Comox was laid out by the Royal Air Force in the spring of 1942, at a point on the east coast of Vancouver Island chosen to guard the Pacific approaches against the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Royal Canadian Air Force took over in 1943, renamed it RCAF Station Comox and used it for the rest of the war to train transport crews, basing a Douglas Dakota training squadron there from 1944.

It was mothballed in 1946 and stayed shut for six years. The Korean War and the hardening of the Cold War brought it back in 1952 as a permanent Royal Canadian Air Force base on the Pacific coast, and the two missions it has now both date from then. 407 Squadron reactivated on 1 July 1952 as a maritime reconnaissance squadron flying Avro Lancasters. 409 Squadron re-established here on 1 November 1954 for west coast air defence under NORAD, on the CF-100 Canuck and from 1962 the CF-101 Voodoo.

For four years Comox was also a radar station: 51 Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron ran a Pinetree Line early warning site here from 1954 until it closed in June 1958, overtaken by the Mid-Canada and Distant Early Warning Lines further north. A CF-101 Voodoo stands at the main gate as a reminder of the fighter years, which ended in 1984 when 409 Squadron left for Cold Lake to convert to the CF-18.

The search and rescue squadron arrived by way of a closure. RCAF Station Sea Island near Vancouver was shut in 1964 and handed to the Canadian Coast Guard; its 121 Composite Unit moved to Comox and was reorganised as 442 Transport and Rescue Squadron, flying the Grumman Albatross and the Piasecki H-21, later the CH-113 Labrador and the CC-115 Buffalo. The Labrador gave way to the CH-149 Cormorant from 2001.

The Victoria search and rescue region is the reason Comox is difficult. It covers roughly 920,000 square kilometres of British Columbia and Yukon terrain, 560,000 square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean reaching about 600 nautical miles offshore, and more than 27,000 kilometres of coastline. Inside that boundary sit mountain ranges, inlets, rainforest, sea ice at the northern edge and open ocean, and the weather that comes in off the Pacific is among the worst in Canada.

442 Squadron holds it with about 200 people, most of them maintainers, and one CH-149 Cormorant and one fixed-wing aircraft on constant readiness for tasking by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria. Its motto is "Un Dieu, une Reine, un cœur" and its badge carries the Haietlik, the lightning snake of Nootka legend, which Thunderbirds were said to send after whales. It is, by the department’s own account, the busiest search and rescue unit in Canada.

The people who go down the wire or out of the door qualify here. The Canadian Forces School of Search and Rescue at 19 Wing trains every SAR technician in the Canadian Armed Forces, and 442 doubles as the operational training unit for the Cormorant while 418 Squadron trains Kingfisher crews. That concentration is why a base with no fighters is one of the busier flying stations in the country.

It also does the work that does not fit the definition. During the atmospheric river of November 2021, which washed out Highway 7 near Agassiz and cut the Lower Mainland off from the interior, three Cormorants from 442 airlifted more than 300 people, 26 dogs and one cat to safety in the 48 hours before the Canadian Armed Forces were formally asked for assistance. That is a squadron improvising a mass evacuation with rescue helicopters.

Canada bought fifteen de Havilland Canada CC-115 Buffalos between June 1967 and December 1968 as tactical transports for 429 Squadron at St-Hubert. In 1970 they went to the transport and rescue squadrons, and in 1975 the type dropped the tactical role altogether and became a dedicated search and rescue aircraft, eventually in the yellow and red that Canadians recognise. Its darkest day came on 9 August 1974, when CC-115 115461, flying for the United Nations, was shot down by a Syrian surface-to-air missile with the loss of all nine Canadian Armed Forces members aboard — the largest single loss of Canadian lives on a United Nations mission and the last Canadian military aircraft shot down.

By the 2000s the Buffalos had been replaced by Hercules everywhere except Comox, and the reason was terrain. The aircraft could take off and land from rugged strips no longer than a football field and could be flown along the contours of a mountain valley slowly enough for the crew to search visually between the rock. Before modern sensors that was the only way to find a wreck in a British Columbia valley, and for a long time afterwards it was still the best.

