New search-and-rescue planes to reach 2-hour ‘alert’ milestone in B.C.

The first fully painted CC-295 as seen at the Airbus production facility in Seville, Spain on Oct. 8, 2019 (Airbus)

The long-delayed rollout of Canada’s new search-and-rescue airplanes is expected to reach a major milestone this week with the Kingfisher aircraft finally assuming “search-and-rescue alert” status in British Columbia.

The Department of National Defence is expected to announce the “SAR alert” designation Thursday, signalling that the air force will have one Kingfisher aircraft ready at all times to respond to emergencies on the West Coast.

The new planes, which were ordered nearly a decade ago, are still years away from reaching their full operating capability, but the “SAR alert” posture establishes that a Kingfisher plane will be airborne from Canadian Forces Base Comox “within two hours of receiving a tasking” from the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria, a National Defence spokesperson confirms.

“Starting May 1, there will be enough aircraft, personnel and resources to enable the CC-295 (Kingfisher) to hold regular SAR alert” in the region, spokesperson Cheryl Forrest said in an emailed statement.

Between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. from Monday to Friday, that two-hour response time will “typically” shrink to under 30 minutes, Forrest added.

The announcement follows the revelation earlier this month that the military had quietly pulled two Hercules aircraft out of B.C., leaving the region without fixed-wing search-and-rescue aircraft since early January.

• Read more: Canadian military pulls rescue planes from B.C. amid new aircraft delays

The planes were redeployed to Winnipeg, adding several hours of flying time to any response on the B.C. coast.

In March, the Kingfisher was “released to service” by the air force, meaning the plane could be called upon to conduct a search-and-rescue mission from Comox if the timing and available resources allowed.

The first such case where that occurred was when a Kingfisher aircrew happened to be training in the Port Alberni area and was asked to support a search for a person in the water after an idling boat was discovered, according to National Defence spokesperson Andrée-Anne Poulin.

Another instance earlier this month was when a Kingfisher was identified among the aircraft conducting a search near Victoria, where two adults and a child went overboard from a vessel in the Saanich Inlet.

• Read more: Man missing, woman and baby rescued after vessel found abandoned near Victoria

Once “SAR alert” status is achieved with one rescue plane ready at all times, the next milestone will be adding more planes to the readiness schedule to reach the airframe’s initial operating capability (IOC), which is expected in the next year.

“IOC of any capability means the point at which it can be employed for its defined mission based on established criteria, which in the case of the CC-295, is a more significant level of readiness than maintaining the single line of SAR tasking,” Forrest said.

After the Kingfishers are approved for operations in Comox, they will enter service in Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia.

The Kingfisher’s full operating capability, at which point all the aircraft, flight personnel and maintenance assets are in place, will not be reached until 2029 or 2030, according to National Defence.

The Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria, which handles all search-and-rescue tasks in the B.C. and Yukon region, receives approximately 3,000 search-and-rescue calls per year, according to the military’s most-recent estimates.

Three-quarters of those calls are for maritime incidents, while 10 per cent are for air incidents and 15 per cent are requests for humanitarian assistance.

Many of those calls can be serviced by the air force’s Cormorant search-and-rescue helicopters, though their range and flight time is limited.

The federal government announced in 2016 that it was buying 16 Kingfishers to fill the search-and-rescue role following the planned retirement of its decades-old Buffalo aircraft in 2022.

The deal with European manufacturer Airbus was intended to have the new twin-propeller planes in the air by 2020. But the progress soon stalled – first due to concerns about the aircraft’s operating manual, and later because of the COVID-19 pandemic and legal issues around the naming of the aircraft.

The delays prompted the military to announce the relocation of two Hercules aircraft to Canadian Forces Base Comox in May 2022, where they were supposed to remain until the Kingfishers were operational.

The initial $2.4-billion deal with Airbus included the construction of a new training facility at 19 Wing Comox, plus an additional $2.3 billion to support and maintain the aircraft for 15 years.