With Lives On The Line, Base Elizabeth City Keeps Coast Guard Aircraft Running

The U.S. Coast Guard’s low-profile Aviation Logistics Center, tucked in a small corner of North Carolina, is a high-tech, aviation-focused equivalent of a naval shipyard. Unnoticed by Washington, the former seaplane base, just outside the Great Dismal Swamp and near the sleepy town of Elizabeth City, has become a bustling depot, handling the enormous mix of aircraft upgrades, refits, and repairs for the Department of Homeland Security’s maritime aviators.

The Aviation Logistics Center has a big job, and they do it well, keeping Coast Guard aircraft flying for far longer than any maritime peer. With lives on the line, the Coast Guard maintains their aircraft as hard as they fly, but, as the Coast Guard’s aviation capabilities evolve, the “aging-but-essential” World War II-era base is at a crossroads.

The facility could use a little more attention from Washington policymakers.

A Sleepy, High-Tech Surprise:

The bucolic surroundings and sun-faded “gate guards” at Base Elizabeth City are deceptive. The old aircraft displays mask a very busy, cutting-edge facility that is home to a range of different operational, training and maintenance commands. The Aviation Logistics Center—as important as it is—is only a single, relatively independent component of the Coast Guard’s larger base complex, and it is easy to overlook.

On one remote side of the Elizabeth City base, HC-130 Hercules, HC-144 Ocean Sentry and HC-27J Spartan patrol aircraft are tucked into work-bays, undergoing a combination of deep depot maintenance, missionization and standardization.

The work is steady. Every 48 months, each Coast Guard aircraft and helicopter arrives at the field, gets stripped down to bare metal and is, in essence, rebuilt, emerging in the latest platform configuration. Outside of repainting newly-prepared fixed-wing aircraft—about the only thing Elizabeth City’s army of 1800 Coast Guard maintainers are unable to do—the Coast Guard does everything else. And even though the Aviation Logistics Center faces workforce challenges common to most manufacturers, the base recruits, hires and trains some of the best aircraft maintainers in the business.

Rotary wing work takes place in two hulking World War II-era hangars. In one, old MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are stripped down to a bare frame and rebuilt, while, in the other, gear from high-hour Coast Guard MH-60’s Jayhawk helicopters are stripped off, refreshed and repurposed for use aboard new or “lightly used” Navy Seahawk hulls that have already been used, on average, for about 7,000 hours and scavenged from U.S. government aircraft “boneyards”.

Maintenance work in the hangars is supported by a network of 20 specialized shops, where technicians struggle to cram high-tech gear into aging, World War II-era buildings, trying to perch their million-dollar machines above flood level. The nimble shops need flexibility. As the Coast Guard’s intensive maintenance program keeps the Coast Guard’s aircraft in service far longer than the original manufacturers expected, the Aviation Logistics Center evolves to meet the need, developing, for example, a center of additive manufacturing excellence, where teams reverse engineer, prototype, test and then manufacture many mission-critical aircraft parts made by companies that have since moved on. In essence, the facility has become something of a counterbalance to the private sector, injecting competition into a space where original manufacturers are highly favored. But the old buildings are at a breaking point, and rather than focus on the work, too many maintainers spend their valuable time figuring out how to make the old facilities work instead.

Aside from the maintenance work, Base Elizabeth City serves as a supply depot for all the Coast Guard’s flying commands. Over a billion dollars in critical aviation parts rest in a non-climate-controlled warehouse, inches from the flood-prone Pasquotank River, as sweating warehouse workers race about, organizing parts needed to keep the Coast Guard’s widely dispersed aircraft flying. Others, behind the scenes, handle contracting work, or scrutinize incoming shipments for fakes or other quality deviations.

Beyond the base, teams of Elizabeth City maintainers range across the United States, helping fix Coast Guard aircraft in the field.

In short, at Elizabeth City, the Coast Guard is doing it all for their five primary airborne platforms. And while the Aviation Logistics Center is doing a great job, the maintainers can only do so much with the aging physical plant and the resources they have. The workers are constantly under pressure, for if they fail to get aircraft turned around and out the door, on time, they know the delay echoes across the rest of the fleet.

But their work is just going to get harder.

A Base At A Crossroads:

The Coast Guard’s aviation maintenance facility faces operational and organizational challenges that need high level attention from the Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, and Congress.

Aviation is not getting any easier. Striking a balance between robust simplicity and the technical demands of intelligence-based targeting and military mission support is hard. Building a cadre of personnel capable of introducing and integrating obscure-but-critical technology into an airframe is a tough job. Rapid technological and requirements changes make the job even more daunting.

As the Coast Guard’s aircraft age, the work gets even harder. Original manufacturers often value “new” aircraft sales more than “long-term” sustainment and can become less eager to support platforms as they get older. The bureaucratic maneuvering can be intense as users throughout the globe form affinity groups to compare notes and encourage proactive manufacturer engagement.

Take the Coast Guard’s MH-65 Dolphin helicopter. Given the Service’s vigorous maintenance efforts, the long-lived Coast Guard’s MH-65s are becoming the B-52s of the sea—iconic, seemingly immortal platforms.

By retirement, the Coast Guard’s MH-65 fleet will be approaching sixty years of service, and the platforms will have gone through five different class-wide modifications. The final “Echo” model is set to support the Coast Guard through 2037 at the earliest, and the Coast Guard wants to run these helicopters well past 30,000 hours—an impressive feat, marked by the fact that the better-funded Defense Department retires their helicopters far earlier. Other military services even throw a party on the rare occasion when one of their helicopters somehow makes it to 15,000 hours.

While the Coast Guard regularly wins kudos for eking as much service out of their platforms as possible, aging platforms need lots and lots of maintenance. As the frugal Coast Guard pushes their aircraft to serve far beyond their originally anticipated service life, parts start to break in ways that engineers never predicted. Aged aircraft become, in essence, “individuals,” each with a peculiar quirk, making it somewhat difficult for maintainers to apply uniform procedures for each airframe. For an austere, efficiency-minded repair depot, laser-focused on schedule, maintainers may be hard-pressed to deviate from standardized procedures.

The depot has very little slack. As the Coast Guard’s fleet of 95 MH-65 helicopters ages out, and the Coast Guard starts shifting to a single-type MH-60, Elizabeth City will face capacity, space and performance challenges as the pace of the Coast Guard’s rotary wing evolution picks up. But with both Congress and the Coast Guard unsure of how the transition to a common helicopter will proceed, the Coast Guard’s aviation depot is left to grapple with the uncertainty.

Time is at a premium. As a busy, cramped, and old facility, Base Elizabeth City needs to know what might be coming. Change cannot happen overnight, and Washington policymakers may underestimate the methodical planning, training, and recapitalization required to keep a changing Coast Guard safe and in the air.

There are, however, opportunities for organizational innovation. The Department of Homeland Security supervises a large air fleet, split almost evenly between the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations. While both have very different operational requirements, both fly MH-60 helicopters and they may, in time, start flying common long-range patrol platforms and other things. It may be a good time to start centralizing the Department of Homeland Security’s aviation maintenance capabilities around modern facilities that are less at risk from storms and flooding, and potentially consolidating contracting with major suppliers for heavy maintenance or missionization.

By thinking ahead and moving quickly, the Department Homeland Security could probably get the Congressional support needed to build a modern maintenance depot, keeping its diverse “air capability” maintained and flying safely into the next century.