The name “Golden Gate Division” might evoke images of the strait that divides the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean, and its eponymous orange-red bridge.
But the beat of the Golden Gate Division of the California Highway Patrol (CHP) goes well beyond the famous bridge or the freeways that connect the Bay Area’s urban centers. It encompasses sprawling desert and endless coastline. And even out here, where roads are few and far between, CHP still has plenty of business.
Established in 1929, CHP was tasked with enforcing traffic laws across the state’s expansive highway system. The most powerful automobile of that decade was the Duesenberg Model J. Capable of a little over 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), courtesy of its 265-brake horsepower engine, the 5,270-pound (2,400-kilogram) car wouldn’t have lasted long on the foothills of the Sierra.
Things are a lot different today — as are the responsibilities of the CHP. Providing security to both state leadership and their buildings, as well as rescuing citizens in distress, are all part of CHP’s daily commitments. And this is on top of its primary duty to police the state’s public roads.
It’s a diverse job in a diverse landscape, and in nearly 100 years of its history, CHP has diversified its methods and equipment. Who knows what the officers of depression-era California would have made of CHP’s fleet of 30 Airbus Helicopters H125s.
What the officers of the 21st century make of them is a valuable and flexible resource that can respond to almost any incident across the state. In the case of the Golden Gate Division Air Operations Unit, its aircraft are based at Napa County Airport, and alongside a fixed-wing component, they play a critical role in patrolling and providing emergency services across the Bay Area.
“We are a rescue, medevac [medical evacuation], and law enforcement aircraft,” said Jacob Lodeen, a helicopter pilot with the Golden Gate Division. “So, we have a broad range of things that we do.”
Lodeen’s journey into CHP’s aviation unit is typical, reflecting the importance of having had experience on the ground, even when policing from the air.
“Part of our requirement is that we are all sworn police officers,” he explained. “You have to have two years as a sworn officer with road patrol time before you are eligible to be in the air.”
Once selected, the path to being a fully-fledged aviator with the CHP is a tough one. In the case of the pilots, applicants must have a commercial rating, but even then, there is an intense, six-month training program to become fully operational. It begins with transition onto the H125 and expanding into instrument flying and emergency procedures. The culmination is on-the-job training that introduces the operational roles.
“The training process is very intense,” Lodeen said. “There’s a lot that’s expected of you in a short period of time.”
Providing some of that training is Sgt. Lannis Pope. He is the aerial supervisor with the Golden Gate Division and a pilot instructor.
“Training is typically about three to six months,” he explained. “It depends on the person. Sometimes it takes a little longer to get somebody up to where they need to be.”
But the pilots are only one half of the crew on board CHP’s H125 helicopters. They are always accompanied in the cockpit by one of CHP’s flight officer paramedics, a title reflecting the aircraft’s principal missions and the level of professional training required to hold that position.
Like the pilots, it’s a three-phase course culminating in on-the-job training that is tailored to the individual’s progression.
“When you get signed off as a pilot or a paramedic and you are able to go conduct missions, you might not be able to do all the missions,” Pope explained. “For instance, with hoist operations, typically our pilots and paramedics can’t do that right away.”
Being one specialist in only a two-person crew can be daunting for newly-qualified CHP aviators, whether they are pilots or flight officer paramedics. However intense the training might be, the real world always feels a little different, and the stakes a good deal higher.
Rich Jones is a flight officer paramedic who had prior medical experience as an emergency medical technician on ambulances. He vividly recalled his first experience of a live rescue.
“You know you’ve trained very hard,” he said. “But that first time you get out there … I was just thinking ‘I hope I don’t screw this up.’ It was very nerve-racking.”
Ken Tyler is a CHP officer who was previously an Army medic and a registered nurse. After joining CHP, he qualified first as a flight officer paramedic and then transitioned into the pilot role after completing his flight training. Even with that much experience, he recalled the feeling of trepidation that accompanied his first mission in his new role.
“December 31, 2010, I was a flight officer paramedic, and January 1, 2011, I switched seats into the pilot role,” he explained. “It was like taking your dad’s car out for the very first time by yourself!”
Tyler’s unique blend of experience lends itself well to CHP’s air operations unit mission set.
“When it comes to training new flight officers, if they haven’t had an experience before then, the odds are that I’ve had it, or at least together we can figure it out,” he said. “Not very many agencies do law enforcement, rescue and medevac, so we get a much wider variety of missions than most.”
These multifaceted missions, combined with the variety inherent in California’s terrain, underscore the versatility required of CHP’s helicopters and crews.
“Each base throughout the state has a different area that they cover,” Pope said. “The terrain is different from base to base. Our highest mountain is about 4,500 feet [1,370 meters], but we have a more urban environment down here, so we have a lot more law enforcement calls.”
In common with many multi-mission public safety agencies, there is a seasonal element to the work. While the law enforcement and medevac missions provide the baseline, rescues are more prevalent in the tourist season.
“Any day of the week in the Bay Area, we could be getting a variety of calls,” Pope explained. “With the law enforcement work, it’s just the same 365 days a year. Rescues would probably be more prevalent in the spring time through the summer, just because more people are out and about and it’s hot.”
As the aviators of the Golden Gate Division Air Operations Unit have to cope with seasonal variations, so do their aircraft. Across the state, CHP is equipped with H125 helicopters, which provide a platform versatile enough to match the diversity of the mission set.
