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Civil Air Patrol Part One - USAF Auxiliary By Tony Vallillo Flight simmers who delved into the missions section of FSX may have noticed one mission that featured a red white and blue Maule, called CAP Search and Rescue. The task at hand was to locate, and if you had some real brass ones land and rescue, a downed flier in the mountains. Finding the target was not terribly difficult, but it took me a few tries before I was able to land the Maule on that tiny plateau, pick up the downed airman and take off again. For most of you it was probably just another imaginary mission among the many offerings within FSX, but some of you may have wondered just what CAP is. CAP stands for Civil Air Patrol, the civilian volunteer auxiliary of the US Air Force. The organization has existed since the early days of WWII, and today has many thousands of volunteers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. We operate over 500 Cessna airplanes; we are, in fact, the largest operator of Cessna aircraft in the world. I say "we" because since 2007 I have been a CAP member myself, and after my retirement from American Airlines in 2008 just about all of my flying was and is done on behalf of my alma mater's auxiliary. My involvement in CAP actually dates from the early 1980's, when I joined as a senior member during my son's tenure as a cadet. This is actually how most of our adult members get involved, in part because CAP is a much better kept secret than it should be. Like most members, when my son went on to other pursuits I let my membership lapse, but I came upon CAP again in early 2007 when a new squadron was established in the city near which I lived. By this time my airline retirement was on the horizon, and it seemed like CAP would be a good post retirement activity -- I could keep flying with a purpose greater than the mere pursuit of a full stomach, albeit in Cessnas instead of Boeings, and also perhaps contribute to the interest of youth in aviation through the cadet program. The timing was perfect, because one year later I had to pull the trigger on retirement early (rather than lose a not insignificant slice of my pension) and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands -- time that would ordinarily have been spent in the company of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Now we all know that She is intolerant of my normal inclination to idleness when not actually flying, and She had gotten used to me being out of the house completely for days at a time each week. It may come as a surprise to you, but spousal homicide is the principle cause of mortality in retired airline pilots (!), who never fail to attempt to prolong their command by trying to take over the kitchen! So at least in a tongue-in-cheek sense CAP has kept me alive for nearly a decade now! CAP has a long history, having been around longer than I have been. It came into being around the time of Pearl Harbor, in an effort spearheaded by well known pilot and journalist Gill Robb Wilson, and the Mayor of New York (also a pilot) Fiorello LaGuardia. Wilson, in particular, was interested in finding ways to use civil aviation as part of the war effort, instead of grounding it altogether, which was one of the proposals floating around at the time. Using volunteer pilots flying their own airplanes, CAP undertook many missions during the war years, including courier missions, border patrols, and the best known mission -- anti submarine patrols along the coasts. Early in the US involvement in WWII, German submarines were a terrible threat to maritime traffic, and it was possible to watch from the shore as ships were attacked and sunk. CAP began flying anti-submarine patrols, sometimes armed with small bombs. Although the stories of CAP airplanes actually sinking submarines with those bombs are apocryphal, a number were sunk by military aircraft summoned by the CAP pilots on patrol. After the war, when the USAF was established as a separate service, the CAP was made the official auxiliary of the Air Force, and given principal responsibility for the conduct of inland search and rescue flying, especially searches for downed airplanes. This was a lively business in the immediate postwar years, and is still one of our principal missions. Additionally, a cadet program was established which is also still going strong. Young people ages 12-21 can participate, and be involved in all manner of leadership training and aviation and technology oriented activities, including learning to fly. In the modern age, CAP has been tasked with many new missions, like disaster relief (mainly aerial photography for damage assessment and resource management). There are also special missions of assistance to the military -- playing target for air defense fighters, escorting actual drones to and from restricted areas, and even simulating drones in large scale military exercises. With the advent of the 406 MHz locator beacon there is a bit less demand in some areas for search and rescue of downed pilots, but we still see those missions occasionally. CAP can be an ideal activity for a flight simulator enthusiast, because you can get hands-on involved in aviation even if you are not a pilot. There are a number of aircrew positions in CAP -- in addition to pilot there are