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KINGSTON - Of all the occupational hazards facing Canadian fighter pilots, you'd think getting blown up by an improvised explosive device (IED) would rank pretty far down on the list.

Not for Capt. Benoit Bouchard. The Westbrook native and Ecole Marie-Riviere and Royal Military College grad, who flew one of two CF-18s into King ston's Norman Rogers Airport to drum up interest in the fighter pilot trade among current RMC cadets this weekend, usually spends his time thousands of feet above such hazards.

But during a recent seven-month posting to Afghanistan as a forward air controller, directing bombs to be dropped by other planes, the light armoured vehicle in which he was riding was struck by a roadside bomb.

This doesn't usually happen to people who the military has spent $10 million training to be pilots.

"I was thinking at the time, what kind of a fighter pilot gets hit by an IED?" the relaxed Bouchard joked on the tarmac of Norman Rogers as cadets climb - ed in and out of the cockpits of the two jets parked there.

The LAV did its job and took the force of the blast, allowing Bouchard to continue directing in fire from coalition air forces -- Canada has not deployed fighters to Afghanistan despite constant chatter that the Hornets will eventually play a role there.

"As a fighter pilot, you know what other pilots are seeing and you can direct them in a lot easier," said Bouchard, who called in close-support fire on positions as little as 200 metres from where he was taking cover.

"If you think about being in the air high enough that you can see Toronto on one side and Montreal on the other, and your job is to drop a bomb into the corner of that garbage can over there, it helps to have another fighter pilot directing you in because they know what you're seeing."

It might seem strange that RMC is having difficulty attracting fighter pilots as the trade is long seen as the most desirable one in the air force.

Bouchard sports the iconic fighter pilot patch on his sleeve with the silhouette of a CF-18 and the motto 'Is it cool in here or is it just me?' -- but he says the long training period and limited number of spots tends to steer eager cadets into other air trades.

"When I went through RMC, 23 of the 24 people on my course wanted to be fighter pilots, and now that number might be four," he said, noting that pilot candidates are opting for helicopters or other fixed-wing aircraft to get into the air more quickly.

"What we're trying to do here is generate some enthusiasm among cadets and get them thinking about becoming fighter pilots."

He and fellow 3 Wing pilot Capt. Lorne Claymore brought the jets in Friday afternoon, doing a flyby of RMC as passing military pilots like to do, and, in Bouchard's case, also flying over the Kingston elementary school that his five-year-old daughter attends.

"I'm posted to Bagotville (Que.), so it's hard explaining to her why daddy can't be around every night like the other fathers," he said. "But if I'm able to fly over her school, it's not showing off, it lets her point up and say, 'That's my dad up there, that's what he does at work.' "

The regular flypasts, while they generate a handful of noise complaints from city residents, are a treasured tradition for military pilots, who can all remember freezing on the college parade square and thinking one day they'd be looking down at it from a cockpit if they toughed it out.

"It's an awesome job," Bouchard said. "I tell young pilots that every single flight that you take, take 10 seconds to look around and realize you're in a glass cockpit and you're above the clouds looking down and this is your office, this is what you're getting paid to do."

http://storage.canoe.ca/v1/dynamic_r...g&size=248x186 Canadian CF-18 fighter pilot Capt. Benoit Bouchard was at Norman Rogers Airport on Saturday trying to recruit Royal Military College cadets to become fighter pilots. (IAN ELLIOT Sun Media)

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This doesn't usually happen to people who the military has spent $10 million training to be pilots.

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