Moose Jaw already had an aerodrome when the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan reached Saskatchewan. It was rebuilt as RCAF Station Moose Jaw in 1940 and the new field opened in 1941, hosting No. 32 Service Flying Training School under Royal Air Force administration. About 1,200 pilots passed through it, and the nationality list is a summary of the war: Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States.

It was decommissioned in 1946 and handed back to civil use, which lasted seven years. The Korean War and NATO rearmament reactivated it in 1953, and from that point Moose Jaw has trained pilots without a break. The airfield carries the name of Air Vice-Marshal Clifford Mackay McEwen, who took command of No. 6 (RCAF) Group of Bomber Command in February 1944 and drove its loss rate down; it is one of only three military aerodromes in Canada named after a person.

The wing today is the centre of aircrew training for the Royal Canadian Air Force. 2 Canadian Forces Flying Training School at Moose Jaw does the flying phases; 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School at Southport near Portage la Prairie does helicopter and multi-engine training; and 431 Air Demonstration Squadron, the Snowbirds, sits alongside them. Instructors are qualified here as well as students, which is why the flying programme runs from before dawn until dark.

The fleet list is unusually long for a single wing because it covers several training streams: the CT-156 Harvard II, the CT-155 Hawk until 2023, the CT-114 Tutor with the Snowbirds, and the Southport aircraft including the CT-145 King Air, the CT-146 Bell 412 and the CT-153 Juno. Over the next few years most of that will be replaced in one movement by the Future Aircrew Training fleets.

NATO Flying Training in Canada was set up in 1994 as something new: rather than the air force owning trainers and hangars, a contractor would own them and sell training hours to Canada and to allies. Bombardier held the contract, and CAE took it over in 2015. The aircraft were the CT-156 Harvard II, a turboprop, for the basic phases at Moose Jaw, and the BAE CT-155 Hawk, a jet, for advanced and lead-in fighter training at Moose Jaw and at Cold Lake.

It worked, in the sense that pilots from Denmark, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Finland and Austria did their training in Saskatchewan and went home qualified, and that a prairie city of 33,000 people acquired an international air force clientele. The syllabus was measured in hours: about 95 on the Harvard II in phase IIA, 45 in phase IIB, 70 in phase III and 49 in phase IV. What it also did was expose the RCAF to a single contractual point of failure.

That failure arrived at the end of the Hawk’s life. Training on the CT-155 ceased at 15 Wing in the summer of 2023 and the type was retired in 2024 after about 24 years, and because the replacement was not ready Canada was left without any fighter lead-in training of its own. 419 Tactical Fighter Training Squadron at Cold Lake went into hiatus on 8 March 2024, planned to reactivate in the early 2030s. The interim answer, Bridge Fighter Lead-In Training, sends Canadian students abroad: up to seven a year to the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training programme at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, and instructors and students to Finland and to the International Flight Training School in Italy.

The permanent answer is Future Aircrew Training. On 29 May 2024 Canada awarded SkyAlyne, the CAE and KF Aerospace joint venture, a contract worth 11.2 billion dollars including taxes over 25 years, covering 71 aircraft across five fleets: the Grob G120TP, the Pilatus PC-21, the Beechcraft King Air 260, the Airbus H135 and a Dash 8-400 with a mission training system. Nineteen PC-21s, designated CT-157 Siskin II, go to Moose Jaw; the first two left Switzerland on 14 September 2026. Full training under the new programme is expected to begin in the spring of 2029, which means the RCAF must bridge a five-year gap in its own pipeline.

The team exists because of leftover aeroplanes. Colonel O.B. Philp, the base commander at Moose Jaw, had led the Golden Centennaires, the team formed for Canada’s centennial in 1967 and disbanded afterwards. Their CT-114 Tutors were still on the base, still rigged for aerobatics and still painted white because of a corrosion treatment. In 1969 Philp started informal formation practice with flying instructors, which became flypasts at local events, which became displays.

