About a Squamish local: Taking flight

Rae Simpson sits at his long wooden dining room table, a vibrant painting featuring Black Tusk by Squamish's Andy Anissimoff behind him.

He and his Swiss wife Ursala bought the painting in Whistler back in about 2014; there are a few other Anissimoff paintings in the bright, spacious home on Thunderbird Ridge.

Simpson acknowledges he isn't very "arty"; the art they have is the influence of Ursala, but he knows what he likes. 

"The guy is great," he says of Anissimoff. 

The active Simpson—who has logged 6,500 kilometres of cycling on his new knees, which he had replaced last October—is nursing a leg injury from a fall at the end of a recent cycling trip abroad.

"I am not normally like this," he says, hobbling a bit after just getting back from a quick swim and some physical rehab work at Brennan Park.

The always-busy Simpson, an aeronautical engineer, has had a storied life so far, and his adventures continue. 

Working backward through the years, he has been, among other positions, an instructor at a test pilot school, a senior air accident investigator for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, a civil aviation inspector for Transport Canada, the chief flight test engineer for the De Havilland Canada Dash 8 for Bombardier Aerospace.

He was a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force for many years and worked as operations staff for NATO, developing concepts and requirements for aerospace combat operations. 

The Squamish Chief sat down with the affable Simpson for a more than hour-long chat about his life, his outlook and his thoughts on Squamish.

What follows is an edited version of that conversation.

Q: You grew up in Toronto, right?

A: I came to Toronto from Scotland when I was just about nine years old. My parents emigrated, and so I grew up in Toronto. I went to the University in Toronto, and by that time, I was in the Air Force.
 

Q: What sparked your interest in airplanes and the Air Force?

A: From a young kid, I had a bent towards engineering types of things, and maybe mathematics. My dad had been an accountant. In the 1950s, growing up in Toronto, the news that you saw was things like Atlas rockets being tested and exploding on launch pads in Cape Canaveral. There was the International Geophysical Year. [This was an international scientific project that lasted from 1957 to 1958, after the Cold War. More than 60 countries participated in sharing science.] Where we lived in Toronto was on the flight path to Malton Airport [now the Toronto Pearson International Airport], so when the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow was flying, I saw it fly over my house. 

My summer job was in a mail room, where everybody else doing the job was a pensioner. One of them said to me, "You're so interested in airplanes. What's it like to fly them? If you're that interested, why don't you find out?" So I did, and I learned to fly them and joined the Air Force. A whole bunch of stuff flowed from that. I ended up spending 33 years in the Air Force.

Q: What are a couple of things you experienced in the Air Force?

A: I got my wings in 1967. I was posted to fly F-104s, which were being used in Germany at the time by Canada in the strike reconnaissance role.

I thought it was a neat airplane. And I thought Europe would be a neat place to live for a while— all of which was true. And so I went over there. I was over there for four years as a reconnaissance pilot. We also had a nuclear strike role in those days. I'm convinced that Canada played a pretty meaningful role in those days in NATO. It certainly was very enjoyable.

When that was finished, I was really interested in getting into test flying, and I was lucky enough to convince the Air Force to send me to the test establishment; the Air Force has a test establishment to do the necessary testing on in-service aircraft or any potential new airplanes. A short time after that, I went to the United States Navy for a year to go to their test pilot school.

Q: What was that like?

A: You know, the militaries at the working level work really well together, and that might distress some readers who think that means that we're in cahoots. But, no. 

At the military level, people are thinking about the mechanics of what was going on or the science that they were working with, not the politics and where their country stood. Yes, they knew they were part of that, but they just don't get into it. So, if you were on one side and I was on the other, we would talk about the way we fly the airplanes or the way we maintain the airplanes, or the way that we maintain the hygiene in barrack blocks; it was all so close to the same, with the one exception—you wouldn't be told things that were not allowed to be told to foreign people. While I was there as a student, there was a test going on that needed some support, and I was initially assigned to it with an American guy, but we ended up with only a single-seat airplane to fly. I flew the thing as a Canadian and did what I was told. In the discussions and the briefings and so on, they said, “You know, we can't tell you what we're doing.” I said, “OK, I'll fly the test points and fly them safely.” I still have friends from that course. Those friendships are long-lasting. 

Q: With your work with the Transportation Safety Board, what do you wish the public knew?

A: I wish they knew how difficult it was to really pin down underlying causes of things.

And, human factors are the biggest thing that we want to get at, and the public— and I'm going to blame the press on this one—they love to say, "Well, this was pilot error," and they stop there.

Well, OK, what have we learned? What was the mistake? 

We look at how decisions were made and potential unintended consequences. You look at resources that you've got; you look at the risk that's involved. Is the decision an instantaneous one, or is it one that we made last month as to what we were going to be doing with the airplanes next year? All of those decisions have their consequences.

Q: Knowing all that you do and given all that you have seen, how do you feel getting on an airplane as a passenger?

A: I'm curious and wondering how they're making decisions. But I'm confident. When was the last time you got up and planned to make a mistake? Never happened? No. It doesn’t happen in airplanes, either. Now, I'm sure people show up in the office, in your office, just like in the flight ops department, where somebody says, “I didn't sleep very well last night.” And maybe that's because they stayed up too late doing good things or bad things. But there's almost always somewhere in the loop, something that closes around and prevents somebody from becoming catastrophic in those ways. So flying doesn't bother me at all. I enjoy travel. I don't enjoy going through security at airports anymore, though.

Q: How did you end up here in Squamish?

A: We ended up in Squamish because one daughter [the couple have three children between them, two in Ottawa and one in Whistler] was a ski racer, and she, in the process of ski racing, fell in love with another ski racer who is Whistler-based, and in due course, they became a couple. As we were contemplating where we were going to go after retirement, staying in Toronto was not one of the answers. We'd been thinking about other places in the mountains. We bought this house in 2009, rented it out for a few years and then moved here.

Q: What do you make of the changes in the community since you moved here?

A: I think that the changes in town are totally inevitable. Whether or not our council wants us to become a bedroom community for Vancouver, there's an awful lot of our community that has been that for years, and I guess maybe that's part of the price you pay for having a nice Sea to Sky Highway, thanks to the Olympics and so on. The way in which we're developing distresses me a bit because I think there's a lot of well-intended opposition to some of the development, but the consequences of the way that the opposition is taking place have, I think, unintended outcomes. If you look at the floatel as an example. There are an awful lot of things about it that I think could have made Squamish better off had it unfolded differently.

The opposition to the floatel hasn't changed the fact that there is a floatel. And sadly, I think a bit of the opposition to it has been done in a disingenuous manner, where we say we're opposed because we don't want workers in town. And then, we do want workers, but we want the housing to be built in town. What you're really trying to say is that we don't want any of this. We just don't have the guts to say it, or maybe we don't have the authority to say it, in which case, we may as well look at what's happening and say, “How do we get the best benefit out of this?”

Q: What is next for you?

A: We are headed to the Aircraft Museum in London, ON. They have a week-long program linked to Remembrance Day, and NATO and so on. I will be presenting.

About a local is a regular column about interesting Squamish residents. If you have an idea of someone to feature for this column (and their permission), reach out to [email protected].