Thank you, Mr. Chair.
General Molstad, welcome to committee. We'll probably get to see you many times going forward, and I'm sure that if you follow the lead of General Eyre, you'll be doing just fine and dandy. He has always been very forthright with us, and I always appreciate his candour.
It's good to see Deputy Minister Matthews and Mr. Quinn here again. They're regular features. We saw each other just yesterday at PROC. It's always good to have everyone here.
I'm still trying to connect the dots. When we look at the incident in Yukon and you talk about what the U.S. Department of Defense says versus what we heard here in committee from Major-General Prévost, we find out now that the shoot-down actually happened in the afternoon, at 3:30. I think everybody made the assumption the balloon had transited Alaska through the night, yet we had CF-18 fighter jets and CP-140 Aurora doing surveillance on the balloon and trying to make a determination on what the object was and what type of risk it posed.
We had CF-18s in the area. I'm just wondering if those were being refuelled in air, or whether they had done their flybys and then were put at our forward-operating location in Whitehorse, or whether they were up at Inuvik or had returned to Cold Lake. What's the reasoning the CF-18s didn't shoot down the aircraft after observing it in Canadian airspace? Can you tell me how many hours the balloon was in Canadian airspace before we made the decision that it had to be shot down?