“The H125 has been great for us,” Pope said. “When the temperatures go up in the Bay Area in the summer time, it can get really hot here, but it has plenty of power and we can get into and out of a lot of tight spaces.”
In keeping with its mission set, CHP’s H125s are well-equipped to face a multitude of eventualities. A night vision goggle (NVG)-compatible Garmin cockpit is rounded out with a Genesys Aerosystems HeliSAS two-axis autopilot, while the flight officer paramedics have at their disposal a Teledyne FLIR 380-HDc thermal camera and TrakkaSystems TrakkaBeam A800 searchlight.
While the camera and searchlight are useful during almost any nighttime mission, they are most used by the CHP aviators in law enforcement tasks.
“The FLIR allows us to see people at nighttime or daytime. [It] doesn’t matter,” Jones explained. “We can make out descriptions of suspects anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 ft. [300 to 600 m] altitude with that. And we also have the TrakkaBeam, and I can’t even tell you how bright that thing is but it’s bright! We use it a lot for our pursuits at night.”
Adding invaluable situational awareness for the crew is a Shotover augmented reality mission mapping system.
“The overlay system has been a big game changer for us,” Jones said. “During a pursuit, it overlays all the street names, intersections, milepost markers, anything that we need. It’s a pretty amazing system.”
Rounding out the equipment with a much more specific focus on rescue missions is a Goodrich hoist. And while rescue and medevac missions may seem similar, there are minor changes to aircraft configurations required between these roles.
“I would say it takes about three to five minutes to configure from a hoist operation to a medevac operation,” Pope explained. “If there is another asset like an air ambulance then a lot of times, we will transfer care once we get the patient out of the spot they are in. But if there’s nobody available, then we will just land and reconfigure for the medevac configuration, and we’ll take the patient to hospital.”
While this in-mission role change is relatively rarely called for, the tasks themselves are quite predictable for CHP crews.
“The day shift is primarily rescues and medevac and then at night, that starts to change to law enforcement,” Lodeen said. “A typical day shift could run two to three rescues, and then we’re running three pursuits in a night, so that primary role constantly changes.”
While predictable, the patterns are not exclusive and there are always exceptions to the rule. Rescues at night bring particular challenges, regardless of the impressive array of technology on the aircraft. As any pilot who has flown using NVGs will tell you, they are a long way from turning “night into day,” particularly when it comes to visual references. While this limits some of CHP’s hoisting policies, it doesn’t prevent them from using advanced techniques like single-skid landings.
“We will respond to any and all rescue calls but we do not hoist at night,” Lodeen explained. “But that doesn’t limit us from performing rescues at night. We can get pretty creative with how we effect our rescue even without the ability to hoist.”
This level of resourcefulness is appreciated by the people who find themselves in need of rescue after sunset in the Bay Area. It is also appreciated by other public safety agencies that may not have access to their own aircraft.
“We get utilized a lot by the smaller departments because they don’t have anybody in their department that flies,” Pope explained. “So, they call us for allied agency assistance, whether it be a sheriff’s department, police department or the parks department. Even the Coast Guard calls us for help sometimes when its helicopter asset isn’t available.”
The spirit of this interagency cooperation is epitomized by the Helicopter Rescue Technician (HRT) program.
The result of close cooperation between CHP and local fire and rescue battalions, the HRT program selects and trains firefighters specifically to deploy from CHP helicopters.
Originally started by Matt Calcutt, a flight officer paramedic in the Valley Division, the HRT concept has since been adopted more widely.
“Matt saw a need up in the Sierra Nevada to recruit more specialized rescuers,” Jones explained. “They deal with a lot of backcountry skiing and snowboarding incidents. A lot of these fire departments specialize in those kinds of training.”
The relationship between the CHP Golden Gate Division and San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District came into being after San Ramon Fire battalion chief Erik Falkenstrom encountered a former colleague from his paramedic training while on a rescue.
“We were up on a call on Mount Diablo, and the helicopter landed and he came out, and we kind of re-engaged our friendship,” Falkenstrom explained. “At that moment, we were like, ‘hey, why don’t we build something with our agencies to provide a higher level of service to our citizens?’ We knew we could accomplish these rescues at a greatly reduced amount of time if we worked together.”
Now mature, the program trains specialist firefighters, who are already qualified paramedics, to perform advanced rescue techniques deployed from CHP helicopters. The aim is simply to get someone with the expertise necessary onto the scene as quicky as possible, regardless of their organization.
“No one really cares which fire department it is. They generally don’t know who’s rescuing them,” Falkenstrom said. “They just want help, and so this program provides that help in a greatly reduced amount of time, and it’s free. You pay your taxes for CHP and the fire departments, so we’re not sending you an additional bill for the service that we provide.”
Whether it’s deploying specialist rescuers, carrying out toe-in landings at night or pursuing criminals across county lines, the aviators flying CHP’s helicopters are almost guaranteed a varied shift whenever they are on duty.
But despite the busy flying program and an honorable purpose, they are encountering similar challenges to many others in the helicopter industry when it comes to finding candidates of the right caliber for the job.
“It’s hard to find good people out there that want to be both law enforcement and paramedics,” Pope explained. “It’s a lot of commitment. It was a lot of commitment for me as a young person when I was 20 years old. At that time, I had the flying bug and I just wanted to fly, but I’m very glad of the career choice I made.”
