Im just curious sardaddy why do you say being a cg helo pilot is the best gig in the military?
Simply because it is the truth. As I said earlier, I served in the Army for 10 years before going to the Coast Guard and I have worked with pilots from other services so I am not making the comment from a plastic bubble.
We get to do our mission every day and our missions are very diverse. I could be doing a law enforcement flight one day, Search and Rescue the next, and yet another mission the next. In fact, I could end up doing multiple missions in one flight on a moments notice. We do our mission whether we are at home in the US or when deployed abroad to areas around the world including SE Asia. Our deployments are usually about two months and do not occur that often. Some do last a little longer, about six months, but they are pretty rare. The worst permanent duty station in most people's opinion is Puerto Rico.
We are operational all the time. We can change from training to rescue during a single flight no matter where we are. Ask a pilot in any other service if they are in the same state of readiness in garrison as when they are in theatre.
But the best part is really the autonomy we have as pilots in the Coast Guard. As a pilot in the Army, I was required to submit a flight plan stating exactly what I would be doing on each flight. Such as, "I will be doing tactical training in areas A, B, and C that will include NOE flying and hover work followed by conducting two instrument approaches into the airfield." I would then complete an indepth risk matrix that would need to be signed by two people in my chain of command. Then I could go fly. Unless of course it was more than one aicraft. That would require an indepth prebrief before going as well.
In the Coast Guard, we are given a general mission and the Aircraft Commander then makes a decision on how to execute the mission effectively. The flight schedule is simply posted with the mission and executed. Since the command already approved it, the crew knows they are allowed to conduct the mission and verify the risk between themselves. So when it is time to fly, the pilot simply goes to maintenance, signs for the aircraft, briefs the crew and goes. No need to track down the chain of command to tell them what is about to happen.
If we are launched on a Search and Rescue case, we have to be airborne quickly so the mission usually goes like this: We get a call, we tell the watch stander to call our operations officer and tell him we are leaving and what the mission is. We do not need to wait for the commands approval. It is our decision. In some rare occasions, we might delay a bit and call our OPS boss ourselves if we think parts of the mission are beyond the norm and want some advice.
The Aircraft Commander is actually TRUSTED to evaluate and execute the mission properly. During Hurricane Katrina, one of my briefs was verbatim "Go out and do good things and we will see you when you get back." Again, ask a pilot from another service if that is the case on their missions
Besides all of that, nothing beats the feeling of being a part of a crew that just pulled someone into the cabin that would be dead had you not completed your mission.
I think being an aviator in any of the services is a good gig no matter what the airframe, I just think the CG, especially as a helo pilot is just better.
