RCAF career ‘perfect fit’ for retiring airframe tech
If Bob Somerset had gone Coast Guard in 1977, he wanted the new hovercrafts operating on the West coast. Navy? He wanted submarines. If he could rejoin today, 45-and-a-half years later, he’d pick the Canadian Armed Forces’ newest space division. He picked aviation.
“That was it, really, from Day 1,” he says, describing how he and a buddy, as kids, were “well known” to the Winnipeg airport police, always being caught going over the fences into the airport’s “graveyard” of scrapped planes.
“Today, knowing someone paid me good money, every day, for years, to work with fancy tools, solve problems and work on airframes? It was the perfect fit.”
Master Corporal (retired) Bob Somerset put on his Royal Canadian Air Force DEUs for the last time March 17, reporting for work at 14 Air Maintenance Squadron for a day that included depart with dignity traditions, “so many!” certificates and the opportunity to say a few (hah!) words to his peers.
“I have 45-plus years of really, really good memories – all good. The problem with staying as long as I have? The people I knew have left. The younger people – I don’t speak their language. The commanding officers and the ones upstairs? I’ve been in the military longer than some of them have been alive. My best friend timed out in March of 2022, and I missed him: this last year, maybe I was wandering around a little lost.”
While his squadron leadership presented a career’s worth of certificates, high praise and formal words, Somerset, in his turn at the front of the hangar floor gathering, used it as his chance to thank everyone.
“I didn’t do 45 years because I enjoyed the job alone: it was the guys, the people. Forty-five years of enjoying working with you all.
“Apparently, people were emotional while I was speaking but, I tell you – it’s the people, the friends. I don’t think they expected me to thank them like I did.”
And, before he was done, he had to step away from finishing: “I was nervous, a little quavery – not from speaking, but that maybe I was not going to be able to finish. It was getting to me.”
‘I was in my element’
Somerset was born in Belfast in 1960: his grandfather had taken his family from Toronto to Great Britain during the Second World War to fly Lancasters for the Royal Air Force. Somerset’s father then met the woman who became his mother; they returned to Canada when Somerset was seven.
“We got off the boat in Quebec City, and the train stopped right at Expo ’67 – we were there overnight, right in the middle of it. Man – there were monorails, displays, technology – holy! My first impression of Canada as a seven-year-old from Ireland!”
The train continued on to Winnipeg, where Somerset’s father, an airplane mechanic, started working in the fast-growing North American hub for all things transportation.
“I was very Irish – cultural, my accent, the way I dressed. The first day of school, I got the crap beat out of me!”
When the other kids realized his expertise at “footie” (“They didn’t even know to call the game the right name!”), and looked at his height, playing sports became one of the “only things going for me.
“High school – I pulled it out. The big plan was to go to university and electronic engineering, but the military was a quicker way out of home.”
He joined the air force as an airframe technician, “and never regretted it.”
He took a plane to Greenwood, just 17, and then a bus to Cornwallis for basic training. The physical training was easy, but memories of the rush to grab meals, the horrible sneakers assigned and the end-of-week-one haircuts they gave everyone, along with uniforms, making everyone unrecognizable; remain with him.
He did his trades training in Borden through to 1978, aiming for jet planes.
“Fighter, fighter, fighter – I’d even take a unit at a French-speaking base. I wanted fighters.
“I got the Argus in Greenwood.”
He thought it was a let down – until he started working.
“Four great big World War II radial engines, dripping grease, snorting and roaring? I liked it!”
Greenwood had a Lancaster on display and, one day, a crew arrived to salvage its Rolls Royce engines for another Lancaster in Hamilton. Somerset offered to help.
“A few years later, that Lancaster showed up in Cold Lake for an air show – and they remembered me. ‘Want to go for a ride?’ Hell, yeah!”
Somerset scampered across the apron in his coveralls: “I was in an aircraft like my granddad was in – absolutely memorable. And then, a B24 from the airshow was flying alongside us in formation.”
