March 27, 2023 | Local, Other Defence
March 27, 2023 – Ottawa, Ontario – National Defence / Canadian Armed Forces
Today, the Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of National Defence, announced that the Government of Canada has extended Operation IMPACT until March 31, 2025.
Operation IMPACT is the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission in the Middle East. Through this mission, the Canadian Armed Forces are deployed to build the military capabilities of regional partners and set the conditions for stability and security in the region. Canada’s military efforts are diverse and include contributions to the Global Coalition against Daesh; contributions to NATO Mission Iraq; and contributions to building the military capabilities of Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.
This extension will allow the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to continue to play an important role in supporting regional partners in the advancement of peace and security.
Operation IMPACT will continue with the same mandate with CAF contributions in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the military line of effort under the Global Coalition Against Daesh, and NATO Mission Iraq. The CAF will also continue to provide training and capacity-building assistance on a bilateral basis with the Jordanian and Lebanese Armed Forces and will continue to provide episodic airlift support to the Coalition from its Operational Support Hub in Kuwait.
The presence of CAF personnel in the Middle East, and the capacity-building assistance programmes, support our regional partners’ security forces, enhancing stability and security in the Middle East.
“Our personnel deployed on Operation IMPACT are helping to advance stability and security in the Middle East. When I visited them in December, I saw directly how their presence makes a difference to our partners and Allies. The Canadian Armed Forces contribute to the prosperity of the region and enhance security as well. With today’s extension, Canada is again demonstrating its commitment to our regional partners and NATO Allies.”
The Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of National Defence
Since its launch in 2014, Operation IMPACT has provided training to 4,500 Iraqi Security Force members, over 3,400 members of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and 400 members of the Jordanian Armed Forces.
In support of the Coalition, Canada conducts train, advise and assist operations with the Iraqi Security Forces and deploys personnel to enhance in-theatre tactical transport, including casualty evacuations, if required.
Joint Task Force IMPACT headquarters and the Operational Support Hub continue to operate in Kuwait. Operation IMPACT includes episodic CC-130J Hercules Tactical Airlift support to move personnel and cargo in the joint area of operations.
September 14, 2022 | Local, Aerospace
Diamond Aircraft’s special mission flagship, the DA62 MPP, is proving that a light fixed-wing aircraft is ideal for surveillance missions, thanks to the aircraft’s cost-effectiveness and increased capability.
March 12, 2019 | Local, Aerospace
by Lisa Gordon The Viking CL-415 “SuperScooper” is more akin to a pick-up truck than a sports car. It's a hardworking, amphibious turboprop that was built to fight wildfires. It flies low, battling blistering heat and blinding smoke, before releasing 13,500 pounds of water in six seconds – and then returning to a nearby lake where it skims the surface to reload. Introduced in 1993 by Bombardier, the CL-415 was essentially a turboprop version of its predecessor, the piston-powered CL-215. Today, there are close to 170 CL-215/415 aircraft in operation, mostly in Europe and North America. They are now supported by Viking Air, which acquired the program from Bombardier in 2016. Pilot training in the CL-415 has historically been done in the aircraft, but TRU Simulation + Training says that due to the unique mission it performs, those training flights can be dangerous. The South Carolina-headquartered company is a division of industry giant Textron Inc., and was formed following the amalgamation of several specialty flight simulation and pilot training companies, including former Montreal-based Mechtronix. About two years ago, TRU's commercial aviation division in Montreal began designing the world's first CL-415 full flight simulator (FFS) with the capability to replicate operations not only in the air, but also on the water. The company was able to draw on its recent experience of successfully building a Series 400 Twin Otter FFS for Canada's Pacific Sky Aviation in Calgary, Alta. – the world's first seaplane simulator with water-handling capabilities. “Before the Twin Otter project, hydrodynamic modelling is something we hadn't done before,” acknowledged Thom Allen, TRU's vice-president of Technology and Innovation. “It's like a boat simulator because you're modelling the buoyancy of the floats or the fuselage in the water. Interestingly, our engineers working on the Twin Otter program actually went to the library and researched how boats work on the water. Mixing the boat sim with the aerodynamic sim is the whole package.” He said the CL-415 experience took things one step further by adding the mission component – scooping the water – to the Twin Otter build. “From a safety point of view, the types of missions you do in a waterbomber are quite a bit different from a commercial aircraft. When you're scooping water and dropping it over a fire, training in those conditions is very dangerous. The tradeoff has always been between the quality of the training and the danger of doing that sort of training.” TRU's CL-415 FFS was delivered to Ansett Aviation Training in Milan, Italy, in September 2018 and certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in December to Level D standards. Although training courses have yet to be completed in the simulator, the hope is that both initial and recurrent pilot training will be done exclusively in the device. Allen said the operational characteristics of a CL-415 are complex and unique. “When you're flying over a very hot fire, you drop your water and the mass of the aircraft is cut in half. The turbulence effect is quite significant when you hit the updraft. The fire is creating turbulence, smoke, reduced visibility – and pilots are dropping every five or 10 minutes repeatedly, usually in rugged terrain at low altitudes. This is the part that made this project something new.” To gather accurate performance data, TRU rented a CL-415 and equipped it with flight test instrumentation. “We weren't doing fire drops with our engineers on board, but we did all the manoeuvres around that, and we brought in a number of senior CL-415 pilots to evaluate our work.” The result is the world's first high fidelity CL-415 simulator with the capability of replicating not just air and water operations, but various types and intensities of forest fires and changes in related environmental conditions. The cockpit noise level is accurately reproduced by a secondary audio system that – like the real aircraft – requires crewmembers to wear a noise-cancelling headset. Full article: https://www.skiesmag.com/news/simulating-the-superscooper
July 19, 2021 | Local, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
/CNW Telbec/ - Aéro Montréal, Québec's aerospace cluster, welcomes major investments confirming the strategic and economic importance of the sector. In a...