Bud Bernston - Canadian Forces - Air Force
Published on 13 January 2010 My name is Edward Bernston, but I go by Bud in my family, and all the
folks in the military that know me. I was raised in a small farm
community out in Saskatchewan, and back in about 1955, I noticed an
advertisement that said, "Join the Air Force, become a pilot, go to
university and get paid fifty dollars a month, all at the same time,"
and I thought that was one hell of a deal, so I inquired and found out
it was the regular Officer Training Program that they had at that time.
I applied for it, and went in to see if I was going to be selected. Out
of about three thousand applicants, only six hundred were selected that
year, so I was told, "You're great to be a pilot, but you're not going
to go to university," and I sort of declined the offer. But when things
got cold that fall, I thought maybe I could smoke through a few months
of working in an office, or pounding a parade square – whatever I was
going to do until the weather warmed up and I could go back to working
on the farm or the oil rigs out on the prairies.
They took me in. Didn't make me a pilot, but made me a navigator to
begin with, flying in the back of CF-100s and then Voodoos. I finally
got to be selected for a pilot in 1967, and continued that until I was
released in '93 and joined the Reserves, and ran the cadet gliding
school in Atlantic provinces for the next ten years after that. So my
few months to get away from the cold weather in the prairies spun out
into a career of almost forty-seven years, of being a back-seater in
all-weather interceptors, being a front-seater in fighters like the F5
and the 104. Lots of staff jobs, and a total of fourteen years spent in
various flying and staff jobs in Europe and all over Canada. So the
little prairie boy from Saskatchewan had a pretty long and extensive
career.
Bud Bernston on the Digital Archive
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