Meet the Roulettes

What kind of penny-ante country would replace jet aerobatics with turboprops? Australia.

They’re breathtaking. Or not. I mean, you decide. But this 2021 RAAF video of the Roulettes aerobatic display team over Hobart might complicate some of the hand-wringing over the Carney Liberals’ plans to ground the Snowbirds fleet and replace its antique CT-114 Tutor jets with… with… with wind-up toys, dammit.

I’m just catching up to this story now, after a long weekend away. I won’t keep you long. I just want to make a few points. These are:

1. Airplanes get old. Eventually it becomes harder to fly them safely, and harder to be proud of owning them when they do fly.

2. Concern about the Snowbirds is almost as old as the Snowbirds. The Tutor jet is a sturdy beast, as are many things that first saw light in 1960 — the Twist, Hitchcock’s Psycho, televised presidential debates — but it’s always been fair to wonder whether a barnstorming team is the best use of scarce military resources, and people have wondered.

3. Other countries have, on occasion, grounded their aerobatic teams; replaced old fleets with newer fleets for those teams; even occasionally replaced older jet-propelled fleets with newer prop-driven fleets. There seem to be countries that have viewed this sort of decision as routine and easy. Canada hasn’t been one of them. It would be good if we got better at making simple decisions that obviously have to be made.

Here now are gems from my reading in the archives. Much, of course, has been reported elsewhere.

In 1989, several weeks after a Snowbirds pilot crashed and died in front of 70,000 spectators at the Toronto Air Show, Harvey Schachter penned a mighty column in the Kingston Whig-Standard:

“[A] Snowbirds pilot's job is one of exaggerated, unnecessary risk. The pilots choose a frivolous undertaking. There is no societal need for their endeavor and the risks they undergo are therefore totally unnecessary. To highlight a daredevil stunt team in a film on workplace safety [as Dupont had done with the Snowbirds] is breathtakingly inappropriate. What the people at Du Pont do is valuable. What the Snowbirds do is foolish and unessential.”

Here’s a good paragraph from a decade later, in a 1999 Charlottetown Guardian editorial:

The best solution would be preserving the Snowbirds in a strong air force. The most short-sighted answer to the problem would be to preserve this precision flying team while allowing the force it represents to weaken on a starvation budget.

In August 2003 the Defence Department’s director of major service delivery procurement wrote that the Snowbirds Tutors might last until 2010, or if heroic measures were used, perhaps as far as 2020. “With each passing year, the technical, safety and financial risk associated with extending the Tutor into its fifth decade and beyond, will escalate,” the review said. Emphasis, as always, added.

The Defence department should proceed “immediately” with Snowbirds fleet replacement, the report said.

It didn’t.

In April 2006, an air force briefing note repeated the message: “Due to obsolescence issues, in the 2010 time frame, the Tutor will no longer be a viable aircraft for the Snowbirds.” The story I’m quoting, by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, says the note discussed options. Replace Tutors with CF-18s, the best fighter available to Canadians, and cut the team from nine planes flying at a time to four? Nope: The fighters would spend most of a show miles away from any audience, turning around for the next fast run; they couldn’t use short runways outside small towns; and the tiny invisible CF-18 fleet would cost 20 times more to operate than the Tutors.

In 2009, the air force pulled what’s known in Ottawa as a classic “Musical Ride” manoeuvre, countering threats of defence budget cuts from Stephen Harper’s government by producing lists of fun stuff that might have to go, including the Snowbirds and the Challenger jet fleet that flew Harper and his cabinet ministers around.

In 2021, Nick Taylor-Vaisey wrote this excellent feature article for a magazine on “questions about the [Snowbirds] program’s future,” after yet another fatal accident. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the questions led to no government decision.

Meanwhile in Australia — a country that is sometimes the object of Canadian neurosis over our purported chronic failure to field a proper fighting force — the Royal Australian Air Force launched the Roulettes in 1970, flying jaunty Italian jet trainers. Those planes got old, as planes do, and in 1989 the Roulettes replaced their Macchi jets with Pilatus turboprops, and then with a later generation of Pilatus comparable to what the Snowbirds might use. I’ve seen some reference to controversy in 1989 when props first replaced jets, but can’t find a reference for you on short notice. The turboprops can’t climb as fast as jets, and they don’t produce a satisfying jet roar. But they do most other air-show things well. They’re cheap as borscht to fly. And as we’ve discussed, air show manoeuvres rarely take place at top speed, because it’s generally thought to be useful if they can stay close to the audiences watching. So turboprops are perfectly effective in those settings.

We’re supposed to get weepy over the beloved Snowbirds, but with great respect to the flight crews that have flown the Tutors with durable proficiency and the ground crews that have kept them airborne, surely it wouldn’t be a big deal if they never came back? Other countries sometimes ground their aerobatics teams — the Asas de Portugal in 2010, the Philippine Blue Diamonds in 2005, Sweden’s Team 60 in 2024. The old newspaper stories I just quoted all called the Snowbirds an unbeatable recruitment tool for the Canadian Armed Forces, but I suspect the Afghanistan war was a bigger boost to recruitment and morale, and Donald Trump might yet give it a run for its money. Also useful: the internet, which the Tutors predate.

I have enjoyed many fun hours at air shows, and in my high-school days was a bit of a fighter geek. But it’s always been strange to idolize a particular model of vintage trainer rather than the whole portfolio of work a competent military performs. Perhaps a parliamentary committee or, I don’t know, a parliament could have discussed such matters, at some point in my lifetime. Perhaps a government could make a decision. “Air shows are fine, but participating in them is not a priority of government policy,” one might say. And even: “We’re taking the sign out of the window.”

Committees, parliaments and governments having proven reluctant to grasp the nettle, perhaps we could farm it out to some arms-length body. An equivalent of the Parliamentary Budget Officer could make decisions, rather than simply costing them. Call her or him the Parliamentary Finding Some Stones Officer. Her or his office would make actual decisions, with funding attached, about official residences, flight-show equipment, and supply management. Parliamentarians could flutter their hands over their brows and exclaim, “I had nothing to do with it!” Everybody wins. Sorry that it’s come to this, but we tried it the other way and it went poorly.