I think in both areas, both in Trenton and up in Petawawa, the best guy to ask is the commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, André Deschamps, who has the details on this.
I just tip my hat to the air force for how they were able to manage the introduction of the C-17 and C-130J, and I anticipate the same kind of work with the CH-47 Foxtrot, the Chinook Foxtrots that are coming in. When you look to the success stories of the last little while, from the decision on the C-17 to when we were able to deliver it on mission, to my mind it was done in record time. From when we took delivery of the C-17, two weeks later the first C-17 was delivering humanitarian supplies to Jamaica in the aftermath of the successive hurricanes that hit Jamaica. From the introduction of that system to actually deploying it into an operation took two weeks. That was because we had worked very closely with the U.S. Air Force. We had taken a lot of our people and put them into the U.S. Air Force, having them fly C-17s for quite some time. When we received our C-17s, the U.S. Air Force provided back to us some of their pilots who had the right balance of experience.
Similarly, with the C-130J, it was literally within months that we had the first C-130J introduced and flying into Afghanistan, doing operational missions there.
Similarly, when the government decided to procure CH-47 Deltas—the Chinook helicopters that we had in Afghanistan, which are an older version of what we'll be seeing here in the next few years—the minister and I were able to fly on Boxing Day of that same year following the decision to purchase them in April. So it was literally within months, because we had made the investments in training pilots, putting them into U.S. Army installations and bringing them up to that operational capability in record time.
The Commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force is working very closely with the U.S., but also with the U.K. and Australia, so that we can get the pilots into their training systems--and here I would add that the ground crew, the maintainers, are also on the various courses--so that when the aircraft arrive, we can quickly bring these aircraft up to what we refer to as an initial operational capability and then to a full operational capability.
I'll just say that the investments this past while into the air force have been tremendous. As the commander of the RCAF reminds me, historically we've generally introduced only two new aircraft into the air force every decade. This decade he's receiving seven new aircraft types. So his transition into those seven new aircraft types, while concurrently maintaining a high operational tempo, is a challenge.
I am really proud of those men and women because they're doing a great job.