otters of the twin variety

This week I had a couple of long days - I went on training to be a spotter for air search and rescues. It started with ground school, which was kind of boring. Somehow, and I'm not sure how this is possible, the material was interesting after a fashion, but it was being presented in a sort of junior high science movie format. At one point in the movie, a man with some gooey blood on his head is standing in a field, waving his arms excitedly, while an 'injured' man (you can tell he's injured because he's covered with a blanket)lies on his back, at goo-head man's feet. The airplane, apparently filled with poorly trained spotters, passes overhead and disappears. The concerned voice-over says, "Imagine the despair of these injured passengers, when the rescue plane they have been waiting for flies right over without seeing them." The man standing up assumes a posture of great despair, with his gooey head in his hands, and the injured man on the ground gives a feeble and heart-rending wave in the direction of the oblivious aircraft. That made me laugh. I mean, it's not really funny. Really.

The second day, which was much more interesting (but colder and more uncomfortable) was the flight training.

Nine of us went on a Twin Otter, and it was a bit chilly and cramped. Very nice little aircraft, though. You can really see a lot out the windows, which is good if you're meant to be looking for small things on the tundra.

Spotting is funny. We were told we had targets - an abandoned snowmobile, a tent frame, a couple of old cabins, and a disintegrating boat. So we performed our procedures, as directed, but it's hard. You are meant to be scanning in the same direction that you would read, I guess because that's a natural movement for your eyes. At first I was concentrating really hard and it was making my eyes hurt a lot. Eventually it began to feel more natural, but then I started getting distracted. As previously mentioned here, there are a lot of muskox around and they run away when planes go over. And, as a human being, my eyes are drawn to moving objects. So the mental soundtrack was: "scanning, scanning, don't look at the muskox, damn, I'm looking at the muskox. what did I miss?"

The man sitting in front of me spotted the cabins, I spotted the boat, but we never did see the snowmobile, despite frequent passes. At the end the pilot said, somewhat sheepishly, that there was a possibility that he had plotted the snowmobile wrong, and it never was where we were looking...

The flight training has to be two 1hr flights, so after an hour of looking for the damn snowmobile, we landed at Jayko Lake, on a short gravel runway, and got out to look around. And I wished I had my camera because it was very pretty. We ate our snacks and laughed at each other, and then we all got back in the plane to do the second half of the training.

So now, if there's an air search called, I might have to go and be a spotter. I'm told that the hard part of that is that they keep going until either they find what is being looked for or the search is called off, and the last one they did was 36 hours of spotting, napping, and peeing in plastic bags. But my bag is now packed, I'm certified, and ready to go.