CGAS Atlantic City New Jersey Patch

Coast Guard Air Station Atlantic City is the helicopter unit that has flown the rotary wing air intercept mission over Washington, D.C. since 2006, and it also covers search and rescue from Connecticut to Virginia. The station opened on May 18, 1998, when the Coast Guard combined Air Station Brooklyn and Group Air Station Cape May into one new unit. Its hangars sit at Atlantic City International Airport in Egg Harbor Township, on the grounds of the FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center. Brooklyn had flown since 1938 and Cape May carried its own long history, so Atlantic City started life with two lineages behind it, and Coasties know it simply as CGAS Atlantic City.

The station flies the MH-65E Dolphin, with twelve aircraft assigned and two crews held on 30-minute response. Its area runs along the Mid-Atlantic coast from Connecticut to Virginia, overlapping the coastlines of the First and Fifth Coast Guard Districts, plus the interior bays and rivers behind them. Since 2006 its crews have flown for Operation Noble Eagle, the NORAD mission guarding the airspace over the nation's capital. That puts a Coast Guard helicopter crew in the same air defense picture as the fighters, intercepting slow and low aircraft that stray into restricted airspace.

This 4 inch round has a red merrowed edge around a white ring lettered U.S. COAST GUARD AIR STATION across the top and ATLANTIC CITY NEW JERSEY across the bottom, set off with two navy stars. In the blue center, an orange Dolphin with its white and blue racing stripe flies straight across a fanned hand of aces and face cards, with a pair of red dice tumbling above. It is the most Atlantic City picture a Coast Guard unit could ask for, and anyone who has driven past the boardwalk gets it at a glance. A small crossed-anchor shield of the Coast Guard sits at the bottom of the ring. The orange of the helicopter and the red border are the colors of a rescue aircraft.

Atlantic City crews launch into the kind of weather that keeps everyone else on the ground, nor'easters and winter gales over the shoals off New Jersey and the Delmarva coast. The work is search and rescue, law enforcement support and the capital air intercept watch, and it does not stop for holidays. A Dolphin crew is a small team, pilots, a flight mechanic and a rescue swimmer, and everyone on the station knows how much rides on the maintainers in the hangar. The unit carries Brooklyn and Cape May forward, and the people who have flown there since 1998 have added their own chapter. On that ramp, Semper Paratus is a working description.

Put it in a shadow box with a rescue swimmer's or aircrew wings and a photo from the ramp at Atlantic City. It also fits on a flight jacket or a vest worn to a Coast Guard aviation reunion, and it makes a good gift for a Coastie who stood duty there. A 4-inch piece of a busy station on the Jersey Shore.