September 5, 2023 | Local, Security
| Media are invited to a departure event for Team Canada, as they head to Germany to represent Canada at this year’s Invictus Games Düsseldorf 2023. |
August 11, 2022 | Local, Aerospace
Airbus was designated as the only supplier qualified to provide the tankers to the Royal Canadian Air Force. As a result, a formal request for its proposal for the planes was issued to the firm on May 13, 2022.
September 25, 2018 | Local, Aerospace
As a leading provider of high value logistics and support to Canadian defence for more than 35 years, Peraton recently completed its Calgary facility operations expansion and modernization. The new facility will enable broader support of Canada's CF-188 fighter fleet and position the company for future growth on fighter platforms and programs. Peraton's Calgary facility, at 76,000-plus square feet, now with an engineering lab for operational design and development, is a “one-stop-shop” for integrated logistics support. The site provides full life-cycle supply chain management for the largest allocation of government-owned materiel in Canada. “With our proven record of efficiency, having reduced costs for the CF-188 fleet, we are well equipped and ready to scale to support Canada's future fighter program,” said Gus Bontzos, president, Defence and Electronic Warfare sector. “We are also proud partners in spurring enterprise development, with 60 per cent of our supplier base in Canada comprised primarily of small to medium sized businesses.” Peraton's investment is helping to propel Calgary's economic growth, sparking renewed growth in specialized high-tech jobs. With its development of a platform-agnostic, scalable sustainment model that can optimize program performance for any platform–air, land, or sea, the Peraton model represents the next generation of cooperative military advancement. https://www.skiesmag.com/press-releases/peraton-expands-calgary-operations-to-advance-canada-defence-program-support
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