PORT ALLEN — Civil Air Patrol cadets were not just role players during the state exercise Saturday.
The cadets had the responsibility of the flight line, guiding incoming and outgoing traffic, and keeping an eye on the planes during the meeting of the senior leaders at the hangar, which Ken D’Attilio provided for CAP to use.
“This is an Air Force-funded training,” said Lt. Col. Ron Victorino, the Kaua‘i Squad Commander and Vice Wing Commander. “We usually have these once a quarter. Sometimes we fly out to other islands. Today, everyone is flying in to Port Allen. This is a great opportunity for the pilots to fly into a smaller, more rural airport.”
Cadets, led by Dylan Auth and Lt. Charlie Rodriguez Jr., had the responsibility of guiding the planes in and out of the short runway before parking them off the tarmac while fuel was reloaded and the senior leaders were being briefed.
Victorino said the training also provided an opportunity to calibrate a new radio system that was provided by the county’s Civil Defense for use during search and rescue and natural disaster warning situations.
Susan Caires, the Kaua‘i public affairs officer, said during the last tsunami warning, she and her husband, Roger, the CAP Wing Commander, were out of state, leaving her father solo in the Emergency Operations Center.
During that incident, there were no cell phones available to contact the individual pilots, or the CAP hanger, resulting in the new radio system which will be formally presented by Kaua‘i Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. to the CAP at a later date.
Rodriguez, in charge of the cadet program, said the radios allow planes to communicate with other planes or to stations on the ground.
Susan Caires said during the briefing that the senior leaders would receive the specifics on the exercise and would then fly to their specified area of responsibility before returning home.
CAP First Sgt. Christian Perdue, anchoring one of the flight line posts, said this is great training. He plans on becoming a fighter jet pilot after attending the Air Force Academy, and being part of the CAP program helps him toward that dream because the CAP is similar to an Air Force auxiliary.
“Young people can join the program from as young as 12 years old,” said Perdue, an athlete and musician attending Kapa‘a High School. “You get to learn how to fly — not just engine aircraft, but gliders as well. There are special schools you can go do depending on the type of training you want, and there are competitions where you go up against cadets of other units from other islands.”
Susan said there was one former CAP cadet who is now flying missions in Iraq after going through the Air Force Academy.
CAP, the official civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force, was created on Dec. 1, 1941, as a way to use America’s civilian aviation resources to aid the war effort during WWII, states online sources.
There are more than 64,000 members in the nonprofit that performs 95 percent of the continental United States’ inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force.
More recently, CAP volunteers logged more than 10,000 hours over the past two months acting as eyes for the Gulf oil spill response.
Visit www.gocivilairpatrol.com for more information. For information on becoming a cadet, call Rodriguez at (915) 264-5071.
