A black military jeep rolls into Redwater on patrol. About 1,000 feet above, Major Erik Manchester keeps watch.
Sweeping the road ahead with his electronic eye, he spots trouble: a white, snow-covered van parked by the next intersection. "Could be a suicide bomber or vehicular IED," he says, using the technical term for roadside bomb. He radios the jeep's crew with the car's exact location.
Had this been a real patrol, those troops might have driven around the van, called in the bomb squad or ordered an air strike. Because it isn't, and it's late, they decide to go home.
Scenes like this played out throughout the skies over Sturgeon County last week as the 408 Tactical Helicopter Squadron prepared to deploy to Afghanistan. The squadron was doing training exercises day and night, and let the Gazette come along for one of them.
Prepare for takeoff
Manchester starts today's exercise with a briefing around the huge, square, map-strewn table in the squadron's headquarters on the Edmonton Garrison.
The troops are learning to use the MX-15 camera system, he says — a gyro-stabilized camera with infrared vision similar to what the Edmonton police use on their helicopters. It looks like a big black ball mounted on the side of a Griffon helicopter.
"It's an absolutely vital system," he says, but few troops know how to use it; there aren't many available in Canada to train on. "For a lot of folks, this is their first time seeing the system."
The 408s spend most of their time in Afghanistan escorting convoys, Manchester says. It's their job to spot bombs or ambushes so ground troops can avoid or destroy them.
Most people won't notice a helicopter flying past in the distance, says Capt. Ron Krueger, who has used the camera extensively in Afghanistan, but will spot — and potentially shoot at — one that flies into binocular range.
"If we get really close, they'll probably drop their rifle or IED and pick up a farm implement to pretend to be a farmer."
The camera gives crews a clear look at a person from well outside weapons range, Krueger says, and lets them track them on the move. It's linked to a GPS so they can pinpoint a threat's exact location without breaking out the map and compass, and has a record feature for later analysis.
It also helps cut down on civilian casualties. "We want to make sure that anyone being engaged by us is a legitimate target," Manchester says. The camera helps troops tell the difference between farmers planting seeds and insurgents planting bombs.
Flying the skies
Manchester gets his orders: he and his crew of four are to investigate several compounds of interest near Morinville before tracking a convoy from Bon Accord to Redwater.
They lift off in a whirl of blades and snow. Cars become metallic mites crawling along black vines, and fields become white sheets spirographed by mad cartographers.
Krueger walks the crew through the camera system. This takes awhile, as there's about a zillion menus to work through. "You can tell it was designed by a whole bunch of engineers let go by Microsoft," he jokes. The crew soon gets the hang of it, and films a radio tower and shack for later analysis.
The crew moves on to the convoy: a black jeep on a black highway. The jeep is about the size of a pen tip at this height, but the camera can zoom in enough to see its occupants. "Okay, he's moving," Manchester says. A high-speed chase begins.
Operators have to spot and track moving targets on the ground, sometimes at night, while managing radio traffic, the chopper's gunners and the helicopter itself, all while keeping out of the line of fire of their own forces. Dust, shadows and heat differentials don't make the job any easier. "You can see where you can get a bit of task overload," Manchester says.
The crew did pretty well this mission, Krueger says, considering this was their first or second time using the system. "It's a button dance," he says, and it gets easier with experience.
And you get plenty of that in the field, he adds — many pilots fly for 10 hours a day. "You can never fly enough. There's always guys that need support."
