I'll come back to the helicopter. First of all, we're told by Airbus Helicopters that we have the oldest fleet in the world now in the BO-105. It's the same thing for the Bell 212, which is frankly from the time of the Vietnam war, so the helicopters at the coast guard are extremely old. They are very well maintained, but of course very expensive to maintain. Helicopters are owned by the coast guard, but they are operated and maintained by Transport Canada under an MOU we have with them.
This project to replace the helicopters is a major piece of our fleet renewal, but it's much faster to get the helicopters because we're basically buying off the shelf. You are right, if you met some helicopter pilots out on the west coast, they are quite ecstatic about the change. Some of them have actually tried the new Bell 429. I should have said earlier that the first three helicopters have flown already and have been certified. One has gone to the refit and paint shop already. So we can't wait to get them. One of the things I'll be very sorry to not see as a commissioner is the new helicopters when they come in.
The helicopters play a very important role everywhere, but especially in the Arctic. Of course in the Arctic, when the Sir Wilfrid Laurier was searching in the Victoria Strait for the Erebus, the helicopter was used to move people around, and as you mentioned they moved people to the shore to establish a GPS station to facilitate a more precise search in the bay there. The pilot was actually on bear watch, so he was watching for polar bears and making sure that the two geographers installing the GPS station would be protected. I should say that this is the standard procedure, and as he was walking around and doing his polar bear watch he found this piece of the ship and that kind of was the proof that the ship was right there. This is why the search concentrated in this area right after that, and very quickly the Erebus was found.
The side sonar scanner actually does not belong to the coast guard. In some cases we have our own. This one I believe belonged to National Defence and was borrowed by Parks Canada and we were using some of the boats launched from the Sir Wilfrid Laurier to use it. We had a sonar on board the Sir Wilfrid Laurier . It was a temporary multibeam scanner on board the Sir Wilfrid Laurier , which provided after-the-fact extremely precise images of the bottom of the ocean in that area. That's technology that we will be hoping to get on other ships in future years. This year we have installed a very sophisticated multibeam scanner on the Louis S. St. Laurent, which was used in the polar mission.