The Department of Militia and Defence bought 90.8 square kilometres of sandy plain on the Ottawa River in 1905, and the Royal Canadian Horse and Garrison Artillery held the first exercises there that summer. Four years later the camp became the birthplace of Canadian military aviation. On 31 July 1909 J.A.D. McCurdy and F.W. Baldwin flew the Silver Dart at Petawawa: the first flight of a military aircraft in Canada.

It did not go well. Four demonstration flights were made in August 1909 and the machine was wrecked on the last of them, on sandy ground that was never suited to a fragile pusher biplane. The Canadian Aerodrome company’s Baddeck No. 1 was tried afterwards with no better result. The Department of Militia and Defence, having watched two aircraft destroy themselves, decided to put an aerial division on hold, and Canada had no military air service until the First World War forced one.

The garrison found other uses. From December 1914 to May 1916 Petawawa was an internment camp holding 750 German and Austrian prisoners, and between May 1916 and 1918 it trained 10,767 Canadian troops for overseas service. A member of the Chinese Labour Corps, Chou Ming Shan, is buried on the base; his grave went unmarked until an official marker was placed in 2019.

The Second World War brought three training centres, 12,515 troops on the base by September 1942 and about 20,000 in training at the 1943 peak, plus Internment Camp No. 33 at Centre Lake, which held 645 civilian internees of 28 nationalities. What Petawawa has never had, in all that time, is a serious fixed-wing airfield. Its aerodrome is a heliport with a closed grass runway, five kilometres north of the main garrison.

This is the point the base exists to correct. Canada does not have an army aviation branch. The CH-147F Chinooks and CH-146 Griffons at Petawawa are Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft, flown by RCAF pilots and flight engineers and maintained by RCAF technicians, based on a Canadian Army garrison and employed by the army and by Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. The air force owns the aircrew, the army owns the ground and sets much of the task.

It is a deliberate arrangement rather than an accident. Unification in 1968 dissolved the separate service air arms and, when tactical helicopters were gathered into 10 Tactical Air Group and later 1 Wing, the decision was taken to keep them in the air force and to attach them to army formations. 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron sits under 1 Wing, whose headquarters is at Kingston, while the units themselves are spread across garrisons at Petawawa, Valcartier, Gagetown, Borden, Edmonton and Saint-Hubert.

427 Squadron is a further step removed. On 1 February 2006 it was transferred to Canadian Special Operations Forces Command and renamed 427 Special Operations Aviation Squadron, with the SOAS title formally adopted in 2007. It remains an RCAF squadron with RCAF aircrew, but it is commanded by CANSOFCOM rather than by 1 Wing, and it supports Joint Task Force 2 and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment. In April 2024 it added Beechcraft King Air aircraft to its Griffons.

The practical consequence is that Petawawa is one of the few places in Canada where the two services work in the same hangar every day. The army officer planning an air assault and the air force captain flying it answer to different chains of command and different technical airworthiness authorities. It works because everyone involved has spent a career making it work, which is a very Canadian solution to a structural problem nobody wants to reopen.

Canada bought Boeing Vertol CH-147 Chinooks in the 1970s and sold them to the Netherlands in 1991 as a peace dividend, leaving the Canadian Armed Forces with no medium- or heavy-lift helicopter at all. The decision looked defensible for about fifteen years. Then Canada went to Kandahar, where roadside bombs made ground convoys the most dangerous thing a soldier could do, and every analysis of the mission, including the 2008 independent panel on Canada’s future role in Afghanistan, said the same thing: get the troops off the roads.

The interim answer was to buy six CH-147D Chinooks from the United States Army for 292 million dollars, delivered in December 2008 and serialled 147201 to 147206. They flew from the X-Ray ramp at Kandahar Airfield as part of the Canadian Air Wing. Between 28 December 2008 and 30 July 2011 they logged 7,084.5 flying hours, carried 90,723 passengers and lifted 7,097,989 pounds of cargo — a very large number of journeys that were not made by road.

