No Pilots? What is wrong with the RCAF?

 

 

 

Vincent J. Curtis                                                           4 July 2012

 

 

            News item: “While Canada is poised to begin taking delivery of 15 new Chinook CF-47F heavy lift helicopters… a crippling shortage of trained aircrew means that even if Boeing delivers them all on time, it will take until June 2017 before the RCAF will have the fleet fully operational.  Earlier this year, the commander of the RCAF, LGen André Deschamps, briefed a Senate committee on the fact that Canada has had to recruit foreign pilots (mostly British RAF) to assist with the training of new pilots.”

 

If there ever was an argument to transfer rotary aviation from the Air Force to the Army, this is it.

 

From among the ardent thousands who staff the RCAF, it will take five years starting from now for LGen Deschamps to find a couple dozen of them to pilot this new aircraft.  Perhaps these new people are currently in the enrollment process and it will take an estimated five years to complete.

 

It is not as if the arrival of these new helicopters comes as a news flash to the Air Force. The contract with Boeing was signed in August, 2009, and so it will be eight years from the time the Air Force was officially notified to the time it is completely ready for action.  Lucky for us their forbears in the RCAF were a little quicker off the mark: eight years is the difference in time between the Mk I Spitfire and the Vampire jet.

 

Previously I’ve argued that the Air Force should postpone purchase of the F-35 for twenty years in order to give the jet a chance to mature technologically and for costs to become more affordable.  To fill the gap, we would purchase 65 modern F-16 fighters, still in production and currently in Block 60 plus of development, and 65 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters.  The combined cost of each pair of aircraft is $10 million less than a single F-35 jet if purchased according to original government estimates, now, ahem, a little out of date.  After twenty years, the F-16 would be ready for retirement and the then-current F-35 can be purchased at costs reasonable and predictable at that time.  The RCAF does not need new capabilities in its fighter jets, what it needs are new airframes.

 

The bonus to the CF (if I may still use that term) is the additional combat power all these modern attack helicopters would provide that would not be available even if the F-35 were operational now.  Of course, that new combat power would be used tactically and often in support of embattled ground troops, which is something the RCAF has historically not done.  And since the Apache flies, by rights it should belong to the Air Force.

 

The revelation that the Air Force cannot even manage to come up with a couple dozen pilots until eight years after notification obviously puts paid to the idea that they could come up in any reasonable time with a hundred or so ardent young men who would love to fly an Apache Longbow, with all its whiz-bang technology, in combat.

 

Thus if the Army wants to have the speed, range, and firepower of attack helicopters to compliment the doctrine of Adaptive Dispersed Operations it will have to take on the task itself.  There is nothing sacrosanct about helicopters being an Air Force thing: rotary aviation belongs to the Army in the United States military, and the Americans are more into rotary aviation than anyone else.

 

The old doctrinal Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group used to have a squadron of Griffon helicopters assigned to it, so in theory at least the brigade commander had at his disposal all the basic necessities of rotary aviation under his tactical control.  It just so happened that the helicopter squadron folks wore blue and were administered through the air element command.  It would not be so hard conceptually to put all these folks in green instead, and to expand the tactical and operational capabilities of the rotary assets at the disposal of the brigade commander.  One could even substitute one for one an attack helicopter squadron for an armoured squadron in the brigade.  It would be easy also to include the heavy lift capabilities of the Chinook helicopters in that modernized doctrinal brigade group.

 

Competition is what makes free enterprise the most cost efficient way to run an economy.  Competition is what makes individuals work harder to get ahead, and produce a better organization.  Perhaps competition in the aviation field is what the Air Force needs to shake itself out of its doldrums.

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