Rescuers parachute into B.C. canyon at night to save man crushed by horse

A hunter who was seriously injured by a horse he was riding has been rescued.

Military search-and-rescue technicians parachuted into a remote canyon in northern British Columbia early Wednesday morning after a hunter was crushed and seriously injured by the horse he was riding.

The airborne rescue marked the first operational nighttime parachute jump from the military’s new CC-295 Kingfisher aircraft, and due to the risk of wildfires in the region, the mission was conducted without the benefit of flares to illuminate the area.

The call for assistance came in to the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 442 Transport and Rescue Squadron, based at 19 Wing Comox, late Tuesday evening.

Authorities say the injured man had been hunting with a group of horseback riders in a rugged area approximately 185 kilometres east of Fort Nelson when the accident occurred.

The Kingfisher airplane and a Cormorant helicopter took off around 9:45 p.m. for the 16-hour roundtrip mission, according to Lt. Keil Kodama, spokesperson for 19 Wing Comox.

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“Search and rescue technicians parachuted from the Kingfisher, hiked to the injured rider, provided immediate medical support, and co-ordinated a successful helicopter extraction,” Kodama said in a statement to CTV News.

“The clouds broke and we had a really good hole to get in there and everything kind of worked out for us,” said Max Honeyman, one of two rescuers who parachuted from the plane shortly after 1 a.m. Wednesday. “We knew the patient had some serious injuries that could need, could need immediate attention, so we opted to jump.”

The rescuers parachuted into a meadow roughly a kilometre from the accident scene, and then hiked up a river to the injured man, Honeyman said.

“We got to the patient pretty quickly, managed to get there and then about two hours later, the Cormorant showed up,” he added. “We spent the night with him and since the moment we got there until the moment we hoisted him out… he was getting better and better and better.”

The injured hunter was transferred from the helicopter onto the Kingfisher in Fort Nelson and then flown to Prince George for higher-level emergency medical treatment.

The man was handed off to critical-care paramedics at the Prince George airport and then rushed to hospital after B.C. Emergency Health Services received a call about the incoming patient at around 5:10 a.m., a spokesperson for the agency said in an email.

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The Kingfisher search-and-rescue airplanes began operations in B.C. earlier this year, replacing the decades-old Buffalo aircraft as Canada’s main fixed-wing search-and-rescue platform.

The federal government announced in 2016 that it was buying 16 Kingfishers to fill the search-and-rescue role in Canada following the planned retirement of the Buffalo aircraft.

The air force intended to have the first of the new twin-propeller Kingfishers operating by 2020, but the rollout was plagued by delays – first due to concerns about the aircraft’s operating manual, and later by the COVID-19 pandemic and legal issues around the naming of the aircraft.