Another aircraft was also ending its career. The HU-16E Albatross racked up an incredible 200,000-plus sorties in a quarter-century, but finally became the last fixed-wing Coast Guard aircraft capable of operating at sea. The last was retired at Cape Cod AirSta, Massachusetts, in March 1983.

Protecting the nation is today part of the job, more than ever, but a new century did not mean an end to Coast Guard aviation’s seminal humanitarian role.

And a third retirement was chalked up when the last HH-3F Pelican was retired from the Coast Guard on May 6, 1994. It was the last Coast Guard aircraft able to land on and take off from water.

 

A new century

Other aircraft came and went. The service’s sole Grumman VC-11A Gulfstream II spent most of its life transporting “bigwigs” but was used during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to bring a team of oil pollution experts to Saudi Arabia. The HU-25 Guardian, a version of the Falcon executive jet, had a long and distinguished history, and two of them used aerial sensors to assist the team in cleaning up oil spills intentionally unleashed by Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The 9/11 attacks on the United States put new emphasis on the Coast Guard’s status as a military service branch and as a security force. Having moved from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Transportation in 1967, the service made a new move in 2003 to the Department of Homeland Security.

Protecting the nation is today part of the job, more than ever, but a new century did not mean an end to Coast Guard aviation’s seminal humanitarian role.

A Coast Guard document describes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, into which aircraft from stations at New Orleans, Houston, and Mobile descended on Aug. 28, 2005, “only to find the utter horror of great expanses under water up to rooftops or completely flattened by winds with burning gas mains and buildings and thousands of survivors clinging to rooftops adding to the unimaginable scene. In tropical storm conditions, helicopters began hoisting survivors, reacting intuitively to the difficult task of triaging the neediest from among the throngs of victims, and delivering those recovered to the nearest dry land or overpass.” Flying around the clock for seven days, Coast Guard helicopters operating over New Orleans alone saved 6,470 lives (4,731 by hoist) during 723 sorties and 1,507 flight hours. Coast Guard helicopter aircrews saved or evacuated a total of 12,535 people during Katrina rescue operations.

“There is little doubt – the Coast Guard’s response was nothing short of monumental,” says current Commandant of the Coast Guard Adm. Paul Zukunft. But the disaster also pointed to the limitations faced by a small service. During Katrina, we saw the limits of a Coast Guard surge in personnel and assets,” said Zukunft. “By necessity, when we deployed equipment and people to the Gulf Coast, we left skeleton crews behind in several areas, which increased risk and the potential for failure in other mission areas. At the peak of the response, we had 3,400 – over 10 percent of the Coast Guard’s personnel complement – deployed to the region in one day.” Zukunft noted in particular that, “an astounding 45 percent of the Coast Guard’s air assets were in the region at the height of the response.”

In its rotary-wing fleet today, the Coast Guard operates 42 MH-60T Jayhawks at eight air stations. These derivatives of the Navy’s well-known Seahawk were acquired as HH-60J models and were subsequently upgraded, armed, and given the MH-60T appellation.

Today’s Coast Guard air fleet is modest compared to other air arms, but colossal in contrast to the earliest days of Coast Guard aviation. It remains modest when measured in aircraft types – just half a dozen kinds of planes and helicopters.

The Coast Guard currently operates 23 first-generation HC-130H Hercules models and nine HC-130J Super Hercules aircraft (a direct result of a post-9/11 budget increase), and plans to acquire 22 HC-130Js. Three HC-130H Hercules will be decommissioned in fiscal year 2016. In a perfect world, Coast Guard members would like to be equipped entirely with the more economical, more efficient Super Hercules model, but that appears to be out of reach in today’s funding climate.

The C-130s are the backbone of the service’s long-range air fleet, ideal for lengthy patrols, on-scene command and control, surveillance, and cargo and personnel transport.

For medium-range maritime patrol duty, the service operates 18 HC-144A Ocean Sentry twin-turboprop aircraft, military versions of the Airbus/CASA CN 235-300M cargo hauler, the last delivered in September 2014. They perform maritime patrol, law enforcement, SAR, and disaster response duty from four air stations. The service planned for more HC-144As but, instead, has received 14 surplus C-27J twin-turboprop transports.

The C-27Js came from the Air Force at no cost. This transfer allowed the Coast Guard to avoid acquisition costs of more than a half-billion dollars – a windfall in an era when budgets are tight. The C-27J is called the Spartan elsewhere, but the Coast Guard hasn’t adopted the name. The FY 2016 budget will include spares, initial training, mission system development, and ground support equipment to optimize these aircraft for rescue duty, whereupon they’ll be designated HC-27J.

In its rotary-wing fleet today, the Coast Guard operates 42 MH-60T Jayhawks at eight air stations. These derivatives of the Navy’s well-known Seahawk were acquired as HH-60J models and were subsequently upgraded, armed, and given the MH-60T appellation.

The Coast Guard has finished upgrading its aging Dolphin helicopters to MH-65D standard. On Oct. 28, 2015, the service completed its first flight of the prototype MH-65E. It has a Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS) similar to one installed on the upgraded MH-60Ts. The MH-65E upgrade will also replace the legacy analog automatic flight control with a digital system, and install a digital weather radar system.

The service’s newest MH-65 initiative is the Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron, or HITRON, currently based in Jacksonville, Florida. Responding to the nation’s effort to stop the flow of drugs from South America in heavily laden speedboats, known as go-fasts, a proof-of-concept HITRON deployment was authorized in summer 1998. Its objective was to disable outboard motors of go-fasts with a .50-caliber precision rifle, with suspect vessels running at up to 50 knots over the open ocean. The goal was daunting, but the initial deployment met with stunning success as HITRON crews disabled five vessels and seized more than $100 million in contraband in a few short weeks. In the subsequent 18 years, armed helicopters from HITRON have successfully interdicted 382 go-fasts, seized 362 tons of cocaine and 21 tons of marijuana, and apprehended 1,227 narco-terrorists.

Also in today’s Coast Guard inventory are two C-37A Gulfstream V executive jets used to transport the secretary for Homeland Security, commandant, and other senior officials.