Ever wonder what it's like to be an air ambulance pilot?  Working out of various bases across the province of Ontario, our pilots are responsible for our fleet of Pilatus PC12s and Leonardo AW139s.

In this episode, we sit down with Captain Christa Wallace, and Captain Poul-Erik Binderup, to discuss how they became pilots as well as gain insight about their day to day life on the job.

Download PULSE on your favourite podcast app, or visit www.ornge.ca/pulse to see all episodes.

See episode transcript below:

Rachel Scott:
Ornge performs more than 20,000 patient related transports per year. In addition to critical care land ambulances, Ornge has a fleet of helicopters and airplanes. We refer to them as rotor wing and fixed wing vehicles. In order to provide our essential service, we employ approximately 625 employees across the province of Ontario. About 20% of them are pilots who fly rotor wing or fixed wing aircraft. Most members of the public are quite familiar with Ornge's rotor wing operations, they often see news stories of the helicopter landing on a highway or at a local helipad to deliver the patient to the care they need. But many are surprised to learn that a majority of our transports occur in Northern Ontario, where we utilize our fixed wing fleet to fly long distances in order to provide much needed access to care.

When looking at our fixed wing fleet, Ornge owns eight Pilatus PC-12 airplanes. On a daily basis, four of the aircraft are in operation. One from our Timmins base, one from our Sioux Lookout base, and two from our Thunder Bay base. Today we're diving deep into the life of a pilot, specifically our fixed wing pilots. Phil Kim sits down with captain Christa Wallace and captain Poul-Erik, to discuss the work they do. I'm Rachel Scott, and welcome to Ornge Pulse.

Christa Wallace:
My name is Christa Wallace. I am a fixed wing captain based out of Thunder Bay, and I've been with Ornge for two and a half years.

Phil Kim:
So is this something you pictured yourself doing from a young age?

Christa Wallace:
I did not know. I initially started at Lakehead University doing a biology course and I worked in my off times between the school year at Quetico park, doing natural heritage assisting. And I thought that was the stream that I wanted to follow, but after three years of that, I decided I didn't want to do that, and I chose to become a pilot. And so I started my pilot training usually later than a lot of people did, around 22 years old.

Phil Kim:
And how's that, did you feel like you're playing a lot of catch up, was it really stressful?

Christa Wallace:
No. No, it wasn't really stressful. I grew up in a really aviation concentrated family. The transition for me wasn't difficult at all. Any pilot will tell you that the financial strain of the first five years is astronomical. So any student really, so now that I'm here at Ornge in the position that I'm in, I feel very grateful, and younger me would be pretty surprised probably. A lot of the places that I had to move to were very expensive to live and to purchase groceries, and just general living conditions, as well as high living expenses, low wages. I've lived in Pike Lake, I've lived in Sioux Lookout with Ornge, and Thunder Bay.

Phil Kim:
And of those three places, which one was your favorite?

Christa Wallace:
Well, I have to say Thunder Bay because that's where I'm living now and that's where I'm actually from. But my time that I spent in Sioux Lookout was awesome, I loved it there. The year and a half that I spent there was pretty fun, and the people at the Sioux Lookout base are a pretty great people. We kind of form a little family unit and we do a lot of outside activities, I say outside activities as in like outside of work. So there's lots of beach time, lots of time at other people's houses, potlucks and things like that.

Phil Kim:
Picklle lake where's that?

Christa Wallace:
It is at the end of the highway way of 1117. It's one of the furthest north places that you can drive off of the 1117. It's a living community of about 400 people and there are two hotels and one grocery store there basically. There is a large pilot community there, so a lot of pilots will stay in the hotels as well as hydro workers and people going further up north. I grew up in Northern Ontario, so I was pretty well versed with the goings on, it was basically like moving home for me kind of thing. It was a culture shock for me to come down here and I spent some time in a really, and so that was a culture shock for me, even living in a really, up north quote unquote. It's pretty straightforward for fixed wing aircraft because there are only certain airports that we can service and fly to, and there are parameters that we have to cover, the runway has to be a minimum of 2,800 feet long and there of course has to be a hospital there for us to pick a patient.

Christa Wallace:
So the airports that we service are airports that I've been to many times before, and so there aren't any really places that caught me off guard. It is always a joy to go up to Fort Severn because we get to see any time of year, we're always like on the lookout for polar bears or moose or anything and huge ice flows. And if it's a really clear day, you can see over the James Bay.

Phil Kim:
hat's nice.

Christa Wallace:
It's a gorgeous part of the country for sure. We see the Northern lights almost every day.

Phil Kim:
Oh, wow.

Christa Wallace:
Yeah, they're beautiful in the air. And the further north you go, they're even more intense, and it's lovely in the winter when the air gets more clear you can see them, they light up the sky.

Phil Kim:
Yeah.