There was some “conversations” back on the ground with supervisors, but it wasn’t the first – or the last – of Somerset’s catch-as-catch-can flying hours.
Somerset was in Greenwood as the CP140 Aurora came into service and, after nine years, was posted to Cold Lake to work with the CF116 Freedom Fighters (F5s).
“I was dancing – I did anything and everything to get a back seat ride – I’ve probably got over 200 hours in back seat flying.”
He kept that up through the F5s, the F18, T-birds, a dual F16 at Luke Air Force Base, an F15 in Florida; he was strapped into an F4 Phantom before it “crapped out.
“I did anything and everything to get an opportunity to fly. The crews knew me, especially the fighter units. I always made it a point to shake the pilot’s hand every time and say, ‘Your plane is ready, sir,’ because I made it ready. And I like to think they knew I did good work.”
In 1990, he posted to 441 Squadron: “a really cool squadron – we won everything, it was really intense, a really good time. I went all over the world.”
It was back to Greenwood in 1995, to 434 Squadron to work with the T-birds and Challengers.
“I thought the F18s were pretty cool, but the T-bird – that was like going from a Lamborghini to a Model T: I loved it. And, I flew all over the world.”
From 1999 to 2009, he shifted to 14 Air Maintenance Squadron, and the Aurora again. He was posted to 12 Wing Shearwater for a brief period in 2009 into 2010, to work on the Sea Kings – “something I wanted when I was single – going out to sea on a ship with helicopters? Yes!” His wife had a good job in the Valley and, within 10 months, as a Reserve position opened in Greenwood and he had a “three-day think,” he quit the Regular Force and came “home.
“It was the best thing I ever did: I spent 36 years of my 45-and-a-half in Greenwood. Moving to Reserve, I was happy – there was no more pressure, I could move around the base in different Reserve jobs if I wanted.”
That Reserve job was in the 14 AMS tool crib; that’s where he stayed for the last 13 years, including three extensions to take him to age 63.
“Anything in that building tool-related or equipment – I could put my hand on it, absolutely. There were 404 tool boards, and they all had to be inspected every year. It sounds mundane, but absolutely not: there was always something different, new tools that made the guys’ jobs easier.”
And, if Somerset says he started feeling like a “dinosaur” in a shop of increasingly younger members, put a tool in his hand to mentor one of them, “and I was in my element.
“The new Kingfisher for search and rescue was here: I was crawling all through that, just jazzed – a new plane! These things are cool! Just think – some of these younger ones are going to eventually work on space aircraft!”
‘I think of me as air force’
Today, a month after his last day, he’s up ‘til midnight or later, sleeping in until 9:30 a.m., getting a way late work-out in (he used to help the Greenwood Commissionaires open the back gate in the morning to work out at the squadron gym). He admits he “hasn’t done a damn thing!
“Another month, my wife will take care of that.”
Somerset has long been the maintainer of the “family fleet” of vehicles, and has a garage full of tools and small equipment, a couple boats, a four-wheeler, a motorcycle. There’s drawers to be done in the kitchen, bathroom flooring to replace, yard work. Plus, he’s interested in lots of things: scuba diving, sea kayaking, fishing and camping, a naturalists’ society, trail work, travelling, road trips. There are plans to take his 83-year-old mother to see her sister – after 50 years! – in Belfast.
He is a little concerned about Remembrance Day coming in November: he admits to crying at what he knew would be his last one in uniform in 2022 (he only cried at one other: he was the right marker on parade and looked up to see his son, then a Cadet, on the cenotaph guard).
“The military, for me, has been a rock through it all,” Somerset says. He married at 20, had two sons (one of whom went on to serve as a medic and then a physician’s assistant) in six years and divorced; before meeting his wife of 23 years, and her two daughters. “I need solidity – obviously: I did 45-and-a-half years with one employer! Anything different is totally against the grain for me.
“I think of me as air force. It’s me.”