Scanner (the crewmember who actually looks for the target), Observer (the right seat occupant who coordinates with the ground assets of CAP using a special radio) and aerial photographer (who is often also a scanner and/or observer). And if you are a pilot, you can avail yourself of the excellent training opportunities in CAP to learn search pattern flying, aerial photography flying, and just standardized disciplined flying in general. If this is beginning to sound a bit like a recruiting pitch, well I hope it is! Flying in CAP is a lot like flying in the Air Force, leaving aside the method of propulsion. The procedures are standardized, and the expectation for a high level of professionalism is emphasized. Search patterns can be flown with great accuracy using modern GPS equipment, and we train and practice to do just that. We take proficiency check rides every year, and we have small and large scale exercises within which to learn and practice, just like in the Air Force. The AF closely supervises our activities; indeed, within the last two years CAP has officially been designated a part of the Total Force, alongside the active duty, the reserves and the Air National Guard. We do wear uniforms, although members can choose from either the Air Force style (essentially a USAF uniform with slightly different insignia) or the more casual corporate uniform (one popular variant of which is simply grey slacks with a blue CAP polo shirt and an optional black leather flight jacket). In earlier times CAP used mostly member owned airplanes, augmented with Air Force surplus airplanes (nothing as sexy as a P-51, of course; in fact, the hottest of them were a number of Beech T-34's from back when the AF used that airplane as a primary trainer). Nowadays we use exclusively CAP owned airplanes, purchased by the Air Force and assigned to CAP, which is actually a non-profit corporation for financial purposes. As I said before we have somewhere around 535 Cessna single engine airplanes, ranging from 172's to 206's, along with 18 Gippsland GA-8 Airvans. More about the latter in part 2. Our Cessnas range in age from mid 1980's to brand new. All of the new ones, of course, feature some variant of the Garmin G-1000 integrated glass cockpit, and more of those are showing up every month. The G-1000 is a real delight for an ex-airline pilot like myself, since it has many of the features of the more recent Boeings and Airbuses -- things like moving map Multi Function Displays, NEXRAD radar, XM Weather, an autopilot with Flight Level Change and VNav functions, and so on. Indeed, were it not for CAP, I would have virtually no opportunities to experience modern integrated displays in small planes. In addition to the new airplanes, many of our older airplanes, particularly the 172's, are being refurbished and in the process upgraded to modern avionics like the Aspen or the Garmin G-500. And not only are the airplanes well equipped, but they are also well maintained, which can be a challenge considering that some wings fly each of their airplanes over 300 hours per year! So just what, you may ask, is flying in CAP like? What does it entail, and how does one prepare oneself for the mission oriented aspects of it? It all starts with a Private Pilot or higher FAA license, of course. Membership application in CAP is initiated online, like so much else in the modern world (http://www.gocivilairpatrol.com/). An early step is to locate your local squadron, which is often found on an airport nearby. Visit on a meeting night (meetings are typically weekly in the early evening, often between 7 and 9 pm.) and meet the local membership. Most squadrons will have an officer who will work with you to get you through the application process. Once you are a member, and have acquired at least one of the various uniforms that CAP uses, you can arrange with one of the CAP flight instructors in your wing for whatever introductory practice you may need to prepare for the initial proficiency check (called a form 5 evaluation in CAP). A form 5 ride is, for all practical purposes, identical to an FAA Private Pilot checkride, and will involve cross country procedures, steep turns, slow flight and stalls, emergency procedures and forced landing, ground reference maneuvers, some instrument flying, and various takeoffs and landings. It is much more than a typical FBO checkout, such as you might encounter when renting an airplane. As long as you know all about it going in, you will have no difficulty. A form 5 eval is administered to each CAP pilot once per year. Once you have qualified as a pilot in CAP, most of the subsequent steps will depend upon your logged PIC time. With 100 hours of PIC time, you are eligible to be appointed as a Transport Mission Pilot. This qualification, which involves no checkride, allows you to fly in missions and exercises in a purely transportation role; that is, flying from point A to point B hauling people or equipment. With 200 hours of PIC time you are eligible for several more qualifications -- Cadet Orientation Pilot, which allows you to fly cadets on their official orientation flights, and Mission Pilot, which involves most of the operations attendant to CAP's missions. Those operations would include search pattern flying, aerial photography flying, ELT search flying, and many more. A considerable