Alliance North launches Volunteer Emergency Response Air Corps at local airport

Stratford Mayor Martin Ritsma poses with the Volunteer Emergency Response Air Corps at the municipal airport on Sept. 27, as part of the Air Bridge 2025 event.

CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

On Sept. 27, after three years of planning, Alliance North launched its Volunteer Emergency Response Air Corps (VEAC) here in the Festival City.

VEAC is a civilian surge aviation resource trained and ready to support government-initiated emergency response. At the drop of a hat, or at the sending of an alert, VEAC pilots can make a critical difference when roads are blocked, commercial flights are grounded or government aircraft are overwhelmed.

Ontario has 9,000 registered aircraft and many more skilled pilots. As Chirag Chopra, co-founder of Alliance North, said, their organization means to provide formal coordination so that those pilots and planes can provide much needed medical transports, search and rescue, animal welfare, environmental response and humanitarian aid.

“For the last two years, we've been building training courses, response plans. We've been talking with various municipal, provincial, federal level officials and getting this all together. So today was a culmination of all of that, and we're here now with a group of pilots, a group of planes and a plan to get it done.”

VEAC pilots gathered for Air Bridge 2025 that day, an emergency response exercise hosted by the city, after an alert went out to the network. Despite delays due to foggy weather which enveloped the region, pilots from across southwestern Ontario, from Chatham-Kent to Kingston, flew to the Stratford Municipal Airport that morning. They participated in a number of demonstrations and exercises hosted by stakeholder organizations.

Gathering in groups, pilots participated in a loading exercise, where they gathered emergency supplies in boxes and stuffed a civilian aircraft full so that it could actually take off. They also gathered around Ali Asgary, an associate professor of disaster and emergency at York University, who piloted a drone with his team in an emergency simulation that involved two hikers, one who was in anaphylaxis due to a bee sting and the other severely dehydrated. With the drone, an EpiPen and other emergency first aid supplies were dropped from hundreds of feet away.

The planning for the day began in July of this year, though the potential for partnership between the City of Stratford and Alliance North began three years ago when Mayor Martin Ritsma, Chopra and Mark Bett (Alliance North’s other co-founder) first connected.

“This is like Christmas morning to me,” Ritsma told the gathering VEAC pilots that morning, reinforcing all the work that went into the day. “… We journeyed. We journeyed really hard and here we are today. … So on behalf of the residents of Stratford, on behalf of city council and all staff, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

As Chopra said, this first event was a proof-of-concept.

“This event was more of a showcase than a real exercise,” Chopra explained. “We are showcasing to the federal, provincial, municipal governments that we've got a program of training – and getting pilots … So as much as it was testing out our own protocols and our own procedures, it was very much intended to get the message out to communities, to governments, to whoever needs to know this, that local pilots exist in the communities they want to help.”