RCAF.com
A Life Of Risks To Save Lives
Maclean’s December 30, 1991 – Brian Willer
In his career as a search-and-rescue specialist, Warrant Officer Arnold Macauley had made more than 500 parachute jumps-but never in such grim conditions as just before midnight on Oct. 31, 1991. That night, Macauley and 16 other search-and-rescue technicians, most of them from 413 Squadron, based at Nova Scotia's CFB Greenwood, were aboard a Hercules transport as it lumbered through a howling blizzard over the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island, just 550 miles from the North Pole. Somewhere in the arctic darkness, below thick clouds and blinding snow, lay the wreckage of another Hercules that had crashed with its 18 passengers 32 hours earlier. Macauley's rescue team dropped about 100 flares before glimpsing the wreckage. With that, Macauley, the team leader, jumped into the teeth of the storm towards the target below, followed by five of his team members, from an altitude of only 1,000 feet. "It was a calculated risk," he said. Minutes later, they located the frozen wreckage, the 13 battered survivors, and began performing first aid.
For Macauley, 37, the arctic rescue was just the most publicized of a career marked by courage and skill. Indeed, even among the daredevils in Canada's search-and-rescue (SAR Tech) squadrons, he is renowned for his leadership and willingness to take risks. Since putting on the red SAR Tech beret in 1978, he has conducted more than 300 rescue missions, many of them in the remotest reaches of Canada.
He has led missions to save lost mountain climbers, hunters and hikers, to evacuate injured sailors from foundering ships at sea and to rescue Inuit fishermen trapped on ice floes His heroism won him Canada's Medal of Bravery in 1984 for masterminding the rescue of three passengers left stranded after their plane crashed into the side of a mountain in British Columbia.
The native of Medicine Hat, Alta., began preparing for such dangerous duties after he joined the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as an 18-year-old private in 1973 After a tour of duty in Egypt with the Unite( Nations peacekeeping forces, he joined the Canadian Airborne Regiment as a paratrooper in 1975, and three years later entered the rigorous training program to become, SAR Tech. "In the army, you are always practicing and pretending,' Macauley says. "In search and rescue, you do what you are trained to do. There is more of a purpose and more of a challenge."
His challenges have included postings with squadrons in Edmonton and Comox, B.C., before becoming an instructor in his specialty at the Edmonton training school in 1985. Four years later, he was promoted warrant officer and posted to CFB Summerside, P.E.I, where he became a section leader then moved with his wife, Darlene, son Jan, 11 and daughter Dawn, 9, to Greenwood earlier this year after Summerside closed. The strongly built six-footer is well equipped for his job. An expert parachutist and skier, he is also skilled in outdoor survival, scuba diving and mountaineering, and as a paramedic.
After 13 years on the job, Macauley say: that he still experiences a rush of adrenaline during a rescue. Fear, he says, is something that no SAR Tech will acknowledge. "When we get into a hairy situation, we just become more focused on what we are doing," he explained "There is too much going on to be frightened.' The survivors of the Ellesmere crash, and many others who owe their lives to Macauley and Canada's search-and-rescue teams, have ample reason to be grateful for that commitment.