French jet team marks U.S. entry into First World War

If aerobatics is your thing, Gatineau-Ottawa Executive Airport is offering a rare opportunity on Sunday, April 30. The Canadian Forces 431 Air Demonstration Squadron, a.k.a. the Snowbirds, will be joined at the free one-day Aero 150 airshow by one of their counterparts from across the pond, La Patrouille de France.

The Snowbirds, who have been flying Canadair CT-114 Tutors since they first took flight in 1971, are scheduled to kick off this year’s busy show schedule by marking Canada’s 150th anniversary on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, just a few minutes east of Parliament Hill.

While the Canadian squadron will be on site in Gatineau, the French team (which dates back to 1931) will only arrive in the early afternoon for a brief appearance before a joint fly-over of the nation’s capital with the Snowbirds.

The Aero 150 event will be followed on May 1 with a private airshow in Mirabel, Que., an event coordinated in association with Paris, France-based calibration company Trescal (which entered the Canadian market when it purchased Montreal’s Primo Instrument in January 2016).

On May 2, the team will fly in Quebec City before commencing the long return journey to France.

Thank you, Canada?

La Patrouille–whose last Canadian performance was in Quebec City in 2009–will be in Canada for only a few days as part of what has been called the team’s “U.S. Tour 2017,” from March 17 to May 6. The agenda includes a centennial commemoration in Kansas City on April 5 to 6, to mark the U.S. entry into the First World War.

Eyebrows have been raised in the Canadian aviation community about the French team’s U.S. tour during a year that also marks Canada’s 150th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The Gatineau performance is the French team’s lone public airshow appearance in Canada, a country that had troops in France two and a half years before Congress voted to end U.S. neutrality in April 1917.

A young country with just under 8 million citizens at the time of the “War to End All Wars,” Canada nevertheless responded to Great Britain’s call by mobilizing nearly 620,000 troops representing about seven per cent of its total population, according to the Canadian War Museum.

Statistics from the museum indicate that approximately 233,000 Canadians were either killed or wounded in the Great War from 1914 to 1918, representing about 38 per cent of the country’s total troops.

The U.S–with an estimated population of 103 million when it entered the war–had more than 4.7 million total service members and 320,518 were either killed or wounded, according to the country’s Department of Veterans Affairs.

One battle, commemorated annually at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, involved the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Effectively under British command, the regiment was virtually wiped out by German machine gunners. Only 68 men responded at roll call; 386 were wounded and 324 were killed or missing and presumed dead.

“I do understand your frustration to see that most of this tour will take place in USA,” Capt Loïc Tatard, a spokesman for the French Ministry of Defense, acknowledged in a March 26 email to Skies. He indicated that the schedule had been fixed some time ago in response to an invitation by Ashton Carter, the previous U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration.

The U.S. airshows began March 25 in New York City with a nine-plane formation flight that included the French team’s eight Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jets and an Airbus A-400M support aircraft. The group flew over the Statue of Liberty, a French gift to the U.S. in the 1880s.

“We just thank you for all what you did,” La Patrouille’s commanding officer, Gauthier Dewas, told a Fox TV interviewer who called the team “the French Blue Angels,” referring to the U.S. Navy demo team. “We always have been allied and we want to send a message of brotherhood and say, ‘OK, we are so happy to come here.'”

From New York, the French team zigzags across the country, stopping in Washington and 10 states, the last being Virginia before a final stop at Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York. A mid-tour stop in Nevada is April 17 to 18 at Nellis Air Force Base, home of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team.

Meanwhile, as La Patrouille heads south, so do the Snowbirds under team lead Maj Patrick Gobeil. After Gatineau, they fly to North Carolina and Florida before returning to Montreal May 13 to 14, and then popping back into the U.S. Their schedule of more than 40 events, including Canada Day in Ottawa, will conclude back in the U.S., in Boise, Idaho, Sept. 14 to 15.

This year, the Snowbirds team will feature a commemorative Tutor with a distinctive Canada 150 paint scheme, designed with the help of one of the team’s pilots. A spokesperson told Skies on March 27 that the aircraft would be unveiled at Canadian Forces Base Comox, B.C., “as early as possible,” hopefully in tandem with the unveiling of the new CF-18 Hornet demonstrator and, if not, a couple of weeks later.