Coast Guardsmen take tremendous pride at having flown aircraft as large as the Catalina, the bigger Consolidated P4Y-2G Privateer, a naval version of the B-24 Liberator bomber and, in later years, the HC-130J Hercules.

 

Helicopters

Not well known is that the Coast Guard, acting in its wartime role on behalf of the Navy, was ahead of the other services in helicopter development. Here is where Floyd Bennett Field gained special importance. On Jan. 1, 1944, a helicopter pilot training program began under the Coast Guard – working for the Navy – at Floyd Bennett Field.

In 1944, tests with Sikorsky HNS-1 and HOS-1 helicopters aboard the ancient cutter Cobb were the very first American shipboard landings of helicopters. Frank A. Erickson, who had been designated a Coast Guard aviator a decade earlier, became the Coast Guard’s first helicopter pilot. In 1944, he flew through howling winds and snow to complete the first lifesaving mission with a helicopter.

Erickson was a calm, steady, persistent figure who traveled a zigzag course to his destination as a Coast Guard air icon. He was an enlisted sailor in the Navy, a dropout from the Naval Academy, and an enlisted Coast Guardsman before attending and graduating from the Coast Guard Academy in 1931. He was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. With the United States at war, Erickson was ordered to the Sikorsky Aircraft plant at Bridgeport, Connecticut, for training in the construction and operation of helicopters and to establish liaison with the manufacturer. He led two other officers and five aviation machinist mates who formed the first Coast Guard Helicopter Detachment. Sergei Sikorsky, son of the famous helicopter maker Igor Sikorsky, said in an interview that Erickson could be “stubborn” and “relentless,” but “had a talent for energizing those around him.” Like the Coast Guard itself, Erickson was ahead of the rest of the world in having a vision of the good work helicopters could perform on land, sea, and air.

As a commander, Erickson developed the idea and the techniques of power hoist equipment for practical use in helicopters. He demonstrated this in Jamaica Bay in 1944 as the pilot of the first helicopter pickup of a man on Aug. 11, 1944; the first pickup of a man floating in water on Aug. 14; and the first pickup of a man from a life raft on Sept. 25.

In the 1950s, the Coast Guard carried out its difficult missions with “hand me down” aircraft that made the service resemble a walking, talking World War II museum.

In a letter to Sikorsky workers, Erickson pointed to a future for the helicopter that many, even within the Coast Guard, were only beginning to see. “These helicopters you are building [at Sikorsky] are especially suited for rescue missions,” Erickson wrote. “Every one of these machines can be adapted for battle area rescue and ambulance work. It is perfectly feasible to equip these machines with a stretcher which can be lowered 25 or 30 feet in hovering flight to remove men from jungles, very high ground or the open seas where even the helicopter cannot land.” In years to follow, the Coast Guard would pull off tens of thousands of rescues just as Erickson foresaw.

In the mid-1940s, the Coast Guard ordered a few more Sikorsky helicopters while other services debated whether rotary-winged flying machines had any practical role. The Coast Guard operated two Army R-5A models under the designation HO2S-1. The design was altered significantly (adding a nose-wheel undercarriage) by the time the civilian variant, the four-seat S-51, made its first flight on Feb. 16, 1946. Nine S-51s went to the Coast Guard as HO3S-1Gs. The Navy also operated the S-51, and many Americans remember Mickey Rooney at the controls in Hollywood’s The Bridges at Toko-ri (1954).