News article

By Holly Bridges

Personnel at 22 Wing North Bay will never have to pop Vitamin D again, at least not on the job. 

One of the last vestiges of the Cold War in Canada, the underground complex carved deep into the Canadian Shield, is now officially closed, replaced by a new, state-of-the-art aboveground facility that opened today. 

No more bus rides, no more thirsting for sunlight.  "Folks have a spring in their steps," says 22 Wing North Bay Commander, Colonel Rick Pitre.  "It's a huge thing that after 43 years as cave dwellers, our folks finally get to see the sun.  Here comes the sun!"

The "hole" as it's been affectionately called by generations of Canadian Forces personnel, is now just that - a hole in the ground.  The complex opened in the early 1960s when Canada began safeguarding our airspace under the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) agreement.  It was the height of the Cold War and it seemed only natural to build Canada's nerve centre for air sovereignty 600 feet underground to survive a nuclear attack. 

Forty years later, with the Cold War over and the risk of nuclear war diminished, the Air Force has closed the underground complex and built an aboveground air operations centre full of high tech bells and whistles.

"To give you an example of the kind of capability we now have in this new facility - we can now track more than 10,000 flight plans using the new battle control system whereas the old system allowed us to track only about 200.  The capacity that we have to monitor and defend North American air space is now significantly more profound than it was in the past," says Col Pitre.

And not a moment too soon.  The world isn't what it was before 9/11, especially North American air space.  Col Pitre says the new aboveground complex, and the mission computers that go along with it, will allow Canada to defend North American airspace and prosecute interlopers as never before.

"The vast majority of North American air traffic comes through Canada so in many respects we are the first frontier for anything of a peripheral nature," says Col Pitre.  "We play a vital role in helping Canada and the United States protect and defend our sovereignty."

The nostalgia of closing a chapter in Canadian Air Force history, while palpable, is replaced, without a doubt, by the exhilaration and excitement of operating in fully modernized, state-of-the-art facility.

The building was dedicated in honour and remembrance of Sergeant David Lindsay Pitcher who is the only air defender to lose his life in the line of duty. Sergeant Pitcher was a crewmember aboard the 962d Airborne Air Control Squadron (AACS) E-3, Yukla 27, which crashed in Elmendorf, Alaska on September 22, 1995. The 962d AACS conducted a flypast during the ceremony to help commemorate the event. CF-18 Hornets and a CC-130T Hercules also conducted flypasts during the ceremony.