A naming contest at Bushell Park Elementary School on the base produced the winner. Snowbirds was chosen because it fitted the white paint, suggested grace and was obviously Canadian; the name became official on 25 June 1971 and the team first performed under it on 11 July 1971. For seven years it was an unofficial outfit flown by instructors in their spare time. On 1 April 1978 it was given squadron status by reactivating 431 Squadron as 431 Air Demonstration Squadron — the first Canadian aerobatic team to hold it.

About 80 Canadian Armed Forces personnel work at the squadron full-time and 24 travel with the show team. Eleven Tutors are held, nine of which fly the display, including the two solos, with two spares flown by the team coordinators and a further thirteen airframes in storage. The Snowbirds are the only major military display team that tours without a support aircraft, which means the maintainers travel in the back seats and the team lives out of the jets it flies.

The Tutor is now the oldest aircraft of its kind still displaying anywhere. It will fly its last season in 2026; the Defence Minister, David McGuinty, announced on 19 May 2026 that the Snowbirds will be grounded after that season until the CT-157 Siskin II is in place and crews are ready, which is stated as 2030 or later. A national aerobatic team standing down for four years is a real cost, and it is the direct consequence of running a 1960s trainer until it could not be run any more.

Seven Snowbirds pilots and two passengers have been killed since the team formed. The first was Captain Lloyd Waterer, killed at CFB Trenton on 10 June 1972 when wingtips touched during an opposing solo manoeuvre. Captain Gordon de Jong died at Grande Prairie, Alberta, on 3 May 1978 after a horizontal stabiliser failure. Captain Shane Antaya was killed over Lake Ontario at the Toronto air show on 3 September 1989 in a mid-air collision, in front of a large crowd.

Two of the losses happened in training near home. Captain Michael VandenBos was killed in a mid-air collision near Moose Jaw on 10 December 1998. Six years later, on 10 December 2004, Captain Miles Selby was killed near Mossbank, Saskatchewan, in a mid-air during practice of the co-loop manoeuvre; the other pilot ejected. On 9 October 2008 Captain Bryan Mitchell and Sergeant Charles Senecal were both killed in a crash at 15 Wing Moose Jaw on a flight that was not a display.

Captain Shawn McCaughey was killed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, on 18 May 2007 when a restraining strap failed during an inverted pass. On 13 October 2019 a Tutor crashed near Brooks, Georgia, after a fuel delivery system failure in the engine; the pilot ejected with minor injuries and nobody on the ground was hurt.

The most recent loss is the one most Canadians remember. On 17 May 2020, during Operation Inspiration, the cross-country tour flown to lift spirits during the pandemic, Snowbird 11 took off from Kamloops, British Columbia, with Captain Richard MacDougall flying and Captain Jennifer Casey, the team’s public affairs officer, in the back seat. A single small bird was ingested into the engine, the compressor stalled and thrust was lost. Both ejected, but the altitude was too low for the parachutes to work as designed. Captain Casey was killed; Captain MacDougall was seriously injured. The Flight Safety Investigation Report, released on 29 March 2021, made five recommendations including changes to engine-failure training, clearer ejection procedures and research into stabilising ejection seat dynamics.

A flying school has its own accident pattern, and Moose Jaw’s is the familiar one: engine trouble or a handling error at low level, followed by an ejection. The CT-156 Harvard II is a single-engined turboprop with ejection seats, and twice in four years those seats saved crews outright.

On 24 January 2014 a Harvard II of 15 Wing was flying practice forced landings in Saskatchewan when a hard landing damaged the landing gear so badly that a normal touchdown was impossible. The crew ejected and both suffered only minor injuries; the aircraft was destroyed when it hit the ground. The Flight Safety Investigation Report was released in May 2016.

On 27 January 2017 another 15 Wing Harvard II was flying aerobatic training when the student reduced power to idle. The instructor took control and applied full power, but the speed had already decayed and a low oil pressure warning appeared as the engine lost power at low altitude. Unable to climb and judging themselves too low to reach the runway, both ejected. One pilot suffered minor injuries.

These are not scandals; they are the arithmetic of teaching thousands of hours of low-level flying a year on single-engined aircraft. They explain why the debate about replacing the Harvard II and the Tutor was always about more than cost per hour.