Two were lost. One was brought down by enemy small arms fire on 5 August 2010, and another crashed on landing on 15 May 2011 with thirty people aboard, causing injuries. The four survivors went into storage at the Arizona boneyard in October 2011 and two were donated to museums at Trenton and Petawawa in December 2016. Canada’s other rotary losses in Afghanistan came from the Griffon force: on 6 July 2009 a CH-146 of 430 Escadron tactique d’hélicoptères struck a barrier taking off in dust-ball conditions near a forward operating base, killing Master Corporal Pat Audet, Corporal Martin Joannette and a coalition soldier.

The permanent buy was announced in August 2009: fifteen CH-147F Chinooks, a Canadian variant with additional fuel and a strengthened electrical system. Boeing delivered all fifteen inside a year, the fleet being declared complete on 3 July 2014 after the last aircraft was accepted on 30 June. 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron had been re-established at Petawawa on 2 May 2012 to fly them, and a CAE-built training centre on the base teaches the crews in Canada rather than in the United States.

On the night of 20 June 2023 a CH-147F of 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron, aircraft CH147310, was flying a night training mission over the Ottawa River near Garrison Petawawa. The aircraft struck the water shortly after clearing a tree line while executing a turn. Two of the four aircrew, both pilots, were killed; the two flight engineers escaped with minor injuries. The wreck was recovered from the river in the days that followed.

The Royal Canadian Air Force named the dead on 23 June 2023 after the coroner’s identification and with the agreement of the families: Captain David Domagala, 32, posted to 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron in 2019, and Captain Marc Larouche, 53, who had served with several squadrons over a long career. Both were experienced; Captain Larouche was one of the more senior aircrew on the unit.

The Flight Safety Investigation Report was released on 3 December 2024. It concluded that unrecognised spatial disorientation affecting all crew members prevented anyone on board from detecting the aircraft’s descent during the turn. Unrecognised downward acceleration and the environmental conditions that night were significant contributors. Preventive measures were recommended at base, squadron, wing, division and strategic levels, with particular attention to over-water night flying.

The finding matters beyond Petawawa. Spatial disorientation on a dark night over featureless water is the classic helicopter killer, and the Canadian Armed Forces had lost a CH-149 Cormorant to the same mechanism at Gander on 10 March 2022. Colonel Jean-François Gauvin, the Director of Flight Safety, was explicit that multiple elements combined to produce it. The accident also reduced Canada’s heavy-lift fleet from fifteen aircraft to fourteen, in a country where there is no second squadron to borrow from.

427 Squadron formed at Croft in Yorkshire on 7 November 1942 as a Royal Canadian Air Force bomber unit in No. 6 Group, flying Vickers Wellingtons, then Handley Page Halifaxes and finally Avro Lancasters from Leeming. It flew roughly 3,200 operational sorties and its people collected 147 Distinguished Flying Crosses, sixteen Distinguished Flying Medals, four Distinguished Service Orders and two Conspicuous Gallantry Medals before it stood down on 1 June 1946.

It also acquired the strangest sponsorship in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adopted the squadron, which is why its aircraft carried the names of MGM stars — Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford — and why every member of the squadron was given a lifetime pass to MGM theatres across North America. A lion cub presented through Winston Churchill completed the theme, and the unit has been the Lion Squadron ever since.

After the war it reformed at St-Hubert in 1952 as a fighter squadron on Canadair Sabres, moved to Zweibrücken in Germany, converted to the CF-104 Starfighter in 1962 and disbanded on 1 July 1970. It came back on 1 January 1971 at Petawawa as a tactical helicopter squadron, standardised on the CH-146 Griffon in 1997, and has been at Petawawa ever since — longer than it spent anywhere else.

The 2006 move to CANSOFCOM changed what it is for. A squadron that had spent thirty-five years lifting infantry and doing reconnaissance for the brigade became the aviation arm of Canada’s special forces, working with Joint Task Force 2 and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment. It deployed to Afghanistan with the Canadian Air Wing, and in April 2024 it took on Beechcraft King Air aircraft alongside the Griffons. It is the quietest unit on a loud base, and almost nothing it does now is published.