This book offers a complete history of the pioneers, planes, and services of U.S. Coast Guard aviation. It covers seven decades of aircraft development, from the early stick and wire seaplanes to today's E2C Hawkeyes, and recounts the human drama of aviators risking their lives in dangerous trial-and-error flight testing, search-and-rescue missions, wartime enemy surveillance, and law enforcement.
Building on the highly successful A History of U.S. Coast Guard Aviation, this book details all aircraft used since the Coast Guard introduced its air arm in 1916.
This book clearly demonstrates the problems encountered by the personalities involved and their strengths in developing the helicopter for Coast Guard use. It shows how Erickson and his friend and mentor, Coast Guard captain William Kossler, undaunted by their lack of support, fought with single-minded intensity to establish the helicopter as a vital rescue tool in the service. Kossler died while the project was still in its infancy.
About the Author: Barrett Thomas “Tom” Beard entered the Navy as an enlisted man in 1953 and completed flight training as a Navcad in 1955. With a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve, he flew operational missions—including carrier landings—in A-l Skyraiders and E-l Tracers. He qualified in more than a dozen other types of Navy aircraft, including F-9 Cougars. He served two tours as flight instructor in his ten years with the Navy. In 1965, following his return from a Vietnam tour at Yankee Station, Mr. Beard entered the Coast Guard. He flew in SAR operations in the HU-16E Albatross, the C-130 Hercules, and the HH-52A Seaguard. He qualified as a seaplane pilot, a shipboard helicopters pilot, and a Coast Guard standardization pilot, accumulating more than 6,000 military flight hours during his career. Mr. Beard holds an FAA airline transport pilot rating and a commercial helicopter rating, plus a Coast Guard master’s license for inspected vessels. After retiring in 1975, Mr. Beard returned to college, earning a master’s degree in history from Western Washington University in Bellingham. Following employment as a museum director, he turned back to the sea, in sailboats. Over the past twenty years, he and his wife, Carolyn, have sailed nearly 150,000 miles and visited about fifty countries as they’ve circled the world one and a half times. Mr. Beard takes vacations from these voyages to return home to research and write articles in his field of maritime history.
Most often, when Joint Operations are conducted by a larger service, individual Armed Service Historians tell the story of events ignoring, sometimes even trivialising, participation of the other Armed Services. Sometimes, Navy historians inferred Navy credit for a naval event conducted by a Coast Guard individual or the Coast Guard by documenting the event but ignoring Coast Guard presence. Documentation of history resulting from both similar and diverse contributions and authorities from a different sea-service is lost by this historian approach. For example, Navy historian Roy A. Grossnick, in his June 2001 book United States Naval Aviation, 1910-1995 only mentions Coast Guard participation in early Naval Aviation and the World War once when “The secretary of Navy was advised LT E.F. Stone, USCG was ordered to NAS Pensacola for aviation training.” As this book documents, Coast Guard individuals and the Coast Guard service gave many contributions to the World War and to development and growth of Naval Aviation during that period.
Float Planes And Flying Boats: The Coast Guard And Early Naval Aviation is a single comprehensive volume telling the history of early Naval Aviation; the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard. A unified history of all naval aviators, it describes interrelationship and mutual support. In years leading to 1920, the Marine Corps and Coast Guard did not own aircraft. The three sea service’s aviators flew Navy aircraft on Navy missions from Navy ships and Navy Air Stations, commanded by Navy and Coast Guard aviators. The bond between them was born. It was a unique time.
The book is documented with 427 endnotes, and features 281 vintage aviation photographic images and a nautical chart of historical note embedded within its text. This balance of photographs and endnote documentation provides both visual and written history that will come alive for the reader.
Red Crew is a first-hand account of U.S. Coast Guard anti-smuggling operations during the early years of the nation’s maritime war on drugs. Jim Howe describes his experience as the executive officer of a specialized drug-hunting crew that sailed in then-state-of-the-art “surface effect ships,” a small flotilla of high-speed vessels pressed into the drug war on short notice. In the early 1980s, South Florida and the Caribbean were awash in illicit drugs, with hundreds of smuggling organizations bringing huge loads of marijuana, and later cocaine, into the United States. To fight this epidemic, the Reagan administration led a massive effort to disrupt shore-side gangs while bolstering interdiction activity at sea. To increase the number of days at sea for each surface effect ship, a “multi-crewing” concept was employed, with four teams of sixteen sailors—the Red, Blue, Green, and Gold Crews—rotating among three hulls. Through its first-person narrative, Red Crew offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day pressures, challenges, failures, and successes of Coast Guard cuttermen as they carried out complex and dangerous missions. Red Crew provides a unique historical view of the early days in the Coast Guard’s war on drugs, and is the only book-length history of the diminutive, one-of-a-kind surface effect ship fleet.
In The Sikorsky HH-52A, noted historian Lennart Lundh presents this diminutive helicopters story for the first time. Covered are design details, international service, licensed production by Mitsubishi, and the story of the Seaguards use by the U.S. Coast Guard. A record of each airframes history is included, as are photographs of three-quarters of the S-62As, S-62Js, and HH-52As produced. Of special interest are the recollections of nearly a score of Coast Guard pilots and aircrew, and the text of the Armys evaluation of the first production airframe.
The definitive, official illustrated book on the U.S. Coast Guard, published in a fully updated and revised edition. Since September 11, the Coast Guard’s motto—Semper Paratus, "Always Ready"—has taken on new meaning. From protecting our coastlines to drug interdiction, combat missions, and guarding against terrorism as part of the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Coast Guard maintains a constant vigil in the safeguarding of Americans. Written by an outstanding team of historians and distinguished officers, including the current Commandant USCG Admiral Thad Allen, The Coast Guard has more than 350 pages that tell the story from its origins as both the Revenue Cutter Service and U.S. Lifesaving Service to lighthouses, ice breakers, and the heroes of Hurricane Katrina. Essays on history, search and rescue, and aviation all have one common focus: the incredibly trained and highly motivated people that make up the Coast Guard.