January 31st 2017 - Study on Maritime Search and Rescue activities, including current challenges and opportunities - CHC Helicopters Canada

Senator Poirier: My colleague was talking about your looking at your service more as closing or filling in the gap. How often are you called upon to fill or close that gap?

Mr. Parsons: Do you mean in terms of how many contracts we have of that nature?

Senator Poirier: How many times would they reach out to you that they need you, in Canada?

Mr. Parsons: In Canada we are not currently providing such a service. From memory, the only country today where we are representing an interim solution for the national government search and rescue service is in Norway, but in that particular example it is not a call-out basis. We are contracted for a number of years to fill an expected gap in their ability to provide the service with the assets that the government owns itself.

Senator Poirier: Did I understand that you don't have a contract right now with Canada?

Mr. Parsons: We do not provide search and rescue services in Canada today. No, we do not.

Senator Poirier: The Canadian Coast Guard has a maximum reaction time of 30 minutes and the Department of National Defence and Royal Canadian Air Force also have a reaction time of 30 minutes or less during busy hours and two hours during standard time upon receiving a call for search and rescue. What is your CHC Helicopter reaction time?

Ian McLuskie, Senior Manager — SAR/EMS, Global, CHC Helicopter: The standard reaction time that we work to for most of our contracts is 15 minutes by day and 45 minutes by night. That's from the call-out to get the aircraft airborne. We track and monitor this with our own in-house software solution that we have in place to manage our search and rescue services. Our contractor can view very clearly what our activities are and see to the minute what time we take off and when we land again after the event.

Senator Poirier: How do your SAR aircraft compare to those operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force?

Mr. McLuskie: The aircraft we're operating right now in this space is the Sikorsky S-92. It is a modern airplane with modern standards and all the modern equipment required to allow it to operate in icing conditions, at night and in all weather. To give you some idea of that capability, the aircraft is capable, correctly flown and correctly managed by the crew, of descending at night into an open area over the sea down to a 15-metre visibility. That's effectively putting a helicopter into this room on a dark, wet, miserable night anywhere on the ocean.

Senator Poirier: Can you describe to us how your pilots and engineers are trained for SAR incidents?

Mr. McLuskie: Most of our crew — that is particularly the pilots and the rear crew — come from the military. Eighty per cent of our people have come directly from the military on retirement and have come into the commercial world. We also have our own training and standards team within the organization. We train to similar if not the same or higher standards as the military. We use exactly the same standard operating procedures and the procedures that are derived from the international IAMSAR documents. We operate to the same systems, the same measures and the same level of competency.

Senator Poirier: Even though you do not have any contract with Canada at this point, are you in the process of trying to get a contract? Is that something you guys have tried to work on in the past?

Mr. Allard: There have been ongoing discussions for quite a while about procuring some search and rescue services in Canada. I am probably the guy going back the longest now. Discussions started in the mid-1980s. When you talked about gapped, it's gapped for a longer period. This is not a day-to-day gap. It's truly if you have a fleet replacement or maintenance. I see the government now coming up to some heavy maintenance on the Cormorant fleet, for example.

If you had a gap for a year or two or three years, this is where we would come in and help you with managing the requirements. That's what we mean by "gap.'' It is not to say we never get a call from search and rescue in Canada. It is just that the way the system is right now you wouldn't get a call.

Now the oil companies on the East Coast, and I have been on the East Coast for a while, had to supplement their own requirement. In other words, they had to contract their own aircraft to help in the search and rescue. I am thinking more of St. John's, going back to the Gander base in St. John's and so forth. That was a set contract by the oil companies that felt they wanted a quicker response time out of St. John's, but that is a different sort of gap that was identified by the oil companies.

When we talk about gap it's mostly on a longer-term basis. Certain countries decided to do it and certain countries decided to actually privatize. It started with an analysis of gap. They decided to look further into cost effectiveness, response times, equipment and capital expenditure. Then they decided that a very interesting way was to work alongside with us.

In Ireland, for example, the image is really the Irish Coast Guard. We are just the contractor behind making sure they deliver the service.

An interesting point is all these agencies and governments would love to talk to a representative of Canada to explain how that works. That is what we try to facilitate because sometimes it's hard to sell your own product. It's better to have a customer tell you how they can do this more efficiently. In more cases than others it's a cost issue and a CAPEX issue.

Mr. Parsons: Perhaps I could briefly add to further clarify the question. Despite the many years of Sylvain's engagement with different government agencies and parties over the years, today the invitation is for us to discuss our experience to help inform your own deliberations to form a recommendation of what a future solution might be.

As far as I know, no decision has been made to pursue any procurement activity. We have no contract to obtain. At the moment we are just trying to provide some information to help that process.

Mr. Fry: I am not a Canadian so I have no particular axe to grind in this direction, but I have been dealing with various government departments over the last year in Canada. Perhaps I could just state an observation. The issue of search and rescue coverage in Canada was becoming a bit polarized between full-state provision and all-commercial provision. I don't think either of those solutions is optimum.

What Canada would be best served in considering is some way where they extract the greatest benefits of commercial provision in support of either the DND or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that do a fantastic job on a day-to-day basis in the ownership. No other country on earth provides search and rescue coverage for 18 million square kilometres.

The current situation you have is not failing. It is working. It is working well, but there needs to be some capability put into that to allow the DND, as they reassess their resources at the moment, to do the job effectively. I think that is the debate we are trying to inform with our presence.

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