Even before it became the Coast Guard, one of the service’s predecessor organizations was fostering the development of aviation in the United States. In 1900, Ohio’s Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, began experiments with gliders at Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s outer banks. The locale was useful for the tests because of its terrain and winds. Also, fortuitously, it was only a mile or so from the Kill Devil Hills Life Saving Station. Surfmen from the station provided logistic help for the brothers, both with the gliders and with the first powered flight on 17 December 1903. One of the lifesavers, John Daniels, took the only photo of that 1903 flight.
Within the next ten years, both the Navy and Army had acquired airplanes and begun developing uses for them. Aircraft moved into combat during World War I. In 1915, the Life Saving Service merged with the government’s Revenue Cutter Service to form the Coast Guard, the name by which the service has been known ever since. On 29 August 1916, a century ago this month, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act to establish an Aerial Coastal Patrol, but even before that law went into effect, the Coast Guard had sent two candidates for training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. In March 1917, Third Lieutenant Elmer Stone received his wings as naval aviator number 38 and the first in the Coast Guard. Two years later, flying along with Navy cohorts, Stone was the pilot part of the crew of the NC-4, the first airplane to fly across the Atlantic.
For the progenitors of the Coast Guard, the missions were law enforcement and rescuing those in peril on the sea. The initial tools of the trade were revenue cutters and surfboats. All these years later, the missions remain essentially the same, with many more added. The tools have grown ever more capable and sophisticated as technology has evolved. The addition of aviation has been a great benefit because of airplanes’ greater speed and range compared to surface vessels.
Aircraft are able to cover vast areas in response to distress calls, to drop lifesaving equipment, to hover over endangered craft and pluck people from danger. They also are able to coach surface ships and boats to locations. In the wake of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, international maritime powers instituted an iceberg patrol to prevent a repeat of that disaster. Aircraft—both manned and unmanned—can serve as scouts for the work of icebreakers, operating ahead to see which paths might be the most likely. They have aided in the exploration of both the Arctic and the Antarctic.
During World War II, the Coast Guard transferred for the duration from the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department to the Navy Department. In some ways, personnel were interchangeable, with some Navy ships operated by Coast Guard crews. The service fulfilled its mission of guarding the homeland coast with antisubmarine patrols that abetted the work of the Navy. Again, the range of aircraft allowed them to look for German U-boats offshore. And, under the leadership of then-Commander Frank Erickson, the service did pioneering work in the use of helicopters.
One of the Coast Guard officers who served in a Navy ship from 1943 to 1945 was Ensign Owen W. Siler. After he graduated from the Coast Guard Academy, Siler was in the crew of the attack transport Hunter Liggett (APA-14). Following the war, he took flight training at Pensacola and Corpus Christi to qualify as a naval aviator. In the late 1950s, he was aide and personal pilot for the Commandant, Admiral Alfred Richmond. Something must have rubbed off. After Siler commanded Coast Guard air stations in Florida and Texas and a Coast Guard district, he himself served as Commandant from 1974 to 1978.
The law-enforcement mission originated with the establishment in August 1790 of the Revenue Marine—later renamed the Revenue Cutter Service. The new service aimed to prevent smuggling that would avoid the customs duties. Clearly the motivation was revenue. Before independence the coloies had encouraged smuggling to avoid paying taxes to Britain. The young nation needed income, and it sought to obtain it through tariffs. With the nation’s adoption of Prohibition in January 1920, the Coast Guard was empowered to intercept rumrunners. In the early years of enforcement, the service used patrol boats and even operated a number of former Navy four-stack destroyers. The Coast Guard was able to step up its game with the passage in 1926 of a congressional appropriation to acquire aircraft for the mission. Among the applications were searching at sea for smuggling craft and machine-gunning cases of liquor that had been dumped overboard.
In 1933, the national experiment in Prohibition ended, but the Coast Guard’s antismuggling work has continued. In more recent years, the service has had a highly visible role in a modern counterpart, the seemingly unending war on drug smuggling. Aircraft, both land-based and sea-based, have extended the reach of those looking for vessels carrying illicit cargo. The Navy is prevented from having a domestic law-enforcement role, so Coast Guard law-enforcement detachments ride Navy ships to arrest the crooks and seize their cargoes. Armed Coast Guard helicopters have performed a role somewhat analogous to the 1920s planes that fired at floating whiskey, this time by a combination of warning shots and disabling shots against fast boats with drugs on board.
The service now comprises 22 air stations and more than 200 aircraft—fixed-wing and rotary. The missions Coast Guard aviation undertakes on behalf of the nation go back many years. Now, however, the sky no longer is the limit. Two retired Coast Guard aviators, Commander Bruce Melnick and Captain Daniel Burbank, are descendants in a way of Elmer Stone. They have truly gone above and beyond—as astronauts.