RCAF pilot loved to fly
Aerobatic star taught Snowbirds, eventually became brigadier-general
In RCAF circles they still talk about a young pilot who landed at the base in Winnipeg. Some local pilots asked him for a favour.
“There’s this old major flying a desk,” they said. “Could you take him up and show what today’s pilots can do?”
No one told him the major was Bill Slaughter, former Red Knight (aerobatic solo pilot), former member of the Golden Centennaires (which preceded the Snowbirds).
Colette Ouellet, the daughter of Bill Slaughter, picks up the story here:
“So it was a two-seater and they went up. And at a certain point, my Dad said, ‘ Gee, do you think I could take over, just to try it out again?’ And he started putting it through its air-show paces.”
The paces were moves such as the Cuban 8, a figure-8 turned on its side so that both loops are vertical. Some of the Golden Centennaire manoeuvres are now banned by the Snowbirds. They’re too dangerous.
Roderick William Slaughter was Canada’s most prominent RCAF pilot of his day with the public, starring in air shows all over the country.
He was also a test pilot, a brigadier-general, a pioneer in flight safety and a senior official in search and rescue.
He died Oct. 31 in Ottawa, aged 74, and is buried at the National Military Cemetery at Beechwood.
Born in Winnipeg, he joined the Air Cadets as a teenager and wanted to fly from the start.
In those days pilots were accepted young, and he began pilot training with the RCAF at 19.
He started his career with 2 Wing in France. He was just 21 when he had to write home to his parents and say that yes, he was the pilot in the news who had just ejected over Germany, but everything worked out fine and they shouldn’t worry.
He wrote it from the hospital where doctors were fixing his spine.
Here’s the real story as told by Colette:
“One story that’s kind of funny,” she calls it. Her father and another pilot were flying in their F-86 Sabres over the Black Forest in 1961.
“The Sabre is a single-engine airplane, and he lost his engine. He flamed out. So he had to eject.”
The two pilots had been approaching their landing but they were still over trees — a dangerous place to eject — and were also low.
“When he ejected, things didn’t happen the way they’re were supposed to,” Colette said. In theory, the pilot pulls a lever, the canopy opens, he shoots up and out and then the seat falls away to let the parachute deploy.
Bill Slaughter’s seat didn’t drop anywhere. It stuck to him, and no chute came out.
He finally freed himself from the seat but he was now very low, “so he only had about 10 seconds of parachute time before he hit the trees. He fractured a vertebra and compressed a couple of disks so he was actually an inch shorter after that. But incredibly he survived it.”
A tree branch also landed on him and knocked the wind out of him.
In his “Dear Mom and Dad” letter, he wrote, “All that happened to me was a small compression fracture to my back, otherwise I didn’t even get a bruise.” The family says this is a heavily sanitized version.
“I almost didn’t meet him,” Colette says of her father. She was born a few months later.
He made his name with the public in a T-33 jet painted red, the Red Knight.
His daughter Cori watched with great pride from the ground, and sat happily in the cockpit at age five while he taxied down the runway.
“I remember spending most of my youth standing on runways watching him, with the plumes (of coloured smoke) from the Golden Centennaires ... As a child it was magical, knowing that your Dad is up there, doing that.”
He was the Red Knight in 1963 and 1964, then a test pilot and then one of the Golden Centennaires in 1967, the centennial year. The team did more than 100 shows that year.
It was a dangerous life; he took over as the lead soloist after two other pilots died.
“I remember being so proud,” Colette said. “We (his children) were looking up and trying to figure out which one was Dad as he did these crazy formations.
“He was very humble. He didn’t really talk about his successes in life.”
But she remembers watching him from the tarmac as he performed, and even being jealous when other children were invited out to meet her father on the runway.
“They swarmed all over him,” she remembers.
Slaughter was an instructor in Portage-la-Prairie and Moose Jaw, taught the early Snowbird pilots and moved on to the headquarters of Air Command. He helped to develop the military’s air safety division.
He flew everything from DC-3s to modern jets, and used to tell his family he could even fly the crates they were packed in.
He retired as a colonel in 1972 and worked for a while for Transair, and then joined Transport Canada in Ottawa. The daredevil pilot was now focused entirely on safety, which struck the family as an irony but wasn’t really a contradiction. Both jobs, Cori says, are all about risk management.
He did accident investigations but also undercover work in the North.
“He would pose as a fisherman that would rent a small aircraft and pilot” to check safety standards, Colette recalls.
That was risky, too. One pilot picked him up in poor weather, and the weather got worse. The pilot was inexperienced and Slaughter realized he was out of his depth.
He had to show his credentials and take the controls. “He thought they were going to be killed.”
He was seconded back to the military and served at National Defence Headquarters as director of air reserves, in time becoming a brigadier-general. He finished his career as executive director of the National Search and Rescue Secretariat.
Slaughter leaves his wife, Laurie; daughters Cori and Colette; a son, Rod; five grandchildren and extended family in Canada, England and the United States. The funeral was Nov. 8.