An unarmed 227-kg missile slammed onto the driving range at Yellowknife municipal golf course prior to opening yesterday after it fell off a fighter jet from 4 Wing Cold Lake.
The CF-18 was coming in to land for a refuelling stop at Yellowknife around 7 a.m. when the AIM-7 Sparrow missile fell off about a kilometre short of the airport.
"The pilot was aware that the missile had detached and contacted air traffic control," said Canadian Forces spokesman Capt. Joanna Campbell.
RCMP closed Highway 3 as a search was mounted for the exact location of the air-to-air missile.
Campbell said the missile was located around 9 a.m. by a civilian employee from the military base at Yellowknife.
The assistant manager of the golf course, Guy Kennedy, was getting ready to open up at 8 a.m. when an RCMP officer appeared and told him an evacuation had been ordered.
"While (the Mountie) was doing that, he was speaking on the radio to someone and said to the someone on the radio that he had a visual on the missile," Kennedy told the CBC.
"At which point I went, 'You have a visual on the missile?' and I kind of looked where he was looking out on our driving range and there was a missile out on our driving range.
"At that point I realized what everybody was talking about."
The 441 Squadron plane was on its way to Inuvik to help monitor a massive Russian air force exercise and discourage any unauthorized entry into sensitive Canadian air space.
The plane is capable of carrying four of the 3.6-metre-long missiles, each with a range of 20 km.
The warhead normally contains 40 kg of explosive.
A team of experts from 4 Wing Cold Lake was on its way to the golf course yesterday afternoon to make the missile safe.
A spokesman for Winnipeg 1 Canadian Air Division, Capt. Dave Meister, said the missile was not armed.
"That has to be done from the cockpit prior to firing," he explained.
In April 2000, a dummy missile fell off a CF-18 during a training exercise over the Gulf of Mexico.
After a CF-18 from Bagotville in Quebec lost a missile in 1998, extra pins were fitted to all Canadian fighters to hold the weapons in their mountings.
A fault with the internal launch mechanism was blamed for the loss of a missile from a CF-18 near Cold Lake in 1996.
Meister said the latest loss remains under investigation.
Source: Edmonton Sun (Alberta, Canada)
