CAP is primarily a drug interdiction organization

[RiverAux]

Did you all realize that CAP's biggest AFAM operational mission (other than training) is drug interdiction? 

According to the slides presented at NEC, in FY09 CAP flew 11,677 hours in drug interdiction out of 50,382 AFAM flight hours.  Far behind that is SAR (2,839 hours) and Air Defense (1,955).  Disaster relief hours were only 692 due to a lack of hurricanes, but the year before only constituted 1,921 hours).  And even before the drop in ELT missions, SAR was only about 3-4000 hours.  Range support was 533 hours, route survey 765 hours. 

I'd seen this sort of chart before, but it never really hit me that counterdrug was actually our biggest mission. 

[tdepp]

Did you all realize that CAP's biggest AFAM operational mission (other than training) is drug interdiction? 

According to the slides presented at NEC, in FY09 CAP flew 11,677 hours in drug interdiction out of 50,382 AFAM flight hours.  Far behind that is SAR (2,839 hours) and Air Defense (1,955).  Disaster relief hours were only 692 due to a lack of hurricanes, but the year before only constituted 1,921 hours).  And even before the drop in ELT missions, SAR was only about 3-4000 hours.  Range support was 533 hours, route survey 765 hours. 

I'd seen this sort of chart before, but it never really hit me that counterdrug was actually our biggest mission.

As Major Mackey, Commander of the South Park Composite Squadron would say in response to this very interesting fact: "M'kay, kids, you shouldn't do drugs, m'kay, drugs are bad. You see, I was at the bottom of the barrel, I was a wreck. Why, I didn't even care about money. I was wasting my life... You boys need to listen up, m'kay, what I'm talking about might save your life some day... Drugs are bad. You shouldn't do drugs. If you do them, you're bad, because drugs are bad. It's a bad thing to do drugs, so don't be bad by doing drugs, m'kay, that'd be bad"   

But drug interdiction flights are good, m'kay.

[Offutteer]

A couple of slides later, they showed the orientation flight hours.

                FY 09
CAP       10,631
AFROTC   2,834
AFJROTC  1,013

Total      14,478  More than any other category for flying. 

For those that missed the slide show, they have it posted on capmembers.com

[RiverAux]

Note I talked about "operational missions(s)", which at least to me doesn't include o-rides.  I'm not saying that they're not part of one of our missions since of course they are, but what I meant was really external ES-type missions.

Obviously too this is just the national overview.  There are probably wings out there where the stats look radically different than the national totals. 

[mynetdude]

Obviously too this is just the national overview.  There are probably wings out there where the stats look radically different than the national totals.

If wings were showing stats radically different wouldn't the stats marry up with NHQ stats? I mean after all all the stuff gets reported up the chain to NHQ so wings/NHQ should marry up then? Otherwise, we are going to see stats that don't match and if wings show higher or lower hours than NHQ might have; doesn't sound good for those who are stats minded...

[davidsinn]

Obviously too this is just the national overview.  There are probably wings out there where the stats look radically different than the national totals.

If wings were showing stats radically different wouldn't the stats marry up with NHQ stats? I mean after all all the stuff gets reported up the chain to NHQ so wings/NHQ should marry up then? Otherwise, we are going to see stats that don't match and if wings show higher or lower hours than NHQ might have; doesn't sound good for those who are stats minded...

Sounds normal to me. You may have wing A that is all about CD but almost no ES and then Wing B that is a no CD some ES and then Wing C that is a lot of both. Add them all up and you get your total. Each one is different for whatever reason but together we are a lot of CD work.

[dbaran]

The fact that missing aircraft and ELT missions are way down also increases relative weight of CD flying.  CD used to be about 40% of our total flying hours in CAWG ... now it's a lot higher percentage since we're not chasing an ELT every day and 20 missing AC a year.

[RiverAux]

Actually, according to the national numbers even before the SAR decline, CD was still number 1 by a large margin.

[a2capt]

We'll see how CAWG missions go this weekend.. two days of WMAO duty ahead .. though yesterday was a bit active. Last time I did this I had three and a phantom missing aircraft that was never found.  Seeing that it's a really nice day, looks like it's the same for most of the state, and the desert is getting hot..