By: Malcolm Imray

Malcolm Imray — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 16:26:24 +0000

I read “Rescuing SAR in Canada” by Martin Shadwick in the context of the recent Air Tindi occurrence near the Diavik mine and wondered again why we have not thought about removing SAR from the list of tasks we assign to the RCAF. Please don’t mistake my comments for anything less than my complete admiration for how well they do it! It’s just that the CAF is properly built around its primary military mission. This means that SAR bases are at existing military bases rather than distributed in a way that makes more sense for the SAR mission. Therefore, the performance requirements for FWSAR are based on the need to deploy from southern bases to search all the way to the North Pole and far out into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The nearest primary RCAF search assets to the Air Tindi accident site are CC-130 Hercules from CFB Winnipeg about 1000 nautical miles (nm) away. It appears the Herc delivered the SARTECHs to the scene about as quickly as could be reasonably expected. If it had been a CC-295 Kingfisher the response time would have been longer due to its lower speed. Therefore, when fully operational the Kingfisher will provide a reduced level of SAR service relative to the current situation in terms of response time. The RCAF have secondary SAR assets at Yellowknife in the form of CC-138 Twin Otter but no SARTECHs are based there and even if there were, the Twin Otter is not normally equipped with SAR gear and fully-equipped SARTECHs can not easily jump out of a Twin Otter side door. But Kingfishers (or similar aircraft) based at Yellowknife could do a fine job of responding to incidents in much of the western arctic; Kingfishers based at Iqaluit could serve the eastern arctic. The nearest primary RCAF rescue assets are CH-149 Cormorants at CFB Comox, also about a 1000 nm away. Sensibly, the “rescue” was not accomplished by a Cormorant but by several commercial helicopters based at Yellowknife. This is quite common and is a pragmatic solution to the vast distances from primary SAR bases. It would be prohibitively costly for the RCAF to base SAR aircraft elsewhere. This is why the Government should long ago have conducted a comprehensive review of the provision of SAR services in Canada with a view to assessing whether it should be provided by a separate, properly funded agency or, for example, transferred to an existing agency such as the Coast Guard. I don’t support the “privatization” of SAR as it is fundamentally a public service, however we already see that private companies are engaged in supporting SAR where it makes practical sense to do so. Our military does a fine job on SAR given the constraints they have but SAR is not really part of their “raison d’être.” It draws resources from their primary military job and dilutes the effectiveness of Canada’s military expenditures, already criticized by many for how little we spend compared to our allies. Full disclosure: I was the leader of the team that wrote the 2010 NRC report on the FWSAR Statement of Operational Requirements but have since retired and my comments here are my own opinion based partly on the work we did back then.

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By: Malcolm Imray