CAP S&R

I joined the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager, as I was really interested in the aerospace education part of the program. Learning about the forces that impact an aircraft and how they are managed was interesting to me.

Search and Rescue, and the applied skills related to that effort was also a big part of the experience. CAP started during the second world war as a civilian auxiliary that was used for coastal patrol for submarines, and for rescue of survivors of ships sunk by the German U-Boat war. After the war, the mission evolved to the present role of Aerospace education and Search and Rescue roles.

For actual hands on training, the Washington and Oregon wings of CAP jointly ran a facility down at the Shelton airfield in surplus WWII buildings. The place was called Bel-Tac. Each month on the second weekend of the month, we'd travel down Friday evening, and stay for the weekend, coming back on Sunday afternoon. 

Saturday was the major training and activity day. The training may be the ground handling of aircraft. You may have noticed the ground people guide an airliner into a parking spot by using arm signals. That would be an example of what we learned. There is more to it than just waving left and right. Proper precautions related to fueling, pre-flight checks, radio procedures are all part of the air search based training.

One exceptionally fun weekend was when we had several light aircraft to work with, so we could do our thing with real planes, not just have one of the cadets hold his arms out pretending to be a plane. We'd cycle the planes, just as we would do in a real search situation. To make it enjoyable and challenging for the pilots and observers, (I'll chat about search procedures soon), they had a contest to drop a flour sack onto a target that we setup on the airfield.

Radio procedure training was also an important skill. There is a very formal process for official messages and for that matter, just making contact between stations. For example, when calling another station, the station you are calling is spoken first, followed by the calling station call sign. As:
Maple 300, Maple 300, Maple 303. Maple (Washington Prefix for Mobile Unit, Fir was fixed, and Ash was aircraft) 300 was being called by Maple 303 (That was actually MY radio call sign back in the day). If it was non-formal talking, the conversations would take place, followed by each station reporting out at the end. (Maple 303, Out).

During my cadet days, I also worked at what was called the Net Control Station for Washington. That required me to take a bus from Lake City to Downtown, transfer to a West Seattle route, and walk a few blocks to the Net Control station in a senior members basement. Yeah, it was a lot of work, but for me, on Thursday nights, I WAS net control (KOF430), and ran the statewide network with a scheduled all stations 'meeting' that was very structured. Pretty cool.  I was also did the weekly Western Region network using the single side band High Frequency radio. I got to talk to California over the radio!

A formal radio message was composed of a priority (Redcap Priority, SarCap Priority, Priority, Routine)  radio address, attention title (commander or some such), Datetime Goup, then the message itself.

I'm going to need to pick this up on my next blog. Let me know if this is at all interesting, or if you are dozing off mid story.

Dad