amount of training goes into becoming a mission pilot, and there is a separate checkride involved, which is administered every two years. Cadet orientation flights are a lot of fun, and are similar in many ways to the rides given in the EAA Young Eagles Program. The O flight pilot introduces the cadet in the right seat to various aspects of airplane operations, and the cadet may take the controls when safely airborne, if he or she desires. There is a complete syllabus for the Orientation program, which involves each cadet getting five rides in the right seat, and as many as he or she wants in the back seats. Each flight has a particular emphasis; for example, the first ride is aimed toward introducing the controls and how they function to keep the airplane under control. Other rides introduce flight instruments, the different speeds of flight, weather and so on. An orientation pilot need not be a CFI, nor are the flights considered to be instructional even if flown by a CFI. Preparation for the mission pilot qualification is more involved and there is a complete syllabus for the instruction. Some pilots take the training at their local wing, often during exercises that are set up for that purpose. Others attend one of the several major Mission Aircrew Schools that CAP operates around the country each year. My alma mater is the National Emergency Services Academy, held each summer in mid-July at Columbus, Indiana. This is a week-long program which encompasses many hours of classroom work and a goodly amount of flying. The Mission Aircrew School at NESA offers programs for qualification as Scanner, Photographer, Observer and Pilot. The size and tempo of this Academy is similar to that of a large scale mission, like the Steve Fossett search some years ago, and the quality of instruction is superb. Graduates, like those of the Navy's Top Gun program, are recruited to return as instructors, and also to teach what they have learned back at their local wing and squadron. I have been going back as an IP each year since I attended as a student, and NESA is a cornerstone of my summer CAP activities. Mission flying involves the execution of a variety of search patterns, which were developed to ensure that a given area would be thoroughly searched or photographed. Long ago, it was determined that a standardized pattern would yield better search results than merely wandering around in the search area, and so it was that our search patterns were created. The patterns we fly are the grid (often called parallel line) search, the creeping line search, the route search, the expanding square search and the sector search. Taking them in the order that an incident commander might order them, the first likely response to a missing airplane report would be a route search along the presumed route of flight. In earlier times this might have been more involved, perhaps following ground references such as railroads or highways; but nowadays, with the ubiquity of GPS equipment, the presumed route is usually direct from the departure airport to the destination airport, particularly if the flight in question was conducted under VFR. The route search consists of flying the presumed route back and forth with increasing offsets from the actual course line as the GPS draws it. Usually the first offsets are one half mile on either side of the centerline, and for each subsequent trip back and forth the offset is increased by that same one half mile, leading to an evolution of one round trip at half a mile, another at one mile either side, another at 1.5, and so on. While this visual search is going on down low (all visual searches are conducted at 1000 feet AGL) another airplane is likely flying higher and faster along the route centerline, listening on its electronic direction finder for the signal sent out by an ELT. Often this ELT route search, sometimes called the "hasty search", is the first sortie sent out, since it requires no planning other than merely knowing the origin and destination of the flight in question (sometimes, as in the case of the Steve Fossett search, the destination is not really known. But a hasty search can still be dispatched to listen for a beacon signal). If the initial route searches turn up nothing, which is often the case, a closer inspection of the landscape is in order. The planners at the incident command post (if one has been set up by this point) will, in the absence of any further information as to the possible location of the downed airplane, probably want a more detailed search of the presumed route. This is done by utilizing the creeping line search. A creeping line search investigates the area along a route, but does so by flying a series of ladder-like legs across, not along, the presumed line of flight. These crossbar type legs are often flown out to a distance of three miles from the route centerline, and they snake back and forth across the route, not unlike an exaggerated series of S turns across a road. This pattern provides considerably greater coverage of a route, but takes far longer than the simple route search to accomplish. In fact, if the presumed route is long, it is usually broken up into segments of around 10nm and a search airplane is assigned to each segment, all flying more or less simultaneously. While all of this is going on, the planners