The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan agreement was signed on 17 December 1939 and the search for airfields began immediately. Greenwood, a farming hamlet in the Annapolis Valley, was picked for a climate that is relatively free of fog. The airfield was built between 1940 and 1942 and the first training unit, No. 36 Operational Training Unit, arrived on 9 March 1942 with Lockheed Hudsons, Avro Ansons and Westland Lysanders — all of them Royal Air Force aircraft, flown by Royal Air Force people, on Canadian ground.

It grew quickly. By the end of August 1942 the station held 36 aircraft and 194 trainees within a total of 1,474 RAF personnel; by November the number of trainees had doubled and the aircraft count had reached 80. In December 1942 the Canadian Army sent an anti-aircraft searchlight troop to give crews realistic night training. The station also flew operationally, on maritime reconnaissance against U-boats in the western Atlantic.

That combination killed people. Dozens of aircraft were lost in the station’s first year, taking Canadians and 31 airmen from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand with them; across the whole period from June 1942 to April 1945 the station recorded 57 airmen killed in 25 crashes. From 3 July 1943 Greenwood was retasked to train crews on the de Havilland Mosquito, supported by Airspeed Oxfords and Bristol Bolingbrokes, and the last Hudson left on 3 October that year.

The station passed to the Royal Canadian Air Force on 1 July 1944, No. 36 OTU disbanded and No. 8 OTU formed in its place. Training ran until the plan ended on 31 March 1945. Greenwood was then slated for Tiger Force, the Commonwealth very long range bomber group meant to operate against Japan: No. 8 OTU disbanded on 31 July 1945 and No. 6614 Wing formed the next day with Lancasters, planning to deploy crews to the Pacific by December. Japan capitulated on 14 August and the wing was disbanded on 5 September. The base was mothballed on 1 May 1946 and by the end of June was down to 72 people.

Greenwood came back on 1 April 1947 and was chosen as Canada’s site for maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare when the country signed the North Atlantic Treaty. On 12 December 1949 No. 2 Maritime Operational Training Unit became operational and 405 Squadron reactivated on the same day, both flying Avro Lancasters modified for maritime reconnaissance. Part of 2 (M) OTU became 404 Squadron on 30 April 1951, and the station was soon so crowded that the OTU was moved to Summerside on 14 November 1953.

The aircraft changed roughly every twenty years and the mission did not. The Lockheed P2V Neptune replaced the Lancasters from 30 March 1955. The first Canadair CP-107 Argus arrived on 1 May 1958 and 405 became the first operational unit on the type in July that year; 404 followed on 15 April 1959 and 415 reactivated at Summerside on 1 May 1961 as the third Argus unit. Greenwood’s Neptunes went west to 407 Squadron at Comox.

The Argus was built for exactly this ocean and lasted until the late 1970s, when six of Greenwood’s eighteen were mothballed and 242 posts cut across all ranks. The CP-140 Aurora was chosen as the replacement; the first arrived on 27 May 1980, the last of fourteen on 10 July 1981, and 405 Squadron flew its final Argus sortie on 10 November 1980. 415 Squadron flew the Argus from Summerside until spring 1981, then moved to Greenwood and converted.

The Aurora is still here, four decades on, rebuilt inside more than once through the Aurora Incremental Modernization Project and the Block IV standard, and it matters more now than it did twenty years ago because Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic has increased. Its successor has been bought: up to sixteen Boeing P-8A Poseidon aircraft under the Canadian Multi-Mission Aircraft project, based at Greenwood and Comox, with acquisition costed above $5 billion and in-service support to 2055 above $10 billion. The Department of National Defence gives first delivery as 2027.

Greenwood’s rescue lineage starts in October 1947, when No. 103 Rescue Unit moved up from RCAF Station Dartmouth. The unit had been conceived that January to help aircraft in distress on the transatlantic run, and it arrived with 100 to 150 airmen and officers, two PBY Cansos, a Noorduyn Norseman and a Sikorsky S-51. On 17 January 1955 it received a Piasecki H-21, the "flying banana".

Unification moved the unit to Summerside in 1968 to relieve overcrowding at Greenwood, and the 1989 federal budget then closed Summerside. In 1991 the base shut and 413 Squadron, the successor to 103 Rescue Unit, moved its CH-113 Labradors and CC-115 Buffalos to Greenwood on 10 June. The Buffalos were replaced with Hercules shortly afterwards, and in 2002 the Labradors gave way to the CH-149 Cormorant.

