Help from above

Natural disasters and their often horrific aftermath, whether at home or abroad, tend to bring out the good in us. As Canadians, we are often proud of our Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and their contribution in times of need. Witness, among others, the Canadian response to the 2004 tsunami that hammered Indonesia; the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and, most recently, the supertyphoon which cut a swath through the Philippines in early November 2013. In each case, Canada played a key role in the international relief effort.

Having monitored Typhoon Haiyan for days before its Nov. 8 landfall in the Philippines, an often mountainous archipelago of more than 1,700 islands, Canada and several other countries were primed to have people and equipment on the ground within days.

In our case, the principal delivery mechanism for what came to be known as “Operation Renaissance” was the Royal Canadian Air Force, which deployed Boeing CC-177 Globemaster III, Airbus CC-150 Polaris, and Bombardier CC-144 Challenger transport aircraft, as well as three Bell CH-146 Griffon helicopters. The helicopters were shipped on the Globemasters – two on one mission and the third on another – along with personnel, construction and other vehicles, and the multi-disciplinary Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), with three reverse-osmosis water purification plants as well as medical and engineering personnel.

“All Canadians are committed to helping relief and stabilization efforts in the Philippines,” Defence Minister Rob  Nicholson said, as the Griffons were being readied for shipment. “These helicopters will provide the Disaster Assistance Response Team with additional means to reach and help those who desperately need our assistance.”

Cyclones are frequent visitors to the Philippines and surrounding countries. The first system of 2013 moved into the region from the Central Pacific in January, and the tally by year’s end had topped 40 storms, including more than a dozen logged as typhoons, several of which were unofficially in the super typhoon category.

But when Haiyan ripped through with sustained winds of 230 kilometres per hour (145 miles per hour), the damage was extreme. The death toll was in the thousands; injuries were almost uncountable; more than 900,000 Filipinos were displaced; and property damage was in the billions, with all counts rising almost daily.

The first RCAF aircraft on the scene was a Challenger flown by Maj Aidan Costelloe from Ottawa-based 412 Transport Squadron, and his first officer, Capt Ryan Kerr. The rest of the standard crew of four included Sgt Monique Ryan, a flight steward, and flight engineer Sean Flanagan, a civilian volunteer from Transport Canada (which maintains 412 Squadron’s six Challengers).

Costelloe, who is his squadron’s standards and training flight commander and has more than 4,000 hours, mainly in CC-130 Hercules transports, told Canadian Skies that his crew was in the air on the evening of Nov. 10, within a few hours of getting the call.

From Ottawa, they flew to Canadian Armed Forces Base Trenton, Ont., for a brief stop to pick up the DART’s commanding officer, as well as the Interdepartmental Strategic Support Team (ISST), in which DND partners with Foreign Affairs, Trade & Development Canada, renamed last summer when the Canadian International Development Agenda was folded into it.

Then they were off to Anchorage, Alaska, with a refuelling stop in Edmonton. From Alaska, they hopped the Bering Sea to Petropavlosk on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, before turning south through Sapporo, Japan, to arrive in Manila 22 hours after leaving Ottawa.

There were no issues en route, even though short-notice flights can present a challenge in terms of diplomatic clearances. Costelloe credited Canada’s military attaches along the way. “I don’t know all the ins and outs,” he said. “We didn’t have the clearances before we left, but we had them before we arrived.”

The crew was understandably “pretty exhausted” upon arriving in Manila, but while their initial role had been simply to get the advance team on the ground, it was quickly apparent that transport within the storm-razed country was “pretty limited,” so the crew found themselves tasked with a variety of ongoing missions.

“We flew 54 hours in the Philippines – up to eight legs a day,” Costelloe said. “It was challenging in terms of . . . some airfields being daylight VFR-only capable in some of the more hard-hit areas, including Roxas, where the DART was based, and Tacloban and Ormoc, which we travelled to a couple of times as well.”

Costelloe and his crew spent the first few days transporting the 22-member DART advance party to Roxas and Iloilo, on battered Panay Island. That done, there were more people to be ferried around, including Christian Paradis, Canada’s international development minister, as well as Valerie Amos, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coodinator, and Justine Greening, the British secretary of state for international development.

The Polaris (a configurable Airbus A310) was used to transport 64 aviation, medical, support and headquarters personnel from Trenton to the Philippines; but, as usual, the heavy lifting fell to the Globemasters.

