INTHESPOTLIGHT Photos and text by Dan Sweet
Rear Admiral Melvin W. Bouboulis,
District 13 Commander, US Coast Guard The Coast Guard’s longest-serving aviator reflects on opportunities in the service for meaningful work, transferable skills.
B
EFORE RETIRING THIS YEAR after 36 years of service in the US Coast Guard (USCG), Rear
Adm. Melvin Bouboulis served as com- mander of Coast Guard District 13. There, he was responsible for all USCG opera- tions throughout the Pacific Northwest, which includes more than 4,400 miles of coastline, 600 miles of inland waterways, and a 125–nautical mile (nm) international border with Canada. As a Coast Guard aviator, Bouboulis
flew all his aviation field assignments as an operational pilot and participated in the historic Hurricane Katrina response in 2005. He is qualified on the MH-65 Dolphin (A, B, and C models), MH-60 Jayhawk, and HC-130 Hercules aircraft, accruing more than 4,000 total flight hours. He holds private, commercial air- plane, helicopter, and airline transport pilot licenses.
At the time of his retirement, Bouboulis
was the longest-serving Coast Guard avia- tor, earning him the distinction of being the service’s 26th Ancient Albatross.
ROTOR: What, if any, issues related to rotorcraft is Coast Guard District 13 facing today, and are other districts facing the same issues? Bouboulis: The issues facing rotorcraft in District 13 are similar to the issues in other districts and, really, the Coast Guard at large. We’re looking at our asset lay- down, our aircraft are aging, and we’re talking about future vertical aviation. The Department of Defense’s solution to future vertical aviation is still in progress. So, maintaining our aircraft and siting
22 ROTOR SEPTEMBER 2023
them in the right places is probably the biggest challenge we have today. We’re not doing anything in District 13 to change the siting, but the Coast Guard is looking at how we maintain our fleet of rotary- wing assets and how we put them in the best places. There’s also going to be a concerted
effort to change the structure of the Coast Guard or the fleet status where we’re going to increase the number of Sikorsky H-60s we have and decrease the number of
65s.The H-60 has greater endurance and capabilities in some areas, and the Airbus MH-65 is now 35 years old, so we’re going to maintain it for another 15 years. I think decreasing the number of
assets we’re trying to maintain will help us, as we can use the current inventory of parts and airframes we have to sustain those lower numbers.
How are you dividing your fleet between ship-based and land-based aircraft? All of our new cutters—the national secu- rity cutter, the polar security cutter, off- shore patrol cutters that are shipboard capable—will be designed to handle the H-60. We initially bought a Navy variant of the H-60 that had blade-fold and tail-fold capability. But due to the lack of use we had on those systems and the mainte- nance and sustainability challenges, we
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