at the incident command post (ICP) are soliciting clues as to the whereabouts of the airplane in question, from sources like the FAA, the police along the route, and often the public. If a clue comes in it can often be localized to a single position, more or less. In this case, it is time to employ one of the point-based search patterns; the expanding square or the sector search. Both of these concentrate the eyeballs on a particular area, albeit in different ways. If the reported position is vague and not definitely established, the expanding square is the search of choice. This pattern begins on a point, and involves flying around that point at increasing distances. It is essentially a squared-off outward spiral, typically flown with right turns with the point of interest always on the inside of the turn. This is done so that two sets of eyes (the observer in the right front seat and the scanner, located for this evolution in the right rear seat) are always on the area of interest. The pattern is most often flown at distances of one mile initially, from the center point, and it increments outward in one mile intervals each time a complete circumnavigation of the center point is accomplished. The area searched starts out at the assumed point but proceeds outward farther and farther from that point. Typically, a search like this would proceed out to around 5 miles from the original point. On the other hand, if the probability of the target being pretty much right at a given point is high, the sector search is your best bet. This pattern looks like a pie, cut up in segments, with the airplane flying over the center point many times, from different angles. This saturates the point-in-question with eyeballs and the different angles allow for many sighting possibilities, particularly in forested areas where trees block the view of the ground. An example of a situation where a sector search would be immediately commenced would be the end-game of an electronic direction finder ELT search. We would actually continue to use the DF gear to fly over the same point again and again, from different angles, both to establish the location of the beacon and also to allow for visual searching. We would be doing a sector search. Sometimes, if a beacon signal is being heard, we simply go looking for it with our electronic gear. There are two types of DF equipment -- the older L-Tronics gear, which uses a needle similar to a tiny VOR course indicator, and lets us know if the signal is coming from left or right, and the more modern Becker unit which has a video screen display with a direction indicator that works somewhat like an ADF and gives us the relative bearing to the signal. Both types work well, although an ELT signal is not particularly strong to begin with, and it may be even weaker after a crash, especially after a day or two has gone by. ELT signals are line of sight, of course, but they can be attenuated by things in the vicinity like trees or buildings, as well as annoyingly reflected by metal structures or sometimes large geological formations like cliffs and canyons. ELT searches are as much an art as a procedure, and more's the pity that we get relatively few of them these days, since that means we have less opportunity to keep the skills sharp. Fortunately, we are possessed of a number of training beacons that broadcast the same signal, but on a different frequency. This is how we practice, and perform ELT searches on the mission pilot evaluation flights. Either of the direction finders would allow us to more or less home in on the ELT signal, and provide indication of station passage when we overflew it. Electronic searches are usually begun at higher altitudes, so that we can acquire the signal. Then we can fly progressively lower as we approach it, to make the search more precise, as well as to allow visual acquisition of the target. In addition to the DF equipment we usually also listen to the beacon on one of our Comm radios (for the older 121.5 beacons). This allows us to determine our proximity to the source, since the signal will get louder as we approach it. If the DF unit is not working we can use older, more archaic methods with the Comm radio that involve analyzing the signal strength or volume to come up with data that can be plotted on a chart to show the probable location of the signal source. Once we have done this we simply proceed to that point and begin one of the point based search patterns. Another method of DF-ing a signal without the DF equipment involves making a steep turn over an identifiable point on the ground while listening to the ELT on the Comm radio. In a steep turn, around 45 degrees of bank or more, the wing will actually block the beacon signal when it comes between the antenna and the signal source. That results in a noticeable "null" in the ELT signal. At that moment, the signal is in the direction of the wing that blocks the antenna. If the antenna is on top of the wing, the signal is in the direction of the high wing, 90 degrees off the nose of the airplane. A quick check of the directional gyro will give us the magnetic bearing, which can be plotted on a sectional using the point you are flying over in the turn as the origin of the bearing. Doing this two or more times over points on the ground separated by around 5-10 miles will