The Hand-Me-Down Helo Solution

The Coast Guard is stretched thin, pulled 11 different ways by its 11 statutory missions. However, one of the biggest bumps in the road is the material state of its platforms.

The Coast Guard has seen multiple service-life extensions for several of its most vital platforms. Coast Guard men and women get underway on 60-year-old cutters and airborne in aircraft with more than 20,000 flight hours. Chronic maintenance and supply issues result in more and more down time across the fleet. One of the most urgent needs is to ease the demands on the aging MH-65 Dolphins.

The Venerable Dolphin

Initially rolled out in the late 1980s with an airframe service life of 20,000 hours, the MH-65 has gone under the knife to keep it in service, with several different segment upgrades to improve its capabilities and keep it mission capable. The most recent service-life extension project (SLEP) will bring the total hours per airframe to 30,000.¹ This will provide a 50 percent extension in service life, adding 16 years—but it is just tiding the service over and avoiding the inevitable.

Out of production since 2018 and with a comparatively small user base, the Dolphin is facing a lack of material suppliers, and maintenance requirements are becoming a growing issue. Current supply shortages and resultant decreases in allowable flight hours could affect the Coast Guard’s ability to accomplish its missions.

Continuing on the current path is just applying Band-Aid after Band-Aid. A better answer would be to convert more hand-me-down SH-60 Seahawks from our big brother, the Navy, to MH-60 Jayhawks.

The MH-60 is larger than the Coast Guard’s MH-65, and it will take work to operationalize it with the current cutter fleet. It will be a slow process, but it is a necessary one that needs to begin immediately. The Future Vertical Lift Program is still lumbering its way through the Department of Defense, and any solutions are more than a decade away—if luck holds. While the most recent SLEP has the MH-65s slated to fly until 2035–39, and while the service might be able to keep them airborne that long, waiting for the Future Vertical Lift Program is not a reliable plan. Large contracts are not known for on-time or on-budget delivery, and the Coast Guard needs both a timely and budget-friendly replacement for its Dolphins.

For the Coast Guard to get through the next decade or more with a fleet of operational aircraft, it needs to make some changes—and quickly. The faster it can purchase additional SH-60s from the Navy, the quicker it can begin to convert them to meet its needs.

Currently, the MH-60 will not fit on any of the old medium-endurance cutters and therefore will need to be modified with a blade-folding kit to be deployable across the fleet. The blade-folding kit also will be needed to hangar these aircraft at facilities that currently are equipped with the smaller MH-65. In turn, however, the MH-60 will offer longer endurance and increased capacity to bring survivors on board in search-and-rescue cases.

The Coast Guard needs to be flexible, but that should not mean having to work only with what it currently has on hand. While it has done this for decades, and it gets the job done, doing so ultimately will mean either doing the mission with an unsafe asset or not being able to complete the mission at all. The service needs to field more SH-60s from the Navy, as holding out for the results of the Future Vertical Lift Program is a long-term solution to a near-term problem.

Thank You, Big Brother

For the Coast Guard, the best way forward is to lean into what the Navy has to offer. The Coast Guard is adept at maintaining and taking care of the assets it has, partially out of necessity. If it can replace its fleet of MH-65 Dolphins with remanufactured SH-60 Seahawks, it can keep them in service for decades to come and be ahead of where it had planned to be.