The Coast Guard’s MH-65 Helicopter Fleet Is Headed For Trouble

The Coast Guard’s aging fleet of 98 Airbus MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are an integral part of the U.S. Coast Guard, handling most of the sea service’s toughest airborne missions. But with the Coast Guard’s hard-used MH-65 fleet facing a long, drawn-out path towards retirement, serious readiness and safety challenges are looming.  

Replacement helicopters will be slow to arrive. The U.S. Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Karl L. Schultz, says the Service is “looking fifteen or so years down the road at our rotary wing aviation program.” Unless the Coast Guard acts quickly to have their basic performance requirements folded into the Department of Defense’s Future Vertical Lift Initiative, a Coast Guard variant of whatever the Navy gets will likely take two decades—or more—to obtain and field. 

That is far too late to help the Dolphin fleet. In too many cases, operational MH-65 units are just trying to survive the day. 

To keep Coast Guard helicopters flying, the sea service is in an unenviable position of juggling contingencies and balancing scenarios. Ideally, over the next few years, the Coast Guard wants to shrink the Dolphin fleet, steadily swapping out aging MH-65 Dolphin helicopters for maritime-ready variants of Lockheed Martin’s big and robust MH-60 Blackhawk. 

To do this, the Coast Guard is growing their existing MH-60 fleet, either purchasing new Blackhawk hulls or obtaining retired Navy SH-60F or HH-60H Seahawk hulls. In a real win for the taxpayer, the “gently used” Navy helicopters get a service life extension while the Coast Guard transforms the hulls into their own marinized Blackhawk variant, the MH-60T Jayhawk.

But this process is not as simple as it sounds. Even though the Coast Guard is eager to “neck down” to a single-type MH-60-based helicopter fleet, the conversion process is going at agonizingly slow pace. Making matters worse, old Coast Guard infrastructure simply won’t let the MH-65 helicopters retire anytime soon.

At sea, the Coast Guard’s 27 aged mid-sized cutters cannot fully support the larger footprint of an MH-60 platform. Delays in getting the Coast Guard’s highly anticipated Offshore Patrol Cutter into service means the old cutters will remain in the fleet—and needing Dolphin helicopters—for years. Ashore, existing air stations and smaller satellite air facilities (Coast Guard Forward Operating Bases), optimized for the smaller MH-65s, will need to be closed, or modernized and updated to support the larger MH-60s—rebuilt with the ultimate goal of supporting the projected dimensions of the Pentagon’s Future Vertical Lift Program. 

Given those daunting operational, fiscal, and political constraints, the Coast Guard is resigned to keeping Dolphins in service for many more years. To do this, the service is modernizing the remaining MH-65s, boosting their service lives to an eye-popping 30,000 hours. 

Can’t Fly When There Are No Parts:

Aging and subject to both hard use and demanding readiness requirements, the Coast Guard helicopter fleet demands a lot of maintenance and a steady diet of spare parts. 

While both the Blackhawk and the Dolphins in the Coast Guard fleet are aging Cold War veterans, and while both Coast Guard helicopters have airframes that are approaching 20,000 hours of operation, the Coast Guard Blackhawks hold a pretty big maintenance advantage. For the Blackhawk, with some 4,000 produced, maintainers and spare parts are available all over the world. The same is not necessarily true for the MH-65 Dolphin. Out of production since 2018, and with a far smaller user-base, critical parts and maintenance specialists are hard to come by. And, as the Coast Guard shrinks and retires the Dolphin fleet, Dolphin maintainers will need retraining before they can move on to something else. 

With few users outside of the Coast Guard, the industrial base needed to keep Dolphin helicopters in the air is crumbling. As main gear boxes and other critical parts disappear, Coast Guard Dolphins are being cannibalized and re-cannibalized, only to be cannibalized again. 

Supplies are so short, a single necessary part can make the rounds between units multiple times. While this just-in-time” logistical support is a common practice in a Coast Guard struggling to meet tough operational requirements, advanced condition-based maintenance algorithms are breaking down, as the maintenance models are based around a more conventional operational picture, where one part stays on one hull. Complicating matters, Coast Guard personnel allowances do not account for this increasingly prevalent practice, so the Coast Guard’s fixed supply of maintainers are strained by the considerable expansion in maintenance labor hours required to keep the MH-65 fleet limping along.

These practices are taking an operational toll, eating into safety margins. Before Congress in April 2021, the Coast Guard Commandant estimated that about 10 percent of the flyable MH-65 fleet would be grounded at the start of the 2021 hurricane season, warning that the Dolphins were being limited to only 78% of their originally programmed flight hours. 

While the struggle to keep aircraft flying is a commendable exercise in bureaucratic legerdemain and organizational agility, the battle to keep aircraft safe and mission capable is an unsustainable, morale-sapping exercise. Just as in the past, when the Coast Guard transitioned from the HH-52A Sea Guard and HH-35 Pelican, fed up MH-65 pilots and maintainers are fleeing the Coast Guard, particularly given the intensifying demand for aviation professionals in the civilian sector. 

As experienced maintainers and aircrews head for the exits, the reduced availability of MH-65s presents a considerable challenge to maintaining pilot and aircrew proficiency. After nearly two years of directed reductions in flight hour allotments, coupled with chronic parts shortages, the readiness of the Coast Guard’s dedicated MH-65 flight crews are decaying as well. 

The problems are snowballing. Unrelenting operational demands and declining MH-65 availability combine to reduce the training needed to underwrite operator safety and mission effectiveness. Reducing MH-65 flying hours reduces training opportunities and makes for longer intervals between high-risk training operations. These, in turn, cause extended qualification timelines and diminished air station bench strength. And in mission planning, MH-65 operational risk management is now dominated by concerns over the resultant declines in operator proficiency.

Put another way, with few spare parts, the Coast Guard’s efforts to preserve airframe life are eroding flight skills that are, in turn, needed to preserve the airframe. It is a recipe for failed missions, mishaps, and, potentially, dead Coast Guard air crews. 

There Are No Good Answers:

As the Dolphins continue their slow journey to the scrapyard, the challenge for the Coast Guard is to keep the interregnum as tolerable as possible for the MH-65 community. But with the MH-65 community already showing stress fractures, fixes are needed now. Readiness rates are slumping, and, unless something changes, the Dolphin will no longer be the right platform to carry out the small helicopter’s big and critical mission-set. 

It is a tough spot for everybody. Given that the hard-used helicopters have survived into their fourth decade is testament to both the helicopters and the tough personnel who keep them flying. But, if current trends continue, the Dolphin helicopter fleet is going to break down, suffering a series of serious—if not fatal—mishaps. 

In the short term, the Coast Guard has few good options. As short-range search-and-rescue, armed interdiction, and air-intercept assets, the units that fly these aging platforms have little to no backup. And, while standing the watch, the MH-65 Dolphin helicopters have got to be ready, on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week standby. If not, mariners will die, drugs will flow unimpeded into U.S. markets, and Presidential security will be compromised. 

But without some sort of help, the Coast Guard’s Dolphin fleet is headed for real trouble. Even with modifications and a service-life extension, the Dolphin fleet is unlikely to survive much longer under the current operational posture and tempo. It may well be time for both the Coast Guard and Congress to double-down and pay the money needed to accelerate an MH-60 phase-in, reducing stress on the sundowning MH-65 fleet and helping the Coast Guard shift to a single, more maintainable Blackhawk-based design.