The big Boeings’ ability to fly long distances and land in remote airfields makes them ideal for military, humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. With the Griffons’ operational versatility central to relief missions, getting the helicopters to Manila as quickly as possible was critical. Although three can be packed into a Globemaster, which can carry up to 160,000 pounds over a distance of 4,500 nautical miles, the need to get personnel and other gear over in a hurry necessitated two helicopter deliveries.

LCol Jean Maisonneuve, commanding officer (CO) of 429 Transport Squadron, which is home to the RCAF’s four Globemasters, explained that the distances flown meant that payloads were limited to 110,000 pounds. The seven Globemaster crews flew nine roundtrips of 18,500 miles: from Trenton to Comox on Vancouver Island as a first leg, then to U.S. Air Force Base Hickam in Hawaii, which shares space with Honolulu International Airport, and from there to Manila via Guam – a total of 33 hours. Return legs skipped Comox because the aircraft were mostly empty.

Maisonneuve, who has more than 7,400 hours on Hercules, Challengers and Globemasters, and has been 429 CO since last July, told Canadian Skies that his crews were delivering one “chalk” or load every 48 hours, as requested by the relief task force, each taking an average of five hours to load and three hours to offload.

The fact that there are only two crew bunks on a Globemaster, which has a normal crew complement of three, means that human cargo must take rest wherever it can be found. Maj David Forbes, the helicopter detachment commander in Iloilo, said that some of his people even napped under the bellies of their Griffons on the first twoship delivery to the Philippines.

Maisonneuve chuckled about the sparse passenger space on his Globemasters. “The floor is actually pretty comfortable with an air mattress,” he said. “It’s probably better than you’d get . . . on a 20-hour flight on a packed (commercial flight from) Dubai to Los Angeles! I think I’d rather be on a C-17 and sleep on the floor any day; but that’s me personally, having done both.”

Forbes said maintenance and other support personnel were “absolutely phenomenal” on the mission. He told Canadian Skies that when they arrived in the evening, they unloaded the Griffons and fitted their main rotors, readying them for the following morning. That kind of readiness, he said, is “world-class” and can be matched by only a handful of countries’ helicopter operations.

A challenge of a different sort arose from the military’s support for the various non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which tend to have different procedures, even though they work toward a common goal. “A lot of that was handled at the task force level in terms of de-conflicting what they’re trying to do,” Forbes told Canadian Skies.

“We’d show up to do one thing, and they’d have us doing another thing,” he explained. “Or, at mid-day, somebody would come and say, ‘Oh yeah, we didn’t think you were able to help us;’ or, ‘We see that you’re doing it for them, so can you do this for us?’ So to maximize the resources we had, we would turn on a dime from inserting military mobile medical teams in one location, to carrying food aid to the other side of an island with basically only a grid reference to go to. On a given tank of gas, we might support two or three different users that we didn’t know about when we started the engines.”

Mountainous terrain separated the air task force headquarters in Roxas from the Griffon command-and-control node at Iloilo, which meant that radio communications could be problematic. “So as the aircraft landed,” Forbes said, “the aircraft captain would pull out a local cell phone and just communicate even by text.”

Also, with Iloilo requiring a return-to-base transit at the end of a typical eight-hour flying day, and “everybody wanting to push to get that last load in . . . before they begin that transit,” fuel and range were constantly being recalculated. “It’s not combat, but there’s a lot of mental math being done,” said Forbes, who flew Griffons during his seven years with 427 Special Operations Aviation Squadron at CAF Base Petawawa, Ont.

The Philippines civil air traffic service does not permit night flying, so the RCAF received special authorization to fly with night vision goggles (NVGs). Moreover, flying after “legal dark,” which typically begins at about 1800 hours at that latitude year-round, also would have meant that crews flying eight hours VFR would have risked exceeding the daily limit set out in their operations manual.

“What it did allow us, though, is flexibility,” Forbes said. “We could have downtime in the middle of the day while waiting, say, to extract a medical team. We could work up until the last minutes of light, pick them up in the dark with NVGs and return to Iloilo safely.”

Op Renaissance officially ended on Dec. 15, 2013. At its conclusion, crews had conducted 184 CH-146 Griffon sorties (totaling 357 flying hours) and transported 828 passengers. Among its many relief efforts, the DART had purified nearly 500,000 litres of water, treated 6,525 medical patients, and delivered approximately 230,485 pounds of food to those in need.

Safely back home, the Challenger commander, Maj Costelloe, put into words how his crew and all the others felt about their involvement in another Canadian humanitarian relief effort:

“Extremely honoured and very proud. The level of appreciation from everyone we encountered . . . was incredible. They made us feel that Canada’s efforts were very, very much appreciated – not just us individually.”