A helicopter flying toward the slope was a welcome sight for a backcountry skier who was injured in the Duffey Lake area northeast of Pemberton on Wednesday, March 29—but it was also an unexpected one.
It wasn’t the usual search-and-rescue (SAR) helicopter hovering overhead, but an RCMP Air Services Airbus H145 twin-engine, dubbed Air 5.
The helicopter and its crew had been carrying out advanced hoist training at the Whistler Heliport on Wednesday afternoon when the report came in at 4:09 p.m. The SOS notification from a GPS device indicated a skier was injured on Cayoosh Mountain and unable to ski out.
The Air 5 crew, including one member of the RCMP Critical Incident Program and another from the Lower Mainland Emergency Response Team, located the injured skier in steep terrain and successfully performed a hoist rescue. The helicopter landed at the Pemberton Airport 51 minutes after taking off from Whistler, where BC Emergency Health Services were waiting to transport the rescue subject to a local hospital “with serious injuries,” according to a news release. The skier’s two touring mates were able to ski back down to the valley without assistance.
It is, by all accounts, the RCMP’s first-ever hoist rescue of a civilian.
“It’s definitely the first civilian rescue with this helicopter ... and the RCMP has never had hoist capability before this,” explained tactical flight officer Const. Shane Wiens, a member of the Abbotsford Police Department who is currently seconded to RCMP Air Services.
“When they ask police officers ‘Why did you sign up?' [the No. 1 answer] is ‘to help people,’” he said. “Talking with the injured skier, they were totally ecstatic about being able to see the police helicopter there, and they were quite surprised ... It’s kind of a nice thing to be able to help somebody in a different way, something that hasn’t been done with the police before. To be able to do that for the injured person was pretty cool.”
How are search-and-rescue crews typically called out to the field?
Typically, a call for help in the backcountry is dispatched to the local RCMP detachment or BC Ambulance Service, before police task-out the response to the closest SAR organization and its team of highly trained volunteers. Still, search and rescue falls under the RCMP’s mandate in B.C.
Pemberton SAR was initially mobilized for the March 29 call, RCMP Air Services Special Const. Paul Copeland confirmed, but “it seemed like they wouldn’t be able to respond for a few hours, and since we were potentially pushing daylight, it made sense for us to do the rescue," the pilot said. "But we had that ongoing dialogue with them. Basically, our goal was obviously to get the patient to medical help as soon as possible.”
Pemberton SAR manager and media spokesperson David MacKenzie confirmed the RCMP's flight crew was in "very good communication" with SAR volunteers throughout the operation.
After the Wednesday afternoon call came in, "the first thing this time of year that we are concerned about, when we're looking at the location, is 'is it in avalanche terrain?'" said MacKenzie. "As part of our protocols, if it is in avalanche terrain that would pose any hazard, we have to at the very minimum take a Level 2 avalanche technician that can do an assessment to ensure that it's safe for us to be conducting any sort of an evacuation in that area."
The Pemberton SAR team was initiating that response and preparing to lift off from its Pemberton Airport base when they received word from RCMP dispatch that Air 5 happened to be in the area, and planned to conduct a flyover to try and locate the subject. "Any assistance—especially if it's by helicopter—we would certainly welcome," said MacKenzie, "as we did."
Hearing the Air 5 crew was unable to land safely during that flyover, Pemberton SAR anticipated they would still be tasked to extract the subject with a longline. That is, until MacKenzie learned Air 5 was outfitted with hoist capability. "As soon as I heard that, to me, that's a great tool in the toolbox," he said. "They were kind of asking if we were OK with them conducting the rescue operation, and I was more than happy with having them proceed."
Anytime Pemberton SAR "can reduce the risk for our own people, all the better," MacKenzie added. "At the end of the day, we technically work for the RCMP—they're calling us to conduct a rescue operation, when [in this case] they actually have a piece of equipment in the area that enables them to conduct the rescue on their own."
Expect to see B.C. RCMP's Air 5 helicopter responding to more SAR calls in the future
Though police work will remain the Air 5 helicopter’s first priority, “The long-term intention of the aircraft was to help out more with SAR, when we could,” said Copeland, who previously flew for Blackcomb Helicopters.
“Our goal is to develop more of a working relationship with the volunteer SAR teams in the future,” he added.
In particular, the RCMP’s Air 5 could, potentially, help fill the gaps for search-and-rescue operations in cases where local SAR crews aren’t immediately able to secure a commercial helicopter, either due to federal constraints on pilots’ flight duty time—RCMP pilots aren’t subject to the same regulations—or when those helicopters are occupied fighting wildfires during the hotter months.
The Air 5 is a provincial asset most frequently used to support the RCMP’s Emergency Response Team (ERT), and to transport members—like its dive team, for example—to sites across the province as needed. RCMP used the aircraft to conduct the hoist rescue of an injured ERT police officer on one previous occasion, in B.C.’s Interior, in February 2022.
Civilian rescues are “not really any different in terms of what we do and how we do our risk assessment and procedures,” said Wiens. However, the steep, complex terrain where Wednesday’s rescue took place did prompt the crew to specifically consider avalanche hazards on their way to the scene. Though every member of the flight crew has received avalanche awareness training, Copeland said, the team was particularly lucky to have a former Blackcomb ski patroller onboard with extensive experience in avalanche terrain.
Avalanche hazard can also be less risky for crews conducting a hoist rescue compared to those operating a longline, Pemberton SAR manager MacKenzie explained. "They're going to have minimal contact with the ground, [because] they're coming down on a on a fixed line, trying to connect up with the subject and then hoist them back to the machine," he said. "It's certainly a lower risk than us doing a longline rescue from our own machine."
The aircraft itself is “a really advanced, modern twin-engine helicopter,” Copeland said. “If it has an engine failure, we can still continue to operate at a fairly high performance level with one engine. It’s got that big safety margin built in, which is not typical in most helicopters—probably all helicopters—that are used commercially in Canada right now.”
The Airbus H145 model is heavily used for medevac and SAR operations in Europe. “We’re getting more and more of them into Canada now as well,” Copeland added, “but this was the first one in Canada.”
The RCMP took possession of the aircraft in late 2018.
“The technical capabilities of Air 5 make it an excellent platform to provide operational support like this throughout the diverse geography of our province,” said Insp. Kevin Kilar, Officer-in-Charge of BC RCMP Air Services, in a release. “We were fortunate to be able to respond and safely extract the skier to medical care.”
