Will Ottawa turn to the U.S. to solve its search-and-rescue plane problem?

For a few weeks now, defence and aviation industry sources have been buzzing about fate of the fleet of a couple of dozen C-27 Spartans sold to the U.S. air force by their manufacturer, Italy’s Alenia. To cut its monster-sized military budget, the U.S. is mothballing its C-27 (right) program and may be ready to sell the planes, possibly to Canada. Canada, for a decade, has been trying to ‘procure’ new fixed-wing search-and-rescue (FWSAR) planes to not only replace our 50-year-old fleets of West Coast-based FWSAR craft but also boost our FWSAR capability in the rest of Canada.

I make the case in my column that this ‘buzz’ should be taken seriously and that senior leadership in the military and the government have reached the conclusion that the C-27 could be just the plane for our FWSAR purposes:

The federal government is close to breaking a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar logjam to provide the Canadian Forces with fixed-wing search-and-rescue planes that can replace our aging fleet of 50-year-old CC-115 Buffalo aircraft.

And, in a twist, it looks like the government will not only get the gear that the brave search-and-rescue technicians in our Canadian Forces need, but the government is also likely to get a good deal as well, saving the taxpayer as much as a billion dollars. [Read the rest]