Christa Wallace:
They light up the,

Phil Kim:
but it's never like blinding, right?

Christa Wallace:
They can be.

Phil Kim:
Oh, wow, they're bright.

Christa Wallace:
 Yeah, they're very bright. Yeah.

Phil Kim:
Geez.

Christa Wallace:
Yeah, It's beautiful. Pink and purple and green. It's lovely. Yeah.

Phil Kim:
Was there ever an experience sort of caught you off guard or surprised you?

Christa Wallace:
What caught me off guard was the magnitude of communication and triaging and organization that goes into a call at Ornge. So it's as if there's a big bucket of sand getting dumped into a sieve and there's all these things that have to go on before the one tiny little grain of sand pops out and we get a call in Thunder Bay that asks us to weather checkup, Mussolini Kingston for example, there's tons of decision-making that goes into that before we even become a part of it. So when I first started at Ornge, that is what took me off guard.

Phil Kim:
Was there anything that you learned on the job particularly that shifted your perspective or understanding of your position?

Christa Wallace:
I think as a pilot, you come into a flying position expecting to make a lot of hard decisions. And so with Ornge, what really solidified those types of decision making for me is, not when the weather is really amazing and we accept the call or not when the weather is really horrible and we declined the call, it's all those blurred lines in the middle that are the more difficult decisions that we have to make on a daily basis, like if the weather is right at minimums and we've got a really far distance to travel, for example, two hours to fly up north, and then another two hours to fly back down south to the hospital that the patient has to get down to, we have to take into consideration the four hours that it takes to complete the entire trip, as opposed to just the time it takes to fly.

Christa Wallace:
There, there's a lot of ground waiting, and a lot of the paramedics spend time in the sending facilities, and they spend a lot of time in the receiving facilities. So we've got a block off like a six to eight hour window of weather for the parts that we have to travel within Ontario.

Phil Kim:
And speaking of weather, was there ever like a case where you're on your way somewhere and the weather has changed in a way that you had to change your route and just turn back?

Christa Wallace:
Yeah, absolutely. Actually recently myself and the crew were in Pike Lake, and the original call was to do a new Eisenberg, which was about 40 minute drive outside of Pike Lake, but the airport is Pike Lake. So we went, and we were supposed to drop the patient off in Sioux Lookout, but there are thunderstorms in the area, quite severe thunderstorms in the area. And we were sitting on the ground waiting for the patient to come. And I was looking at the weather, and the weather in Thunder Bay was good, but it was also deteriorating. And so I called the OCC and requested that we get the receiving facility changed to Thunder Bay. So effectively declined the Sioux Lookout call in Pike Lake, and then brought the patient over to Thunder Bay for weather purposes.

Christa Wallace:
People in Southern Ontario haven't traveled too far from Southern Ontario, and so they sometimes don't realize the vast area that is Ontario. Ontario is a huge province. And out of Thunder Bay, we travel thousands of miles every day when we're on shift. Yeah, and we service communities that don't have any road access, so Ornge and the SA carriers are some of the only points of contact and healthcare that these communities have. Some don't even have nursing stations.

Rachel Scott:
I want to take a quick moment to give you a bit more information about our fleet. In addition to our fixed wing fleet, Ornge also works with standing agreement carriers also known as SA carriers. We contract three organizations with fixed wing fleets to transport lower acuity patients. Our SA carriers are particularly useful in Northern Ontario, where they enable access to care for lower acuity patients and areas where there's less resources. You may be surprised to know that last year our SA carriers were responsible for more than 30% of our patient related transports. And now back to the episode.

Phil Kim:
What do those communities look like?

Christa Wallace:
Within the, so there's an airport of course, and then within the community there are roads, and there are stores, and shops and schools of course, there's a grocery store called the Northern Store, so that basically carries everything that that community needs from computers, and internet modems, all the way to diapers or, food, things like that, everything [crosstalk] yeah. So maybe that's only the one shop, also clothes and things like that, the Northern Store carry there. So Ornge and SA carriers are really the only lifeline when it comes to that sort of thing. So if you get sick up north an airplane is the only way that you're going to get to the hospital.

Phil Kim:
It's kind of scary.

Christa Wallace:
It is really scary.

Phil Kim:
Do you remember there ever being any, I know you're focused on front of the line stuff. So focused on what happens in the cockpit, is that what it's called?

Christa Wallace:
Yeah, cockpit.

Phil Kim:
Oh my God, I'm right.

Christa Wallace:
Or if there are two women flying together, we call it the hen pen.

Phil Kim:
I love that. Was there ever any scenario that you call that was like a close call, I guess in terms of how quickly you get to transfer the patient?

