tHeCivilAirpAtrol : itswwiiorigins , History , AndlAstingmission
Military & Veterans Affairs Committee Chairs : MattHall – HillWardHenderson & AlexSrsic – BayAreaLegalServices
theCivilianAirpatrol ’ scurrent missionsareprimarily three-fold : cadetleadershipand trainingprograms , aerospace education , andperforming emergencyservices .
As the shroud of a second world war ( WWII ) in a generation descended upon the globe and the Third Reich had overrun Europe , the last country standing after the fall of France in 1940 was Great Britain . Winston Churchill ’ s repeated pleas for United States ’ assistance , which was slowly being inevitably drawn into the war , was eventually answered after much heated congressional debates by the passage of the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 . This Act allowed the U . S . to lend or lease war supplies to any nation considered vital to our nation ’ s defense . President Roosevelt labeled our commitment as “ the arsenal of democracy .” However , the ships carrying the supplies to England were being regularly lost as were its crews and tonnage aboard , scuttled and sunk by the German U-boats having a heyday along the Atlantic seaboard .
Enter the 1938 vision of Gill Robb Wilson , aviation editor of the New York Herald Tribune , who foresaw that the grounding of private planes in Europe was a contributing factor to Nazi occupation . With Wilson ’ s lead and the backing of many notable military and civil aeronautics personnel , including the Chief of the Army Air Corps , General
“ Hap ” Arnold , and former World War I pilot and Mayor of New York City , Fiorello H . La Guardia , an Office of Civilian Defense was first created in New Jersey and eventually in other East Coast locations . Private airplanes then took to the sky to patrol and spot the submarines as their periscopes appeared . The surprise attacks of the U-boats , which lived and died being undetected , were now interrupted as the private airmen in their own single engine pistondriven Fairchild 24s and Stinson 10s , some painted bright yellow , would call in the military as a result of their reconnaissance findings .
These initial civilian agencies in homeland support of our military became the blueprint for the creation on December 1 , 1941 , six days before Pearl Harbor , of the Civil Air Patrol (“ CAP ”).
Subsequently , a few days after the bombing and destruction of the Pearl Harbor Base , farmers , crop dusters and many other privately-owned planes and their owners , from their minimum altitudes of 1,000 feet , sometimes temporarily dropping to 500 feet , volunteered to oversee and supplement the protection of the U . S . coast , shorelines , and southern borders . Meanwhile most of the military was stationed overseas on
two fronts . For the bravery of its civilian pilots during WWII , CAP received the highest civilian honor , the Congressional Gold Medal , in 2014 .
As WWII drew to a close , CAP , which pre-dates the 1947 formally-enacted creation of the U . S . Air Force , nonetheless survived and became a non-profit auxiliary to the Air Force , and is a line item in its annual appropriations budget . CAP currently has 60,000 members ( cadets between the ages of 12 and 18 and seniors ) within its 52 wings , one in each state , Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands .
Its current missions are primarily three-fold : cadet leadership and training programs , aerospace education , and performing emergency services in its Cessna 172 and Cessna 182 Aircrafts , such as providing supplies and forensics in conjunction with FEMA ’ s hurricane and other disaster relief . CAP ’ s pilots flew hundreds of missions and were charged with aerial photography and mapping of the oil spills resulting from the Exxon Valdez Disaster in 1989 and the Deep Water Horizon oil rig explosion of 2010 . CAP was also authorized to fly the first non-military aircraft
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