Canada Thinly Prepared for Arctic Air Rescue

People who fly the northern route from Europe to North America look down from their warm airplanes and try not to think of crash-landing in that vast, white nothingness.

Every day, 125 commercial airliners cross the Canadian arctic.

It’s a beautiful land, but a harsh one, unforgiving even to those who live in it and are prepared. Someone tossed there by fate, without training or proper equipment, might be better off dead.

Last year, a Canadian Forces C-130 Hercules transport crashed within sight of Alert, a secret military base at the top of Ellesmere Island, 550 miles from the North Pole.

Because of the near-perpetual darkness in October and the rugged terrain, rescuers could not reach the site overland from Alert.

The team that brought out the 13 survivors and five bodies 32 hours later came from an air base in Edmonton, Alberta, 2,250 miles away. The pilot of the downed plane, Capt. John Couch, froze to death eight hours before help arrived.

A blizzard further delayed the rescue effort, but the crash victims also suffered because Canada’s search and rescue system is based entirely in the south.

“If there were unlimited funds, we could put things everywhere,” said Brig. Gen. Victor Pergat, commander of the Canadian Forces’ Northern Region. In this era of tight budgets and severe cutbacks in military spending, however, money for search and rescue has been hard to come by.

As for the Alert crash: “If we had launched out of Yellowknife instead of Edmonton, there would only have been a 1 1/2-hour difference,” Pergat said.

For the Defense Department, the logic is simple.

Last year, there were of 575 air search and rescue incidents in Canada, 533 of them south of the 60th Parallel and 42 north of it.

“With the resources we have available, we place them where the action is, and that action is not in the north,” said Lt. Col. Jim Ritzel, head of the department’s search and rescue section in Ottawa. “We can be at Ellesmere Island in eight hours, which is not bad.”

Eight hours can be a very long time if you are underclothed, injured and trying to survive at minus-40 temperatures.

Canada has four search and rescue regions: east, served from Halifax, Nova Scotia; central from Trenton, near Lake Ontario; west from Comox, in British Columbia, and a monstrous chunk of land stretching from the Montana border to the North Pole, assigned to Edmonton.

In all, 690 people and $214 million a year are devoted to search and rescue in Canada, the second-largest country on the planet.

Is Canada prepared for a major disaster in the far north, such as the crash of a jumbo jet?

“We have a plan to respond to that,” Ritzel said. “We’ve had a plan since 1965.”

The Major Air Disaster Plan involves locating the crash scene from a satellite signaling system called SARSAT, sending up Hercules transport planes and putting rescuers in by parachute.

“We feel that, within eight hours, we can have at least 30 people in,” the colonel said.

No rescue helicopters are based north of the 60th Parallel. The Major Air Disaster Plan calls for taking small, disassembled helicopters north in cargo planes, to be reassembled and flown to the site, which takes time.

Canada has large, specially equipped rescue helicopters, but they are too big to put into airplanes and all are based in the south.

“It is becoming more obvious, after last year’s crash of a Hercules transport plane on a routine supply mission to Alert . . . that our rescue equipment is not the best,” the Toronto Star said in an editorial.

“The fact that two American H-60 Blackhawk helicopters had to be flown to Greenland from Alaska and then were used to fly out some of the rescuers, raises real questions about our arctic capability.”

Up to 60 survivors can be handled by the disaster rescue plan’s initial stage. If necessary, that would be followed by an additional air drop of four pallets loaded with clothing, tents, sleeping bags, stoves, medical kits and food for a total of 320 people.

Helicopters eventually would arrive, weather permitting, and fly survivors to the nearest airfield for evacuation to hospitals in southern Canada.