Paul Bickford
Northern News Services

Hay River (June 17/02) - Besides practising dentistry in Hay River, Dr. Jim Tennant is president of the NWT Dental Association, an active member of the Rotary Club, and a family man with three children.

Somewhere in that schedule, Tennant, who is from originally from England, also finds time to serve as the NWT director of the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association.

News/North: How did you get into flying?

Jim Tennant: I've been here for 29 years, in Hay River, but I've worked all over the North. That's sort of how I got into flying, apart from being an interest. We used to do a lot of flying to smaller communities surrounding here to do dentistry. We used to do a lot of contracts all throughout the Mackenzie region and even the Kitikmeot, but I didn't fly up into the Far North. I left that to the experts.

N/N: How long have you owned an airplane?

JT: I learned to fly in 1974. So I've been flying for about 28 years, and had an airplane since about '75. My current plane I've had for about 14 years.

N/N: How often do you fly?

JT: I fly a fair bit in the summer. In the winter, I tend to just park it, just because of the lack of daylight and the cold weather. I'm a busy person, as well. In the summer we do a lot with CASARA, training navigators and spotters. I've been down to Edmonton once so far this spring, a couple of times to Fort Providence, a couple of times to Yellowknife.

N/N: Do you fly as a hobby mostly?

JT: Usually it's because I have to go somewhere. But then, I enjoy it. Flying for fun is OK at first, but I've been flying for a long time. It's a useful business tool. One of the problems is weather and with a single-engine airplane you do tend to get stuck in various places. If you've got lots of time, you fly yourself. When the weather is good, you get there pretty fast.

N/N: What made you get so involved in CASARA?

JT: A love of flying. And there is some training involved. Your flying has to be very precise, because you're searching very precise areas. Your altitude and the course you hold over the terrain has to be just so. If you're wandering off course, the spotters will miss an area. A CASARA crew is a pilot and navigator in the front and two or more spotters in the back on either side of the aircraft. So the pilot and navigator's sole responsibility is to keep the aircraft following a very exact course and a very exact altitude above the ground so the spotters can do their job efficiently and not miss any areas.

N/N: What's your role as NWT director?

JT: Basically, I direct the volunteer activities of CASARA groups, with my right-hand man, Dave Taylor, my deputy director in Yellowknife. Two of us work very closely together. Being a volunteer organization, we confer on a lot of things. He could be director just as easily as me.

N/N: You're a volunteer?

JT: It's volunteer organization. CASARA is funded by the Department of National Defence, and they provide us with some equipment, things like electronic homing devices, survival gear, radios -- things that we'd need in the event of a search. We maintain a search headquarters here in the airport building. They reimburse us for flying expenses, the running costs on the airplanes.

N/N: How many times have you been on a search in your own plane?

JT: In the last five years, two actual searches in Hay River, one was a boat and one was a lost person. In the zone itself, we had another call last year for a missing aircraft, which turned out quite well. He just put down for the night and forgot to tell anybody.

N/N: How important is the work that CASARA does?

JT: If an airplane went missing or somebody went missing, the Rescue Co-ordination Centre down in Trenton is the one that get things rolling. They would have to dispatch a Hercules from Winnipeg to get here. So that's a three-hour trip and a Hercules trip is very expensive. We can be -- from receiving the call to being in the air -- about one hour with a volunteer crew. That could mean life or death.... We also can be tasked by the RCMP or the GNWT, as well as search and rescue.

N/N: How do you go about promoting CASARA to people?

JT: It's not hard to sell. It has to be the right sort of person. They have to like flying, not necessarily be a pilot but they have to like being in small airplanes. It really doesn't suit some people. The ones it does suit really love it.

N/N: In which NWT communities is CASARA now operating?

JT: We've got Yellowknife and Hay River, and they've been running for a long time. Fort Smith is new. They just got certified last fall after a year of training. And Inuvik has been going for a while, but they disappeared off the radar map for a while and then just this last December got certified again. Now all our four zones are operational. We'd like to get something going in Norman Wells and something going in Fort Simpson, so we'd cover the whole Mackenzie corridor.

N/N: What's the most rewarding part of this volunteer role?

JT: We don't do many searches. But have successful training sessions where we find the target that we put out. Just the knowledge that we're operational and ready at any moment to go out and look if there's an emergency. We're not helpless.

N/N: Did you get involved in CASARA because you had problems yourself while flying?

JT: No. But the really good thing about CASARA is it helps any pilot realize how difficult it is to find people on the ground. In doing that, it improves their safety, because once you realize how tough it is to find people, you start planning your flights very carefully.