Civil Air Patrol Performs Quietly Behind the Scenes

By Jim Evans

…to serve America by developing our nation’s youth; accomplishing local, state and national missions; and informing our citizens about the importance of aerospace education.

The discovery last month of the wreckage of a missing plane and its passengers from Phoenix in a remote area atop Combs Mountain in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park underscored the often unacknowledged importance of the Civil Air Patrol directly responsible for the sighting.

An auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, the Civil Air Patrol, or CAP, is a federally chartered benevolent civilian corporation — a nonprofit 501(c)(3) — that conducts 95 percent of all inland search and rescue in the United States. It saves an average of 100 lives every year, directed by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base, Va.

The CAP was founded in 1941 and initially operated under the jurisdiction of the Army Air Forces. CAP pilots were credited with sinking two enemy submarines and the rescue of hundreds of crash survivors during World War II. After the war, it became an auxiliary of the new U.S. Air Force, charged with the primary missions of aerospace education, cadet programs and emergency services.

The CAP annually provides more than 100 aerospace education workshops at colleges and universities, and it provides classroom materials, teacher training and other educational aids at no cost to U.S. teachers. It also offers activities, training and competition for thousands of cadets across the country, providing almost 10 percent of each year’s new classes entering military service academies.

Perhaps best known for its traditional role in search and rescue, the CAP performs a variety of emergency services, such as aerial reconnaissance for homeland security; disaster-relief support; transportation of time-sensitive medical materials, blood products and body tissues; assistance to federal agencies in the war on drugs; damage assessment, radiological monitoring, light transport and communications support, and low-altitude route surveys for the U.S. Air Force; orientation flights for the Air Force ROTC; and it maintains the most extensive communications network in the country.

Headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the size and scope of the CAP is extraordinary, encompassing eight geographic wings with 52 wings (one for each state, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia) and 1,700 units nationwide. CAP’s more than 550 corporate-owned aircraft and more than 4,000 member-owned aircraft make it the largest fleet of single-engine, piston aircraft in the world, with more than 120,000 hours flown by volunteers every year.

The CAP also maintains a fleet of more than 1,000 emergency-services vehicles for training and mission support, and about 675 chaplains are available to provide counseling and ministry to its more than 27,000 cadets ages 12 to 21 and more than 62,000 senior members.

Although the CAP’s civilian charter mandates that it no longer participates in direct combat activities, its role in homeland security has increased substantially since 9/11. In fact, the first plane to fly over the destroyed World Trade Center — when all other aircraft was grounded — was a CAP aircraft transporting blood, and CAP aircraft provided the first aerial photographs of the World Trade Center site.