling us about your early days, your deployments to Afghanistan, as well as your time as CO of four fifty Squadron.
Bryan:I'm really looking forward to sitting down again for the next one. Thank you.
Chris:Alright. Thanks a lot, Brian. What a pleasure to talk to you.
intro:Alright. That wraps up our chat on the early days of major general Chris McKenna's career. Tune in to
Bryan:our next episode to hear about his time in Maui as the task force commander, his command positions,
intro:as well as the beginning of our chat on
Bryan:the modernization of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the new aircraft we are bringing online. Do you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard
intro:in this show? Would you or someone you
Bryan:know make a great guest, or do you have a great idea for a show? You can reach out to us at the pilotprojectpodcast@Gmail.com or on all social media at at pod pilot project. And be sure to check out that social media for lots of great videos of our RCAF aircraft. As always, we'd like to thank you for tuning in and ask for your help with the big three. That's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends, and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts.
Bryan:That's all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up. See you.
intro:Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.
