Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

Inuvik ( Mar 03/00) - The Royal Canadian Air Force paid Inuvik a visit last week but didn't use its own base.

The overnight visit by four CF-18 fighter jets and their support crew was so brief that many residents wouldn't have known they were here until they performed a soaring fly-by over Mackenzie Road as they headed west to Alaska on Wednesday morning.

Lieut. Mark Gough, a Yellowknife-based Canadian Armed Forces public affairs officer, said the brief stop was the reason the Air Force rented space to house the CF-18s in the privately-owned Beaudel Air company hangar and why the pilots and crew stayed at the Mackenzie Hotel rather than make use of the Armed Forces' own Inuvik Forward Operating Location base at the airport.

"The reason they didn't use their own hangars is because the FOLs, like the one in Inuvik, are essentially in cold storage," he said. "Not all the power is off, but the pipes haven't been heated and it's not habitable and no water or sewage is turned on."

Gough said military security dictates that when FOLs are made ready for use, the task must be performed by armed forces personnel flown up from down south. He said the expense involved in such a procedure makes it more practical to simply rent a private hangar when the Air Force is only visiting a community for a short time.

"It's about $10,000 to turn on an FOL," he said. "It's not just a matter of opening the doors and parking the planes; there's a question of the support crew and their vehicles and the utilities."

Meanwhile, those on hand at the airport received a rare treat Tuesday afternoon, when the two-seater CF-18s arrived and performed a series of touch-and-goes over the airport runway.

Gough says the four jets were part of the 441 Squadron based at Cold Lake, Alta., on a training mission that took them to Alaska and then to Yellowknife before they headed back for home.

"These CF-18s fly North once or twice a year, so that new pilots who've never flown here before or seen the FOLs get the chance to take a look around," he said.

"Flying in the North is a lot different from flying in the south, with a lot more wide-open space, and if you talk to any pilot, they'll say it's much better to have a visual as opposed to just checking out a map."