yield a probable location where the plotted lines cross. You can do all of this on your PC based simulator. In fact, I use MSFS when I teach these procedures at NESA and the other training sessions. You can do the search patterns using only the sim, without any add-ons, although for eye candy realism you may want to download one of the CAP repaints that are available for some of the Cessnas, both stock and add-on. We fly the visual search patterns using information from the GPS. The data we use are track, cross-track, and distance. All of the patterns are flown using various combinations of these three bits of data. For the grid search we use all three -- track is always used to steer the airplane over the exact course over the ground that you need, cross-track becomes the value we use for the centerline of our desired path over the ground, and distance marks the beginning and end of each leg of the pattern. The expanding square is flown using track, distance for the first turn of the pattern, and cross-track for both centerline and end points for all subsequent legs. The creeping line uses distance as centerline, cross-track for end points of the legs, and as always track to control the path over the ground. Sector searches use cross-track (or CDI centered) as centerline, and distance as end points. All of the patterns take advantage of the OBS feature of most GPS's, which allows the course to be adjusted like the desired radial of a VOR. All of the big three Electronic Flight Bag providers (ForeFlight, WingX Pro and Garmin pilot) now have the capability to actually construct and draw these search patterns based upon data you enter, such as the type of pattern and the point where it starts. So too does the G-1000, provided the SAR feature has been activated. A few of our airplanes still have the GX-55 GPS, and this was the first unit to feature the ability to construct and draw CAP search patterns. So there are many ways to skin the SAR cat! In MSFS we also have a terrific add-on that allows you to do much more by way of simulating CAP search operations. Published by Abacus Software, it is titled CAP Search and Rescue, and it is available for both FS2004 and FSX. This package has a number of features: A GPS that has a readout of latitude and longitude, allowing for several of the patterns (grid and expanding square) to be flown by direct reference to lat/long numbers Simplified but accurate simulations of both the L-Tronics and Becker DF units The ability to place an ELT signal anywhere on the scenery, which will be displayed on the DF The ability to also place on the scenery, at the same point as the ELT signal, a visual representation, in scale, of a target. There are around a dozen or so possible targets, ranging from a crashed 747 to a crashed light airplane, and also people, cars, trucks, signal flares, signal fires, and some others. These appear on the scenery in scale, and are often surprisingly difficult to find, just like in the real world! Using the Abacus package, a pilot or even a scanner trainee can get a lot of valuable practice. We in CAP are starting to use simulation in this way, and the benefits are substantial. Abacus even offers a discount for CAP members. You can look online to find some of the CAP search manuals, particularly the Operational Mission Inflight Guide. These are not classified, and you can get some good insights into how to actually fly the various patterns. In recent years CAP has been tasked with new responsibilities, especially aerial photography, most often in support of some kind of disaster relief like a hurricane or flooding or the like. As we go forward this will be a bigger part of our mission, because the 121.5 beacons are no longer monitored by the satellite, leaving no way for the Air Force Rescue and Coordination Center (AFRCC) to know that a signal is being broadcast unless an airplane aloft or on the ground happens to be listening on 121.5. Airliners often do just this on their second VHF radio, so we do occasionally get tasked to go find an ELT that is broadcasting. In the vast majority of instances the beacon has started transmitting for some reason other than a crash -- a hard landing perhaps, or a fault in the unit. Beacon searches usually end up in one of two areas -- an airport or a junkyard, since a major reason for a unit to start transmitting is improper removal and disposal. Similar beacons also exist on boats, and marinas are another popular terminus for ELT searches. But the rise of the 406 MHz beacon, coupled with its internal GPS, means that a transmitting beacon now broadcasts its exact location, obviating the need to actually search for it. So it is to the aerial photo missions that we turn next, because in the last few months the US and its territories have been hit with several major hurricanes, causing untold damage and destruction across large areas. This is what we can do to help out when the time comes for the coach to put us into the big game! In part two of Civil Air Patrol you can go along with us on a major mission, and experience the thrill of long distance overwater flying with but a single engine, a task I once thought I would never undertake... Stay tuned! Tony Vallillo www.gocivilairpatrol.com Also by Tony Vallillo: CAP Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria Recovery Mission