CBP CONVERGES ON SUPER BOWL LIII
With roads often snarled in traffic jams on Super Bowl Sunday, aerial resources are especially critical to law enforcement’s ability to respond quickly to emergencies. Grantham was part of the CBP AMO team of 62 personnel who helped enforce the TFR at this year’s Super Bowl in Atlanta. CBP AMO personnel came from Puerto Rico, Miami, Jacksonville, San Diego, New Orleans, and Washington headquarters to converge on the Air Security Operations Center at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia.
“Any time we have one of these national events like this, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Grantham related. CBP doesn’t have a hard time finding personnel who want to participate in the largest U.S. sporting event of the year, even though few of them will catch even a glimpse of the game on a screen. “Everybody enjoys being part of something special like this,” Grantham said. CBP partnered with more than 50 other federal, state and local agencies to protect Atlanta Super Bowl fans.
Arriving with CBP AMO personnel at this year’s Super Bowl were 10 helicopters and two fixed-wing aircraft:
• Six UH-60 Black Hawks, which fly up to 180 mph and 15,000 feet altitude, monitored the skies continuously about 40-50 miles outside of Atlanta, conducted ground surveillance, and stayed on alert for any calls to conduct an interdiction of a suspicious aircraft.
• Four Airbus H125 helicopters (also known in North America as the AStar), flying at up to 150 mph and 12,000 feet, were there mostly for tactical support. They are equipped for day and night video surveillance, and they include a searchlight and a loudspeaker. “In order to serve CBP in their mission, we have worked hard to learn from previous years flying the earlier H120 and AS350 models,” Airbus Helicopters Inc. President Chris Emerson noted. “The great thing is the newest variant, the H125, has so much more capability, including a digital cockpit which will ease the pilot workload and will allow them to carry ballistic protection and more mission equipment.”
• Two Beechcraft Super King Air 350s, which AMO calls “MEAs” for “Multi-Role Enforcement Aircraft,” fly at a maximum of 300 mph and 28,000 feet. They primarily moved people and equipment, although they also can conduct ground surveillance. Their FLIR thermal imaging cameras can pick up the heat from a human at 7,000 feet.
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May/June 2019
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