Hercules

Steve Parker doesn't flew the HC-130 for the U.S. Coast Guard. Here he gives us the low-down on the demanding life of a flying coastguard.

As I said, the real motto of the Coast Guard is, “You have to go out. I almost jumped up in the theater to cry, “Bullshit!” If you had a helicopter enroute to a rescue hoist, if they had a chip light or not, there is no way ANY Coast Guard C-130 would abandon them. Consequently, the Coast Guard passed a bunch of regulations saying that if the weather conditions exceeded certain parameters that the mission had to be aborted and the aircraft or ship returned to base. I couldn’t convince them that the new units were under warranty and unlikely to fail and that we needed them for critical navigation in Central America. We had a flight director, but the LORAN and Omega navigation systems had been decommissioned in anticipation of upcoming “Satnav” (GPS) but there were not yet satellites enough to make the system work so as we primarily worked in the Caribbean and Central America, we used ADF navaids for some circumstances. I took the controls, and said, “I have the aircraft. The sinking vessel had to shut down its main engines as the flooding rose to the air intakes and due to the rising water in her engine room was about to have to shut down her auxiliary engines that powered the dewatering pumps. In the wild turbulence the wing would drop on one side and you’d see it touch the water, or thought you did, but it must have cleared by a matter of inches because if you dug a wing tip in the water the aircraft would instantly cartwheel and you be dead. If we had the ready aircraft fueled for a training mission and were scrambled for emergency search and rescue, sometimes we had to hurriedly top up the fuel. When I gave new crewmembers a tour of the C-130 I would point to the forward bulkhead of the cargo compartment, upon which were hanging the two parachutes and a full-sized fire axe. Cockpit comfort – most C-130s have a large air conditioner in the cargo compartment and a small air conditioner for the flight deck. My particular orders read, “upon designation as a Naval Aviator, you are hereby co-designated a Coast Guard aviator.” I suspect it is the same for Marine aviators so that in wartime, when the Coast Guard used to be a part of the Navy (maybe still will be) all Coast Guard pilots are current naval aviators and can be plunked into Navy cockpits where needed.