Latest news with #CH-149Cormorant
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
New RCAF plane completes 1st operational parachute rescue deep in B.C. mountains
Members of the Royal Canadian Air Force are celebrating the successful rescue of a pilot who crashed deep in the mountains north of Prince George, B.C. The mission involved Canada's newest fixed-wing search-and-rescue aircraft. The CC-295 Kingfisher carried out its first operational parachute jump on Wednesday after only three weeks on the job. The air force says the Kingfisher, which is based out of Canadian Forces Base Comox on Vancouver Island, is specifically designed for search-and-rescue operations, and comes equipped with sensors that allow crews to locate people or objects from more than 40 kilometres away, even in low-light conditions. "The modernization on this plane is night and day compared to what we used to fly previously," said Capt. Greg Harris, who piloted the Kingfisher during the mission. The aircraft officially went into operation on May 1, Harris said, and completed its first operational jump Wednesday to help save a civilian pilot who had crashed near Mount Kinney. Harris said the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria notified them at around 1:30 p.m. of a spot beacon being activated by a single-passenger airplane, indicating a crash. An RCMP helicopter reached the crash site, approximately 130 kilometres northeast of Prince George, and recovered the injured pilot. Search-and-rescue technicians then parachuted out of the Kingfisher, approximately 10 kilometres south of where the plane crashed, and established a temporary care site. RCMP then took the injured pilot to the SAR technicians. They stabilized the patient, who was then picked up by a CH-149 Cormorant helicopter and flown to Prince George for treatment. 'Ended up being pretty challenging' Harris credited his colleagues for handling challenging terrain and bad weather. "You never know what you're going to get, and it's never simple," he said. "There's always variables that come up that you weren't thinking were going to come up. So it ended up being pretty challenging." Master Cpl. Alain Goguen was among the SAR technicians who parachuted out of the plane carrying medical equipment and other gear. Goguen said the technology on the Kingfisher helped them assess where they were going to land, saving them precious minutes in a mission where time was of the essence. Harris said with stormy weather looming, they were minutes away from not being able to have the SAR technicians jump, and the injured pilot would have had to wait "a substantial time." He said he and his colleagues were thrilled to play a role in getting the pilot to safety, working closely with RCMP and the crew of the CH-149 Cormorant. He added that the mission allowed them to test their new aircraft in a real-life situation. "A lot of time these situations where airplanes crashed, the outcome is often not a good one, so the fact that the first operational jump of the Kingfisher was so successful and the outcome was so positive, it led to a pretty jubilant base here," Harris said. Goguen described the rescue in more straightforward terms. "That's what we trained for, so that's what we did. And things worked out."
Winnipeg Free Press
01-05-2025
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Spanish pilot missing after small plane crossing Atlantic crashes off Newfoundland
ST. JOHN'S – The search for a pilot whose small aircraft crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of Newfoundland continued for a second day on Wednesday. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada says the single-engine Air Tractor AT-802 took off from St. John's International Airport with only the pilot aboard on Tuesday morning. A spokesman for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax says the centre received a signal from an emergency beacon around 9 a.m. Atlantic time. Lt.-Cmdr. Len Hickey says the signal came from an area 225 kilometres east of St. John's. He says two Canadian Coast Guard vessels and two fishing boats were dispatched to the scene to begin the search, and they were joined by a military CH-149 Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopter and a CC-130 Hercules fixed-wing aircraft. The searchers later found an oil slick, one of the amphibious plane's floats, as well as an empty orange life-raft and some other debris. Hickey said the transportation board confirmed the turboprop had been purchased in the United States by a man from Spain, whose flight plan included a stopover in St. John's before heading to the Azores, an island chain west of Portugal. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. The highly agile Air Tractor aircraft, which has a range of almost 1,000 kilometres, is primarily used for spraying agricultural crops. But it can also be used for aerial firefighting when equipped with floats. Typically, smaller aircraft do not have the range to complete a transatlantic flight, but they can be equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks to extend their flight time. 'He was working his way up the eastern seaboard with the last touch point in North America being St. John's before he crossed the Atlantic,' Hickey said in an interview. 'The Azores was listed in the flight plan as the destination.' Hickey said Wednesday the two fishing boats were released from the search later in the day, and he confirmed the search would continue until sundown. At that point if the pilot had not been found, the RCMP was expected to take on the case as a missing person file. This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2025.
