Captain Brian Bews is a bit of a celebrity at his home base of CFB Bagotville, Quebec.
He’s one of Canada’s elite air force fighter pilots. He’s cool, confident, the best of the best. But that’s not why everyone knows who he is. Around the base, they’ve started calling him “Rocketman” – a nickname inspired by the day this past July when Capt. Bews cheated death by mere seconds.
The moment was as surreal as it was unexpected. Captain Bews was practicing for an air show in Lethbridge, Alberta this summer. He was doing a manoeuvre called “High Alpha Pass,” a move he’d practiced at least 50 times before. But this time something went terribly wrong.
“The jet stopped listening to my control inputs,” he told Global News’ current affairs program 16:9 The Bigger Picture in an exclusive interview. “The nose started to fall to the right… I remember my hand on the stick pushing to the left corner to try and correct that.”
He couldn’t correct it. The jet veered off its flight path, diving and crashing to earth in a massive explosion. The spectacular flames and billowing smoke made it hard to believe anyone could walk away alive. The technician who did the final checks on the plane,Sarah Nantel, told 16:9 she feared the worst.
Get daily National news
“I could not believe it,” she said. “I honestly thought it wasn’t happening. I saw the chute deploy and at that point I was still unsure.”
Even Capt. Bews could hardly believe his narrow escape.
“I’m hanging in this parachute, kind of in shock…I watched my jet as it rolled over and nosed into the ground and then exploded,” he told 16:9.
“It’s the air show jet. It’s got the tail painted up nicely. And I specifically remember seeing those nicely painted tails go into the ground and explode. It’s such a surreal feeling.”
Capt. Bews is alive today largely because of a steady hand on the ejection lever. He blasted out of harm’s way with just two seconds to spare. And he says he owes his survival to a seat made by British company, Martin Baker, and assembled and armed on the base in Canada. Its role in his survival has given Capt. Bews deeper respect for those who put the seats together.
“These guys have to build a product that the very first time it’s used, it has to work perfect or else someone will die,” he told 16:9.
After the crash, Capt. Bews went to the safest place he knew to recuperate, the family farm in Saskatchewan. His relieved parents, Lorraine and Ken Bews, welcomed him home.
News of the crash was hard for the family to take. The youngest of three boys, even Capt. Bews’ towering confidence was shaken. He’d come too close to death for comfort. And he told his mother he knew what tipped the scales for him on the day of the crash.
“He said he had his guardian angels with him,” a still emotional Lorraine Bews told 16:9.
And the Bews family knows exactly who those guardian angels might be.
In 2005, Capt. Bews was married. He and his wife, Kim, were stationed at CFB Cold Lake in Alberta. Kim was seven months pregnant. In was in the early morning hours of February 9th, 2005 that Kim and two other pilots’ wives were on the highway together, headed to Edmonton, when their car hit black ice. It slid out of control and into the path of an oncoming truck. All three died on impact.
Five years have passed and Capt. Bews has learned to live with the pain of that loss. But, on July 23, in the moments following the crash, he thought of the day he lost Kim.
“I thought about it right away,” he told 16:9. “I thank God and my angels up there that I’m still here.”
Now, just a few months later, Capt. Bews is anxious to get back in the air. The injuries he suffered during the crash are grounding him for now, but it’s just a matter of time before he’s back, soaring the skies, confident in his skill and unshakeable in his faith.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.