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Guest post: The thing speaks for itself

The Bulletin, which calls itself "Philadelphia's Family Newspaper," published yesterday an interview with Captain Paul Ratté, the CO of Air Station Atlantic City. The interview, by Chris Freind, captures one of the essential elements that makes Coast Guard aviation great: standardization.

The article isn't long, and it's worth reading.
We made over 33,000 rescues. It speaks to a culture that pushes both responsibility and leeway out to operational commanders in the field.

Another major reason for that kind success is the guard's level of standardization.... Particularly in U.S. Coast Guard aviation community, we don't have a West Coast and an East Coast way of doing things. We have one set of trainers, one curriculum, one operation manual and one ethos for how to operate. In that case, it's very easy to grab a flight mechanic from one air station, a pilot from another, a co-pilot from another and just fuse them together. Same thing with the maintenance philosophy. All of the sudden, we had all these helicopters [that needed servicing during Katrina], and we were able to pull aircraft mechanics together from all over the country and make it work. Standardization has always been the goal. It's just that we've improved it quite a bit over the years.Those who participated on the ground know he speaks the truth. Crew met pilots they had never seen before the pre-flight brief, then got into helicopters and helped a lot of folks in hazardous conditions. That's possible only through a deeply embedded culture of standardization.

Which brings me back to the title of the post, taken from the top line of the newspaper's site: Res Ipsa Loquitur. Standardization spoke during Katrina.

Picture with this post is by Kyle Niemiand lifted from CGVI.

This post was written by a loyal reader, a Coast Guard pilot, who believes that bringing aviation standardization to the rest of the CG using modern logistics tools is more than the right thing to do.