U.S. Coast Guard Aviation, Facing Crisis, Rethinks Strategy

Trouble with the U.S. Coast Guard’s emblematic fleet of 135 lifesaving, smuggler-hunting and migrant-finding helicopters is forcing the Coast Guard aviation to update the Service’s vision for their fleet of around 200 patrol aircraft and helicopters.

The rethink, coming after years of Forbes.com coverage of the Coast Guard’s struggle with a broken aviation portfolio, is a welcome development. The last straw, an abrupt imposition of flight hour restrictions upon the Coast Guard’s workhorse MH-60T “Jayhawk” medium-range recovery helicopters, reported in August by Forbes, is finally forcing the Coast Guard to forge a new set of strategic goals and refresh an operational template that hasn’t changed much since the bad old days of the failed Deepwater procurement effort. In the air—if it chooses and the Department of Homeland Security allows—the Coast Guard can finally move to address America’s swiftly-changing strategic priorities in the maritime.

The Coast Guard needs to move fast. The crisis in the Coast Guard’s rotary wing community not going away. As of early December, almost 18 percent of the Coast Guard’s 45-strong MH-60T “Jayhawk” medium range recovery fleet is out of service. Eight helicopters with over 19,000 flight hours are, as of now, permanently grounded.

It is not a good look for the future rotary-wing mainstay of the Coast Guard. If the flight restrictions remain, the Coast Guard aviation—led by the hard-used Jayhawks—will run into serious peril. By late 2023, over 90 percent of the Coast Guard’s MH-60T helicopters were operating with more 16,000 flight hours, so, without a rollback to the Coast Guard’s original 20,000 flight hour target, several more Coast Guard Jayhawks are set to bump up against the new 19,000 flight hour limitation.

The flight hour restrictions have jolted the service. In a real-world sense, a cut of a thousand hours clips almost two years of service from each Jayhawk. And the likelihood that the big helicopters will never be able to run beyond 20,000 hours—matching the incredible 30,000 hours the Coast Guard is forcing out of their smaller MH-65E Dolphin helicopters—is shaking the Coast Guard’s Headquarter’s dogged support for an aviation recapitalization strategy that has, of late, faced a steady drumbeat of delay and several harsh doses of reality.

Coast Guard leadership is finally showing signs of throwing in the towel and recognizing hard truths. A new aviation strategy is under development. In a December 10th email, a Coast Guard spokesperson wrote, “We are developing a comprehensive strategy for the future of Coast Guard Aviation,” that “will outline aircraft transitions across our rotary and fixed-wing fleets, as well as the potential development of an uncrewed fleet.”

It is great to hear that the Coast Guard is finally rethinking several tired operational assumptions. Though a draft strategy is circulating, the Coast Guard would not make the document available for review. Though expectations are low and industry observers are certainly skeptical that the Coast Guard, reacting hurriedly in the face of an imminent crisis, will properly account for the Service’s increased relevance, excitement is spreading. There is finally some hope that the penny-pinching maritime border security service may start demanding the money this worthy service needs to operate.

Coast Guard Aviation Strategy Crashed And Burned:

Eight helicopters may not seem like much, but they are the reason why the Coast Guard is finally taking their aviation problems seriously. The operational restrictions on the MH-60T fleet are crushing the Coast Guard’s complex, decades-long effort to move away from the small MH-65E Dolphin helicopter, and there’s no way to obfuscate the problem or to simply “kick the can” for two years, leaving the issue for the next set of newly-promoted Coast Guard aviation admirals.

A single-helicopter Coast Guard makes sense. Ideally, the Coast Guard, by flying a single platform—the larger MH-60T Jayhawk-could slash training and sustainment costs. The larger, more capable helicopter could take on some tougher missions.

But getting there—executing the strategy—has been an almost an insurmountable challenge. An abrupt transition to a single-helicopter fleet, flying newly-built helicopters, would break the Coast Guard’s meagre $13 billion budget. Instead, the always-cost-conscious Coast Guard hammered out a complex recapitalization scheme so miserly that it makes even the most rabid of Washington D.C.’s bargain-hunters blush.

The plan looks good on PowerPoint. To stretch out the transition costs, the Coast Guard focused on eking every possible hour out of their fleet of 90 ancient Airbus MH-65E Dolphin helicopters, buying time to gradually refresh and expand their existing fleet of big MH-60T choppers. No effort was spared to be a good steward of the taxpayer’s funding.

In reality, the low-cost effort has been a demoralizing failure. To work, the Coast Guard is forcing the Service’s Dolphins to fly an eye-popping total of at least 30,000 hours of flight time (To compare, the Navy retires their helicopters after 12,000 hours). As the aging Dolphins were nursed towards record-breaking operational limits, they would, according to the original plan, be replaced by refitted and modernized Jayhawks—a low-cost fleet largely sourced from retired Navy cast-offs.

