THE COAST GUARD AIR FLEET Uniquely Coast Guard. Uniquely durable and resilient. BY CRAIG COLLINS
When the Coast Guard announced plans to add a new aircraft to its fleet in December 2018, it was big news: The service was moving from a years-long evaluation of a small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS), launched and recovered from the deck of a National Security Cutter (NSC), into a new phase in which the system would eventually be deployed aboard every Coast Guard NSC. But the news also had a familiar ring to it, for a couple of reasons: The sUAS system, the ScanEagle, was hardly new to the service; it had performed well in evaluations dating back to 2012, when it was first deployed aboard the USCGC Stratton. An 8-foot-long fixed-wing craft with a range of up to 80 miles and endurance of about 20 hours, the ScanEagle is launched from the deck of a vessel by means of pneumatic catapult and lands with the aid of a tailhook. The ScanEagle has proved a valuable asset for the Coast Guard, identifying actionable intelligence and greatly increasing the domain awareness of cutter patrols. In deployments aboard the Stratton from 2016 to 2018, the ScanEagle participated in at-sea interdictions that recovered more than 18,100 kilograms of contraband, with a street value in excess of $289 million. The aircraft also provided overwatch assistance during boardings of several fishing vessels. On the heels of these successes, the Coast Guard has made the ScanEagle a permanent feature aboard the Stratton and plans to outfit four NSCs per year, beginning with the cutters James and Munro, until the NSC fleet is complete in fiscal year 2021. The ScanEagle program also offered an echo of past Coast Guard aircraft acquisitions, in that it didn’t begin with a concept tailored to the Coast Guard’s multimission posture. The ScanEagle’s first and primary users were the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps; the aircraft was first deployed to perform battlefield reconnaissance during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004. The same is true of many aircraft that have become iconic representations of the Coast Guard. The HC-130 Hercules turboprop airplane, the Coast Guard’s longrange surveillance aircraft, began its service in 1956 as a cargo carrier for the U.S. Air Force. A newer addition to the Coast Guard’s fleet of medium-range aircraft,
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Coast Guard OUTLOOK
the HC-27, was originally developed as the Joint Cargo Aircraft to provide the Army and Air Force with shorttakeoff tactical transports. The MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, the Coast Guard’s medium-range recovery workhorse, is an adaptation of the helicopter that entered service in 1979 as the Army’s Black Hawk and Navy’s Seahawk helicopter. Understandably, the Coast Guard, with a budget equal to just over 1.5 percent of the federal defense budget, doesn’t always celebrate its reputation as the service that finds a way to do more with less. According to Capt. Tom MacDonald, who helps lead aviation acquisitions as the assistant program executive officer for aviation, the Coast Guard isn’t typically the service that sits down with a contractor, writes out its requirements on a whiteboard, and then receives an aircraft tailor-made for its 11 statutory missions – but there’s no denying the service’s knack for innovating solutions uniquely suited to its needs. “We’re very good,” MacDonald said, “at taking DOD [Department of Defense] platforms and adapting them to our mission set.” As Adm. Karl Schultz, commandant of the Coast Guard, pointed out in his first State of the Coast Guard address, it’s a skill set that has been increasingly put to the test, as intensifying global complexities have upped the demand for Coast Guard services while its acquisition budget has remained mostly stagnant. “Coast Guard men and women are doing more and more, in increasingly complex and dangerous environments, with aging platforms and infrastructure,” Schultz said. Still, he remained optimistic that the service “will remain strong, adaptive, and resilient to the challenges ahead.” The people who tend the service’s air fleet share this optimism, and have applied uniquely Coast Guard ways of thinking to both improve and extend the performance of air assets, in many cases transforming 20th century platforms into cutting-edge aircraft that will serve the Coast Guard well into the 2030s.
“MISSIONIZING” THE FIXED-WING FLEET In aviation, one of the clearest examples of a 20th century technology in need of updating is radar
