The Torch: Air Force Maple Flag exercise: scaled down, different focus

The reasons below:

Real wars put a crimp on air-combat exercise

At 27,000 feet, simultaneously refuelling two Canadian CF-18 fighter jets is a matter of inches.

CREDIT: Larry Wong, The Journal
A Canadian Forces CF-18 fighter tops its tanks at 27,000 feet.

At 342 miles an hour, the details are marked out in seconds.

Above the clouds, Capt. Alex Barrette of the Canadian Air Force navigates the massive Polaris Airbus that functions as a mid-air gas station. It's his job to co-ordinate the three aircraft as they are tethered together by two 75-foot fuel hoses with circumferences of a softball.

"Obviously, it's something a bit dangerous to do in the air," Barrette says at his station behind the cockpit. "We have to talk to them, make sure they see us on the radar first, then visually, then we bring them in. They need to be precise to put the fuel probes in their baskets. It's a difficult task."

It takes several minutes for the Polaris to give each fighter 12,000 pounds of fuel. Then the jets disengage and two more take their place.

The tricky manoeuvre is one of many that the Canadian Air Force is practising over the sprawling CFB Cold Lake in a massive, month-long training exercise called Maple Flag [Air Force website here, more from 2008].

In addition to Canadian soldiers from across the nation, such as Barrette from CFB Trenton, pilots and flight crew converge on northern Alberta from Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States, Great Britain and Australia. Observers attend from Chile, Egypt, India, Oman, Poland, South Africa and Ukraine.

Despite the fact that this year's version of the Maple Flag has attracted more than 4,500 air force personnel from around the world, it's the smallest the event has been in years because of actual combat taking up training time and resources [emphasis added].

"We have done our best in the last three or four years to increase the participation, but consistently it has been decreasing," says Maj. Carl Cottrell, who is in command of the Air Force Tactical Training Centre [see bottom here]. "That's because the current events of the world are drawing the majority of resources from these air forces and armies into specific locations. That always has a cost in training [emphasis added]."

This year's event is four weeks long, down from six weeks and even eight in past years.

In response, the Maple Flag organizers have adapted the style of training at their annual event. In the 1980s and 1990s, they were primarily fighter-jet exercises in isolation.

"It provided the first 10 combat missions for junior fighter pilots in a training environment, so they would not have to have those first missions in a real combat environment," Cottrell said.

"History has shown that those first 10 missions are the most critical to a fighter pilot's success."

As current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started, the focus of air warfare changed and the training program follow [emphasis added]. The air force now strives for daylong exercises, such as the rescue of a prisoner of war, that integrate aircraft, ground troops and others. Such complex co-operation is now used in the Canadian effort in Afghanistan, with the introduction of helicopters in the past year.

The biggest asset the Maple Flag program has is geography.

"Cold Lake is a supreme location," Cottrell says. "We have one of the largest unrestricted airspaces in the world. You can take our airspace and superimpose it over Europe, it basically covers one end to the other. You can't compete with that."

Maple Flag is good for surrounding communities...

Back on the base, Capt. Paul Umrysh, senior mission monitor, is in charge of co-ordinating the different nationalities, languages and fighter jets of the numerous countries.

He laughs at how Maple Flag exercises must look to outsiders. "It always looks like controlled chaos, but it's planned almost to the second. It's highly orchestrated."

Umrysh says there aren't as many language barriers as there could be because pilots communicate well, regardless of country.

"We're all air force guys, so we all have similar slang and acronyms we use. When you get to this high a level, it's almost global slang. We understand each other."