Snowbirds Genesis

I had flown the CF-100 to a number of different air shows. I knew Jake Miller who flew the 101 and Winnie SeRose who flew the 104, I knew them really well. Got to know O.B. Philp who was the CO of the Centennaires, gone on to Moose Jaw and shortly after we got there in, I guess it was 1970, the base commander at CFB Moose Jaw was appointed was O.B. Philp. One of the things that Canada had always done quite successfully was to have an excellent aerobatic team and then right at the height of this performances, disbanded. I mean, they had the, initially they had the Siskins, then they had the Golden Hawks. These are the air force wide teams. Then they had the Centennaires. All them disbanded, all formed for a specific purpose and disbanded after that. So when O.B., O.B. had always thought that the military should have a permanent aerobatic team. One of the things that up to that point the teams were not allowed to do is you could not do formation aerobatics. The regulations in the military forbid you to do formation aerobatics. So, through ingenuity, you looked at the definition of a loop and a loop says it’s a 360 degree return in a vertical plane. So, okay, and that’s an aerobatic. But if we inclined it a bit 10 degrees off the vertical, it was no longer an aerobatic. So that’s what he did for the first go-around and that’s how they started to get the manoeuvres and then with that, they went to petition the Air Force and said, look these fellows are very good and we’ll be very careful and we’d like to try a couple of air bag manoeuvres. We’ll try a loop. We’ll try a roll and that’s the way it started. Now I was there during that time and participated in the early formation teams and then came time to select the Snowbird. The first Snowbird team and I said, “I’d like to try out,” and he said, “No, we’ve got you slated to go into standards. You’re going to take over quality control and standards and you know, with your experience and you’re an A-1 and we just can’t...” You know, there were only three A-1s on the base. They said, “We just can’t have an A-1 just flying around in formation.”