Day in the Life of the RCAF: Comox - Flying the CH-149 Cormorant - Episode 9

We do maritime, aviation, and humanitarian rescues. So everything from missing boaters, sinking vessels, aviation incidents like plane crashes, lost or injured hikers, and medevacs as well. We do kind of the whole gamut here. It's a big machine that is pretty complex, has a lot of computer systems on board, but it's a super powerful, agile machine. It's a dream to fly, really. It's a three-engine, all-weather helicopter. That's what makes it special, is its ability to go through icing conditions. And we perform search and rescue operations with the winch or via landing to get our SARTECs on scene. The third engine for us just gives us redundancy if we have an engine failure. For the most part, most regimes we're in, it won't affect our performance. The biggest challenge is usually weather. Often we're going out on rescue missions in not great weather, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. So I would say that's the biggest challenge. Otherwise, just the nature of SAR missions in general can be challenging. So offshore missions come to mind. Mountain rescues, there's not so much of that out here on the East Coast, but definitely if you're on the West Coast. Over water, you take a lot of things for granted. When we're over the ocean, we don't have to worry about hitting anything. So we can fly in very poor visibility. We've got great autopilot. We can use a RAD, so it's a RADALT hold, essentially, that allows us to be very precise in our altitude that we're holding over the water. Over the mountains, we can't take those things for granted. We need, obviously, if we are flying too close to the mountains and poor visibility, we risk smacking into it. So it does make a big difference. We also run into performance limitations as we're going up there. So the ability for the helicopter to hover and experience maybe an engine failure at sea level is a lot different than the ability for us to have an engine failure at 10,000 feet. So those performance limitations do affect how we operate in the mountainous environment. I love flying on the core. It's very maneuverable. It's a very tight crew concept. There's a lot of communication going on on board between the front end, the pilots, the flight engineer, the team leader, and the team member. There's a lot of good conversation as decisions are getting made. So it's very, very mobile, very dynamic. You can get into a lot of tough-to-reach areas. And yeah, I prefer to fly on the core for sure. We fly in all weather. We do have NVGs for flying at night. We're going out during the day on beautiful weather. We're going out in the middle of winter and when it's rainy and the dead of night. So we have the capability to go out at any point in time. It's normally, somebody's not getting stuck in the middle of nowhere on a bright and sunny, warm day. It's usually pretty foggy and windy and rainy and the dead of night. So during the daylight, on a beautiful daylight today, we'll fly visually as much as possible. And so that kind of like takes a lot of load off off of me at night. We're using our night vision goggles and we're using our navigation tools more to tell us more about what's happening around us. We really have to be careful here, especially in the mountains where clouds form layers and stuff that it can be pretty tricky to navigate through those passes on night vision goggles. So we're definitely using our instrumentation kit more. I would say that because of its size, it's very smooth. The turbulence doesn't affect it as much as a small helicopter. It's also stabilized in multiple ways. So it has a stabilization system that the main gearbox is mounted on some struts that it's kind of like noise canceling where it senses a signal and then put inputs in that opposite response so that the cabin of the aircraft or the aircraft itself is basically anti-vibration. So in that sense, it's actually very smooth, super smooth to fly. I would say it's a joy to fly flown a bunch of different helicopters. It's got a very ergonomic autopilot suite that allows us to take a load off of ourselves and devote more time to the mission centric side of things or the weather that we're kind of dealing with. Best part about being a pilot on the Cormorant is the days that we get to go do a mission and we get someone back safely to their families. That's definitely a huge perk of the job.