On Aug. 30, 2021, the last U.S. aircraft departed Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, marking the end of a massive and chaotic evacuation of thousands of international diplomats, families, and Afghan civilians as Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control following their ouster from government 20 years before. 

Major Ian Wookey, a Royal Canadian Air Force tactical helicopter pilot, was serving with the U.S. Army’s 82^nd Airborne Division at the time, as part of a four-year exchange program as a CH-47 Chinook pilot.  

In this third episode of The Pilot Project Podcast, recorded in February, the current executive assistant to the Chief of Air and Space Force Development shared his experience as the last Canadian in Kabul in those final days of Operation Allies Refuge.  

The text has been edited for length. For the full interview with Maj Wookey, visit The Pilot Project Podcast show page.

The Pilot Project Podcast: At this point you’ve completed the evacuation of the embassy. The airfield is relatively secure and now it’s time to evacuate the people who are actually on the airfield proper?   

Maj Wookey: This is where the mission turns from security to evacuation. We’d managed to retain U.S. control of the airfield, and by [Aug. 17], we had non-NATO countries start flowing into the AO [area of operations] to support their own [evacuation] missions. 

It wasn’t just the Americans that were doing this. The Canadians were doing it. All our partner nations were doing it. Anybody who had a vested interest in that country, or any sort of diplomatic mission in that country, was starting to flow into the AO. 

Now it becomes a challenge of space on the airfield. How do you manage dozens and dozens of cargo planes and passenger planes coming onto the airfield, all to do the same thing, but not all in close coordination with each other? 

The units that had flowed in from the U.S. brought a little bit of expertise.… They brought some planners who were able to help coordinate. Our task force was trying to manage it from a level of, ‘Hey, we’re familiar with this AO, we’ve been on this airfield for a few months, we know how to operate here.’

It was not an easy situation to be in, especially for the force protection folks … who were securing the airfield perimeter where they were watching the Taliban execute civilians on the external perimeter of the wall; where there were daily firefights going on in and around the perimeter. The security situation was not [good], but it at least stabilized to a point where we could execute some operations from inside the airfield. 

We started operating in support of the U.S. Forces Afghanistan mission, which was to fly [Chinooks] to areas outside the perimeter of the airfield and pick up some entitled persons who were being staged at offsite locations … and bring them back to the airfield without having them have to fight through the streets of Kabul, the Taliban checkpoints, to be evacuated. 

Over the course of about eight days, from the 17th until the 25th, we were flying three Chinooks a day pretty routinely to locations outside of Kabul to pick up civilian personnel and bring them back to the airfield. We were doing several hundred a day … I think the final tally was just shy of the 10,000. I think we got about 9,800 people on our three Chinooks back to the airfield. 

The Pilot Project Podcast: You mentioned that these fleets were operating way outside of their norms in terms of the amount of people they’re carrying, crew rest, and these types of things. Can you describe some of the challenges encountered during the evacuation? 

Maj Wookey: One of the biggest challenges during the evacuation was just the scale of what was happening. It’s one of the largest evacuations, if not the largest, in history, as far as we can tell. It was a worldwide mobilization of militaries and infrastructure and support facilities. When you think of a non-combatant evacuation operation, and when we look at it in a military context, it’s not just the act of evacuating someone, it’s actually getting them from the place where they are, through a secure processing zone, to a point of embarkation, to some sort of temporary safe haven where they can then go onward to an ultimate destination. 

The only way to move them out was by aircraft. And the security situation was such that civilian aircraft were not being chartered to go in there. So, it was military and government aircraft … almost every C-17 in the world was rerouted to help this mission. All those crews were put on wild schedules in various locations in the world to make sure you could get from a staging location in the Middle East into Kabul and then back. 

There were periods where we had to stop the evacuation outflow because … the people we were evacuating out of Kabul were getting stuck at their temporary safe haven. There were some security instances where you had an aircraft land and you had panicked civilians opening emergency doors while the aircraft were taxiing and flooding out onto the runway.  

Once the department of state left, there was no fuel to replenish the airfield supply of fuel. … So, we were back to whiteboard math of how many sorties we were flying and how much fuel we were pulling out of the in-ground tanks on the airfield … to make sure that we weren’t about to run out of fuel because there was no resupply coming. There was no way to get more fuel into that airfield with the security situation the way it was. 

The Pilot Project Podcast: During all this chaos, you managed to get some help from a Canadian friend. Can you tell us about it? 

Maj Wookey: It’s a really interesting part of the story that’s probably always going to stick with me. In the middle of all these evacuations … there was no way to flow anything into Kabul. Any aircraft coming into Kabul was coming in with a purpose to conduct some sort of evacuation operation, and they were flowing in empty and they were leaving full. There was just no feasible way to bring more people or equipment without undoing all the planning that we were doing to try clear the airfield. 

The problem we had was one of our [Chinooks had a broken] component that we needed to be able to fly, and all our maintenance parts … had gone back to Kuwait where they were staged and waiting to receive us when we eventually left the country. We had no dedicated airflow to get [those] back into the country. 

But it just so happened that the Canadian mission was also located in Kuwait. Through serendipity, I knew the acting Air Task Force commander on the ground in Kuwait. I contacted her on WhatsApp, connected her with one of our crew chiefs, who had the component that we needed … and [within 24 hours], on one of the Canadian flights that was coming to bring out Canadian evacuees, they managed to get this part onto the aircraft. 

Another interesting piece of that story is, when our C-17 landed and I went on board to thank the crew, the aircraft commander was an old Royal Military College classmate [who I did] pilot training with. It was a really weird, “funny seeing you here” moment. We were able to affect some good for the mission and do a little bit of collaboration between the Canadian and American forces. 

The Pilot Project Podcast: The logistics of this evacuation are hard to comprehend. It’s literally moving an entire large city of people out of a country in nine days. 

Maj Wookey: It’s kind of mind-blowing to look back on it and acknowledge what was accomplished.  

The Pilot Project Podcast: What eventually brought a stop to the evacuation? 

Maj Wookey: It was the security situation. And I think that’s what everybody knew it was going to be, eventually. On the 26th of August, there was a terrorist attack outside the gates of the airfield. A suicide bomber detonated an IED, which ended up killing 13 U.S. service members and dozens and dozens of civilians.  

That was a really challenging day because we knew from the intelligence picture that there was a risk. We knew the security situation was such that we could not keep up this level of evacuation indefinitely without inducing some sort of force protection risk. But we’d had a week of success and there was optimism that we could get through to some sort of end state successfully. When the bomb went off, everything kind of stopped.