Christa Wallace:
There was a situation where we picked a very sick patient up out of a airport and they were transferred to the aircraft and we took off and the paramedics told us to turn around and land right away. So we landed and they were doing CPR and he was tubed and vented before. And so then they extubated him and they had, they were bagging him and they asked us the pilots for extra hands, so I was back there bagging a patient while they were doing the necessary things that they needed to do. And then the paramedics got the patient's stable, and then we took off and went back to the receiving facility. So that was a pretty crazy experience for me that had never happened. But I talked to some of the other pilots and a lot of the pilots have similar experiences. It's very interesting to say the least.

Phil Kim:
Yeah, I feel like you've seen it all.

Christa Wallace:
Yeah, well, a day that isn't interesting is a good day. When you have airplanes and you're dealing with sick people, you want a non-interesting day, boring days are good days. Mondays, we want every day to be Monday, not Friday kind of thing.

Phil Kim:
Oh my God.

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
My name is Poul-Erik Binderup. Everybody calls me PE. I've been with Ornge since March of 2009, so a little over 11 years. And I am a Captain on the PC-12 as well as a training captain and a check pilot. So I do flight tests as well.

Phil Kim:
When did you know you wanted to become a pilot?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
I was five years old actually when I did my very first flight in the airplane. And then I don't remember much from being five years old, but I do remember that flight. It was a family friend that took me up and I just knew air airplanes from that moment on and in life where everything, and it wasn't until a little bit later on in life that I actually got the money together to do my commercial training.

Phil Kim:
Can I ask what were you doing in the meantime before you actually went to school for aviation?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
Yeah, a little bit of everything. From construction, and I actually went to university. I got a bachelor of arts degree in psychology, so I was headed down that road for a little while. Berkson construction, summertime jobs, ended up actually getting a job working for Michelin tire, building tires, just manual labor until I could get enough money together to actually go to flight school. When I first started flying, it was just for the enjoyment of flying. So I got my private pilot's license, started that training. It wasn't very far into the training when I did my first solo flight, and I just remember my memory of that is basically all adrenaline, your safety blanket or the comfort of having an instructor next to you is now gone, and you're all by yourself. And as soon as the plane lifts off the ground, just realizing, well, I'm committed now. And there's a great deal of emotion that goes into that.

Phil Kim:
Yeah, and now that you're a trainer today, how do you help ease that transition between having the trainee, like you being there beside the trainee versus them transitioning into flying alone, how do you ease that transition?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
A great deal of the training that I do here at Ornge is in terms of initial training is getting fairly low time pilots in a position to first pass a flight test, and then to be able to get a online, to do the medivac work as a first officer. A lot of the first officers that we get have never flown a PC-12, it's a fairly high performance airplane. And so to get them ready to be able to go out there and do the job, for me as the instructor there's a great deal of satisfaction that comes when they get to that point. For us on the fixed-wing side of things, the COVID-19 sort of, well through training in general, kind of on its a year, it's all of the training that we do, fixed wing and rotor is done in the United States. So when they closed the border pretty much forced us to rethink our training program. For us on the fixed wing side, that transition was a lot easier.

We've been using simulators to do our training for the past five or six years. But prior to that, we did all of our flight training on the aircraft. So for us to go back to doing flight training on the aircraft really was just to step back to what we knew. Whereas on the rotor side, they've had to work a little bit harder to make that transition because it's not something they've done before. It's always been done in the simulator, so it's ironic that I can make training more real in a simulator than I can in the airplane where I actually have to simulate things. I can actually turn the aircraft off when it ran it in the air so.

Phil Kim:
Speaking of simulations, do you ever, just for fun, come up with impossible scenarios, like have you ever made any one of your trainees just fly through a tornado or something like that?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
Well, we do try to do. One of the fun things about the simulator is that I can load up, compound failures. So as a pilot is working through a scenario and they're doing well, sometimes we'll add failures on top of failures on top of failures. It's not so much just to see them break as it is to see their decision-making processes. And so that's a pretty regular thing for us to do that, it's just we want them, it's not so much about how they perform as how they decide to perform. So if they're making good decisions, they might still crash the airplane in the simulator, but that's more me than them, so as long as they're making all the right decisions along the way, then that's really what we're after.

Phil Kim:
hat draws you to being a pilot for Ornge, as opposed to being a pilot anywhere else?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
Again, I really wasn't all that familiar with medivac flying when I first launched into this career. When I first started flying the PC-12, I was doing a scheduled service up north based out of Thunder Bay, the company that was working for went under so I started working for one of our standing agreement carriers, Air Bravo. And that was my introduction to medivac. And what I realized was that it was another whole world of flying. Not just taking people from point A to point B because they had to be there for some reason or they're just traveling in general, but I was now a really integral part of somebody needing to get from point A to point B. I became as a medivac pilot, an important part of their day basically when quite often they're having a pretty bad day. So it's again, in terms of job satisfaction, no. Not only do I get to fly airplanes, but I get to help people. And that's become a very, very big part of what I do for sure.