All these efforts have moved far more slowly than expected, consuming what little operational margins Coast Guard aviation had to maneuver.

And now, with the unexpected cut of a thousand operational hours from the MH-60Ts, the Coast Guard is discovering that it has no margin left. The Coast Guard’s commitment to budgetary efficiency is literally running their rotary wing fleet into the ground. And, adding insult to injury, the original cost-saving calculus doesn’t add up anymore.

For taxpayers, the Coast Guard’s prudent budgetary stewardship has been an amazing thing. Heeding the call to “do more with less,” the Coast Guard has wrung every possible hour out of their helicopter fleet, but now, without a quick and massive capability boost, the Coast Guard has little choice but to either fly potentially unsafe aircraft or to refuse missions, hoarding what few flight hours the Coast Guard helicopter fleet still has left.

Coast Guard Aviation Needs a Real Strategy Now

As the Coast Guard’s rotary wing fleet crumbles, other warts are starting to pop up.

In retrospect, the Coast Guard’s aviation planning was saddled with optimistic assumptions about Coast Guard base capabilities, base consolidation expectations and rosy operational cost projections. These savings didn’t pan out the way planners expected. Coast Guard leaders, overly committed to their ideas, made things worse by digging in. and refusing to consider the pesky back-office things required to fully implement the Coast Guard’s shift to a bigger and more complex helicopter.

The service compounded the Service’s long-term risk by failing to fully engage in the Pentagon’s Future Vertical Lift Program, and working to drive the Department of Defense to appreciate the Coast Guard’s unique rotary lift requirements. And, with the Pentagon moving away from conventional helicopters, the Coast Guard has been abandoned, left to look out for its own aviation needs, without help from their better-funded military partners.

Making things worse, the Coast Guard’s bare-bones recapitalization effort went forward with no real plan to manage the inevitable cascade of programmatic delays. Coast Guard aviation leadership, enjoying a terminal two-year appointment before retiring from the Service entirely, were poorly equipped to pivot from the day-to-day business of meeting short-term operational targets into the tough business of grappling with strategic challenges.

Years of emphasizing short-term availability over hammering out long-term, realistic solutions have decimated Coast Guard aviation. In aviation, Coast Guard Admirals haven’t done a particularly great job of setting their junior leaders up for success. They’re getting sacrificed. As the fleet grew into an array of older and hard-used aircraft, blame for failures, accidents and catastrophes have regularly been pushed down onto the Coast Guard’s already stressed set of mid-career aviators and maintainers.

Complicating matters, the Coast Guard also got stuck in an operational rut. To observers, it was obvious Coast Guard leaders expected their MH-60T fleet of Jayhawks to go beyond 20,000 flight hours. The Coast Guard expected to push the components on their heavily-used choppers to the raggedy edge of their “service life” engineering analyses and beyond—employing the same operational template as the Service’s hard-used MH-65E Dolphins.

But the big and robust Jayhawk helicopter is no Dolphin. With so many Blackhawks in service for other customers, the Coast Guard lacks leverage over the original manufacturer. It cannot force Lockheed to cater to the Coast Guard’s unrealistic service life expectations. And, as a heavier and more complex platform, the wear and tear—and the resulting maintenance load and additional operational risks—are proving a heavy lift for the Coast Guard to handle.

Rather than face a daily struggle of trading broken parts and getting aged craft into the air, flight crews—that are neither growing nor getting the support they need to take on their ever-increasing maintenance load—are voting with their feet. Frustrated Coast Guard aviation ratings are walking away from retention bonuses of between $35,000 to $50,000 a year.

The past several years has been a tough road for Coast Guard aviators. For decades, the Coast Guard has done a great job of stretching the taxpayer dollar, and, now that the Coast Guard is rethinking their fleet mix and their operational approaches to aviation, it is time for the service to get rewarded for their troubles. But to do that, the Coast Guard needs to buck up, build, and then advocate for an aviation strategy that makes few, if any, compromises.

Without a cash infusion for new helicopters, new patrol aircraft and unmanned gear, the choice before the Coast Guard is stark. Either Coast Guard aviators can get about the business of being maritime life-savers and elite maritime border security hunters—stalking hostile Russians, encroaching Chinese fleets and migrant armadas—or they can become a sad-sack set of low-budget maintainers, focused solely on nursing tired aircraft and managing a jumble of oft-broken and oft-cannibalized subsystems into some semblance of mission readiness.

The bright red Coast Guard helicopters and aircraft are emblematic of America’s life-saving maritime law enforcement service. It is time for the Administration, Congress and the rest of DHS to award America’s hardest-run rotary wing fleet and the rest of Coast Guard aviation with the respect—and funding—it deserves.