413 covers an area of about 1,800,000 square miles with around 200 people: from southern Nova Scotia north to Iqaluit on Baffin Island, west as far as Quebec City and east out into the middle of the Atlantic. The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax holds one Hercules and four Cormorants on primary response, with crews on 24-hour standby for vessels and aircraft in distress, medical evacuations and searches. The squadron works closely with the volunteer Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, whose spotters it trains.

The Hercules era ended in mid-January 2026, when 413 retired its last CC-130H. Aircraft 333 — which carried a placard reading 1973 and had roughly 37,000 hours on it, more than any other H model in the fleet — had trouble getting out of Greenwood at all, losing a propeller to the cold and covering the ramp in oil across two attempts. The CC-295 Kingfisher has taken over the standby.

On 2 October 1998 a CH-113 Labrador, aircraft 305 of 413 Squadron, was lost near Marsoui on the Gaspé coast of Quebec. All six on board were killed: Captain Peter Musselman and Captain Darrin Vandenbilche, the pilots; Master Corporal David Gaetz and Master Corporal Glen Sinclair, the flight engineers; and Sergeant Jean Roy and Master Corporal Darrell Cronin, the search and rescue technicians. The crew had just come off a medical call at Sept-Îles and had been airborne minutes when the new tasking came in — a search for a yellow aircraft.

The cause was an on-board fuel leak that led to a fire and an explosion; the rotor went out of balance, struck the main body and the aircraft broke up in the air. The loss came at the end of a decade in which the Labrador’s age had become a public argument, and it hardened the case for the Cormorant. Twenty-five years later the squadron treated the anniversary explicitly as a training event rather than a ceremony.

The Cormorant then had a bad start of its own. On 13 July 2006 CH-149 149914, based at Greenwood, crashed into Chedabucto Bay off Canso, Nova Scotia, in heavy fog during a night search and rescue exercise with a Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary vessel. Three Canadian Forces members were killed — Sergeant Duane Brazil, 39, Master Corporal Kirk Noel, 33, and Corporal Trevor McDavid, 31 — and four other crew members were injured.

Mechanical failure was formally ruled out. On 11 March 2008 the Directorate of Flight Safety announced that the cause was pilot error, and that Canadian Forces officials had been aware of a shortfall in the training the pilots had received; preliminary findings indicated the crew were unaware of the proper use of the autopilot, leading to controlled flight into terrain. It was the first fatal Cormorant accident in Canadian service. Greenwood has lost nine people in two aircraft on the rescue mission, and the squadron talks about both.

404 "Buffalo" Squadron formed at Thorney Island in Sussex on 15 April 1941 under RAF Coastal Command, flying Blenheim IVs and later Beaufighters on convoy cover and shipping reconnaissance from Scottish bases. As part of the Dallachy strike wing it took part in the attack on German shipping in a Norwegian fjord on 9 February 1945, a day the wing itself named Black Friday for its losses. It reformed at Greenwood on 30 April 1951 and is now the operational training unit for Aurora aircrew and maintainers.

405 "Eagle" Squadron formed at Driffield on 23 April 1941 and flew the Royal Canadian Air Force’s first bombing operation ten weeks later, against the marshalling yards at Schwerte on the night of 12/13 June. It took part in the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne on 30/31 May 1942, spent late 1942 loaned to Coastal Command hunting U-boats in the Bay of Biscay, and was then the only RCAF squadron selected for the elite No. 8 Pathfinder Group. Its last operation of the war, on 25 April 1945, put nine Lancasters over the Berghof.

415 "Swordfish" Squadron reactivated at Summerside on 1 May 1961 as the third operational Argus unit, moved to Greenwood in spring 1981 and converted to the Aurora. It now works as the long range patrol force development squadron, which is the job of deciding what the fleet should be able to do next.

None of these squadrons spends most of its flying hours on submarines. The work is fisheries and pollution patrols, counter-narcotics operations with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Arctic sovereignty flights and support to search and rescue, with the anti-submarine role held in reserve and practised hard. Greenwood Auroras flew operations in the Arabian Sea after 11 September 2001, which is a long way from the Annapolis Valley.