Phil Kim:
Do you by any chance have any personal examples or personal stories that stick out in your head of a time where you felt like you really helped in a meaningful way on the job?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
There's lots and lots of stories, but there's one that I remember the most was a girl, and this probably goes back about six or seven years. I had a little girl on board of the plane that we had to take to Ottawa, she had broken her leg. I think she was about 12 at the time, it was a ATV accident and she was in a lot of pain, and she was scared, she'd never flown in an airplane before. It was just a whole lot of bad going on in her day. And of course, everybody around her is telling, being great, the medics were awesome, telling her that everything's going to be okay. And as we got her loaded up in the airplane, you could just sort of see the fear in her eyes.

And one of the things that we've had for a long time are these little stuffed animals that we call them the flying lions. It's just a little small stuffy, pretty insignificant by most standards, but I've always carried one in my bag for kids, just in case we get a kid on board, and this particular day I had one. So once we got her loaded up on the airplane, I dug this thing out of my flight bag and gave it to her. And you could just see in her eyes that the sincerity of all of the people that were saying it's going to be okay, suddenly kind of made sense for her. Her demeanor changed a little bit, she calmed down a little bit. She started to actually believe us that it was going to be okay, we were going to get her where she needed to be, and they were going to, doctors are going to be able to help her out.

So that little stuffy has become a go-to for me, especially with kids. There's been a few adults I would like to give them too as well, but especially for the kids and the kind of symbolic for me in that, when I'm on the job, I'm having a good day because I get to fly airplanes but I'm meeting people on a bad day. And so that little stuffy for me represents that.

Phil Kim:
When it comes to seeing difficult situations like that, how do you prepare yourself emotionally for that, and how do you train other people to be emotionally prepared for that?

Poul-Erik Binderup​:
Well, part of that, I don't think you can ever get rid of the emotion completely. One of the things that Ornge does in order to not influence my decision making in accepting a call, is that we don't know anything about the patient until I've call. So I'm looking at the call just in terms of safety, weather, runway conditions, all that kind of thing. And then once I determine that it's safe to go, they still don't like to give us much information, because they don't want that to influence my decision-making, but it's a small aircraft, once we get there, the pilots help load the patient. In fact, we direct the loading of the patient, literally physically lifting them into the airplane so we can see if it's a burn victim, we can see that they're burned. If it's a patient on a ventilator, we could see that. If it's a child, they're right there, we can't ignore it.

So the trick really is not to get rid of those emotions, but to just use training and be able to say, okay, now I need to put that over here to one side and put my pilot cap back on. And as empathetic as I might be towards that person's situation, I now have a job to do. So let's go be a pilot and get this person where they need to be. And then my training of course comes in there as well, and we're able to go on and do that, get the job done. It's again, one of the cool things about being a pilot, about flying is just that we never really know what we're going to see any given day. When we're up there of all of the country that we fly over, whether it's up in Fort Severn on the Hudson's Bay Coast, where it's a lot of Tundra, some of the pilots have even seen polar bears.

I'm still waiting to see my polar bear, but the view and the country that we cover and all of the lakes and the expanse of it all, all the way down to Southern Ontario and flying into Toronto wild island, where we fly rate by the CN tower, as varied as that is, you just never know what you're going to see. And the one day we took off out of Sioux Lookout, it was an evening flight, the sun was setting and we flew up through a layer of cloud at about 10,000 feet, and all of a sudden I realized that the sunset was below us. So as the sun was setting, it was reflecting on the cloud, we had just flown through. And I've never, you're always looking up at a sunset, but I'd never seen one from above, and it only lasted a boat 10 seconds, and then it was gone and behind us, but just really, really pretty. You just never know.

Pilots are a funny bunch. If you go on any pilot's Facebook page, that's the stuff they're posting. They're posting pictures of sunsets and storms and runways and doing time lapse photography, they're flying over lakes, and that's just, it's what we do, it's why we do it. We're very much in tuned with seeing those things too. And every once in a while, I've got over 10,000 hours in the air right now and tomorrow I could go flying and see something new. So it's always fun.

Rachel Scott:
Thanks for listening to today's episode. Throughout this season, we'll focus on different people at our organization who make an impact on the lives of patients. This podcast was brought to you by Ornge air ambulance. This episode was produced by Rachel Scott and Philip Kim, and support with our wonderful staff on team Ornge.
 

     

Ornge is the largest provider of air and land ambulance services in Canada. We perform more than 20,000 patient-related transports per year. This podcast will give you insight to the inner workings of our organization.

From coordinating and dispatching calls, triaging patients across the province, and the logistics that come with operating a fleet a helicopters, planes and land ambulances. We will tell you what it takes to deliver life saving care in an ever changing environment. Download PULSE on your favourite podcast app, or visit www.ornge.ca/pulse for the latest episode.

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