Replacing it took twenty years. The search began as early as 2002; the Alenia C-27J Spartan was for some time the presumed winner and the government considered buying it without competition, which drew accusations of bias from the rest of the industry. The programme was relaunched as an open competition, a request for proposals went out in 2015, and in December 2016 Airbus won a contract for sixteen C-295 aircraft with deliveries planned from 2019 through 2022.

The last operational Buffalo sortie was flown from Comox on 15 January 2022, aircraft 115452, with Captain Fahim Awan in the left seat and Captain Matthew Hart as aircraft commander. Three airframes were kept as historical artefacts and the last operational aircraft went to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. The Kingfisher that replaced it was still years from full service, and the gap was covered by Cormorants and by Hercules from elsewhere.

The CH-149 Cormorant, the Canadian version of the AgustaWestland AW101, replaced the CH-113 Labrador from 2001. Its entry into service was not smooth: the type suffered tail rotor hub cracking, and all fifteen Canadian aircraft showed cracks of varying degrees shortly after entry into service in 2004. A redesign was issued in 2005, and three of the first six aircraft fitted with the new hubs showed cracking within a month. An articulated tail rotor with elastomeric bearings, derived from the AW139, eventually solved it.

Canada has written off two Cormorants and neither was a Comox aircraft. CH-149 149914 of 413 Squadron crashed off Canso, Nova Scotia on 13 July 2006, killing three crew and injuring four. CH-149903 was destroyed on 10 March 2022 at 9 Wing Gander during a training exercise, when a seat malfunction and severe vertical vibration produced unrecognised spatial disorientation; four of the six on board had minor injuries and two were seriously hurt, and the airframe was salvaged for spares for the mid-life upgrade.

The CC-295 Kingfisher is the Buffalo’s replacement and the programme that has given the air force the most public trouble. Comox received the first aircraft in September 2020 and is the training base for the type, with 418 Search and Rescue Operational Training Squadron standing up to teach it. Getting it into full service has taken years longer than planned, and the fleet reached the east coast only in 2026, when 413 Squadron at Greenwood took over the Atlantic standby with it.

What gets lost in the procurement argument is what this base has to cover while it runs. The Victoria region does not get easier because a contract is late, and for most of the period between the Buffalo’s retirement and the Kingfisher reaching maturity, the fixed-wing half of Pacific search and rescue was thinner than the plan on paper said.

19 Wing shares its runway with the Comox Valley Airport, run by a civilian commission, and that has produced some of the odder days in the base’s history. On 5 June 1979 a Northwest Airlines Boeing 747, chartered by the United States military to carry 368 service personnel and families from Travis Air Force Base to Japan and South Korea, caught fire in an engine over Cape Scott. It landed on Comox’s 10,000-foot runway with the fire warning light still flashing. None of the passengers or the thirteen crew was hurt, and a base used to handling service families looked after them until a replacement aircraft came.

In April 2012 a Korean Air Boeing 777 with 149 people on board, bound from Vancouver to Seoul, turned back off the north coast of British Columbia after a telephoned bomb threat and was escorted into Comox by American F-15s scrambled from Portland. In 1989 the arrival of Washington Air National Guard KC-135 tankers for the annual Global Shield exercise, complete with vehicles, equipment and armed personnel coming ashore from landing craft on a local beach, prompted residents to ask whether the United States was invading.

The Snowbirds fly their spring work-up at Comox every April, which makes the Comox Valley one of the few places in Canada where the national aerobatic team is an ordinary spring noise. The base hosts a biennial air show, the Comox Air Force Museum is on the station, and Annex A at Goose Spit is the sea cadet training centre HMCS Quadra, where about 600 cadets train each summer.

Not every incident is aviation. On 18 November 2021 an explosion at a barracks building that was undergoing renovation injured 22 people, sixteen of them military and six civilian; 59 people were housed in the building, though not all were inside at the time. The base is also one of two, with Greenwood, planned to operate Canada’s armed uncrewed aircraft in the late 2020s, which will be another change to what the Comox Valley hears overhead.