Flight Lt. Christopher Hasler
RAF Distinguished Flying Cross
A former Nova Scotia man who was turned down when he tried to join the Canadian air force has won the Distinguished Flying Cross for demonstrating “great courage and composure” while piloting a British military helicopter in Afghanistan.
Flight Lt. Christopher Hasler grew up in Bedford and learned how to fly gliders and Cessnas with the local air cadet squadron. After job-shadowing a Sea King pilot at 12 Wing Shearwater and graduating from C.P. Allen High School, he turned his eye to the sky with the hope of making a career out of flying military choppers.
“I applied out of high school to the Canadian Forces and didn’t get in, for whatever reason,” the 26-year-old said Saturday during a Christmas visit with his parents, who now live in Ottawa.
“These things happen. So I went to university and still really wanted to fly. So I gave the RAF a call and then I was successful.”
He had historical reasons for looking across the pond — his grandmother spent time as a wireless operator in the Royal Air Force. His grandfather served as a technician with the Royal Canadian Air Force in Northern Africa.
“They met in England during the Second World War,” Flight Lt. Hasler said. His great-grandfather also served with the Royal Flying Corps in 1918.
“I just felt a bit of history there and I wanted to do a bit of travelling as well,” he said.
After a relatively peaceful stint in Iraq in 2004, Flight Lt. Hasler was sent to Afghanistan last summer for a two-month tour. He was the captain of a Chinook on July 17 when he led a group of helicopters into Sangin, a Taliban stronghold where a soldier had been killed the day before while trying to secure the landing site. The mission was to bring desperately needed supplies to British paratroopers.
“The troops were running quite low on ammo and water. Actually, they were out. So we had to go in to resupply them,” he said. “Where they were was quite a dangerous spot.”
According to the Royal Air Force’s description of events, Flight Lt. Hasler chose a different landing site to surprise the enemy.
“There were buildings on three sides, with the ever-present threat of one of the two rotors striking a building and causing catastrophic damage,” the medal citation says.
“To give the Chinook more space, he intentionally placed one of the spinning rotors above a single-storey rooftop. Any error could have been fatal. The mission was a complete success.”
A few days later, Flight Lt. Hasler landed in an area that was taking fire from insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine-guns and rifles.
“There was about 1,000 rounds fired that night, but I managed to get it in, get the guys on the ground and get out,” he said.
Besides having a good handle on flying helicopters, Flight Lt. Hasler seems to have mastered understatement as well.
The citation says that “he held his nerve while his troops were disembarking at the hottest of helicopter landing sites, allowing them to suppress enemy positions with minimum U.K. casualties.
“He acted with great courage and composure in the most demanding, high-risk environment the Chinook Force has operated in within recent history and displayed the highest standards of gallantry and professionalism and outstanding capability as a helicopter captain.”
Flight Lt. Hasler, who did another two-month tour of Afghanistan in the fall and is to return again early in the new year, plans to attend a medal ceremony at Buckingham Palace in the spring, when Queen Elizabeth II will present him with the Distinguished Flying Cross.
“It was just doing my job,” he said of the two situations in Afghanistan. “But the thing is, the Chinooks don’t fly themselves.”
Each helicopter normally carries two pilots and two loadmasters.
“I was the captain on those occasions and just the guy in charge,” he said. “That award belongs to the crew as much as it does to me. I didn’t do it by myself. Those guys were intrinsic to what happened.”
A total of 4,460 Distinguished Flying Crosses have been awarded to Canadians. “There were two in Korea and before that it was the Second World War,” Flight Lt. Hasler said.
But he insists he’s still “just a guy on the squadron” back at his base in Hampshire, England, though he admits the attention has been “really daunting. I’m getting loads of banter from the guys back home for all the spotlight. . . . The e-mails are non-stop.”
Canada sold its heavy-lift fleet of Chinooks to the Netherlands in the 1990s as a cost-cutting measure. Some of the Chinooks the Dutch air force has used recently in Afghanistan used to belong to Canada. But this country is now trying to fast-track the procurement of new CH-47 Chinook helicopters to carry troops and heavy equipment, including lightweight field howitzers, in Afghanistan.
Flight Lt. Hasler, who was born in Jasper, Alta., but lived in Nova Scotia from age five to 20, hasn’t ruled out a move to the Canadian air force someday. “I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing at the moment,” he said. “But maybe if I settle down, I might come home. We’ll see. I’m keeping all my options open at the moment.”
He has had several opportunities to ferry Canadian troops around Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in his helicopter. “Because the Canadians don’t have their own aircraft out there, they use us quite a bit to move the boys around,” he said. “It’s good to talk to a Canadian voice when you’re over there flying above. I really enjoy flying the Canadian boys.”
