U.S. COAST GUARD ORAL HISTORY
PROGRAM
Operation Noble Eagle Documentation Project
Attack on America: September 11, 2001 and the U.S. Coast Guard
Interviewee: Captain
Richard P. Yatto, USCG
Commanding Officer, Air Station Cape Cod
Interviewer: PAC Peter
Capelotti, USCGR
Date of Interview: 2 April 2002
Place: Air Station Cape Cod
Q: You’re a full captain. How long have you been in the Service Sir?
CAPT Yatto: I’ve been in for; it’ll be 25 years this May.
Q: And you’re Academy?
CAPT Yatto: Right, I graduated from the Academy in ‘77.
Q: Seventy Seven, okay. Were you here . . . how long have you been here in command of the Air Station?
CAPT Yatto: I took over on the first of July ’99.
Q: Okay.
CAPT Yatto: So I’m nearing the end of my . . . it’s a three-year tour.
Q: Right. Where do you go from here?
CAPT Yatto: Deep Water Project.
Q: Really?
CAPT Yatto: In Headquarters.
Q: Yes.
CAPT Yatto: I came close to retiring.
Q: Did they ask you to come down or you wanted to go down there?
CAPT Yatto: Yes, I think [ the Program Executive Officer for Deepwater (G-D) Rear ] Admiral [ Patrick M. ] Stillman was interested. I have some . . . my specialty is aeronautical engineering and I was the Lead Engineer for the H-60 Acquisition down at ARSC [ Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City, North Carolina]. That was a successful project I think, primarily because we worked through a Navy contract we bought. The Coast Guard was attached to a Navy procurement of H-60 “H” models.
Q: Now was that a 3/2/1 purchase model where they had three missions, two Services, one contract type thing?
CAPT Yatto: Well actually it was a Navy contract for . . . they were buying 18 HH-60H models and we jumped on that contract and bought 42 HH-60J models. They’re very similar to the Navy’s “H” model, but even though we bought a lot more airframes it was a Navy contract and replaced the old H-3.
Q: That was the first admiral interview I did was with Admiral Stillman.
CAPT Yatto: Oh, okay.
Q: Yes, he was my old boss at Public Affairs.
CAPT Yatto: I never worked for him before but I met him a few times.
Q: Brush up on your philosophy before you . . .
CAPT Yatto: Okay, I think I’ll enjoy working for him. He seems to care about people.
Q: He’s . . . I think he’s the best. In fact that was one the things that was of interest to me as a . . . in archeology we’re using all these autonomous vehicles now and I walked into his office he had a Predator drone done up in Coast Guard livery.
CAPT Yatto: Oh really?
Q: And I said, do you – because it was interesting because he said, where do you foresee the Coast Guard in, say, ten years when say, Admiral Stillman is now Commandant Stillman, and he said he actually sees the Coast Guard as much smaller than it is now.
CAPT Yatto: Really?
Q: Not much larger because you’re going to have much more highly trained people doing things like operating autonomous vehicles in concert with these very advanced platforms. I suppose the [ CGC ] Healy [ WAGB-20 ] is the model for that.
CAPT Yatto: When was that interview; that was pre-9-11?
Q: No, two months ago. He said, because for the simple reason that what’s driving the Coast Guard, as always does, is our budget concerns, and what drives the budget is personnel costs.
CAPT Yatto: It’s people.
Q: And if you can cut down those costs by having more highly trained people but fewer of them, then you can ship that money to other resources.
CAPT Yatto: I can see where that could work potentially in Aviation, but boy, I think that would be tough to get our hands around; Port Security for example.
Q: No, you can’t do it. You’ve got to have bodies out there.
CAPT Yatto: There’s no way you can automate that. You need to do physical searches. You need to have people there, so I’m not sure if that will work.
Q: Of course a lot of it . . . you know Port Security was so far off everybody’s radar screen six months ago.
CAPT Yatto: Sure, that’s why I asked if that when you talked to him was that prior to 9-11.
Q: Yes, and they’re wrestling with that now; how much Port Security should they really do.
CAPT Yatto: Sure.
Q: I think they were probably thinking they were going to get out of the business all together.
CAPT Yatto: Should it be a different agency.
Q: Exactly. Like you have the Transportation Security Agency now and is there going to be a Port Security Agency or something like that.
CAPT Yatto: Well we had General [ Konstantin ] Trotsky from the Russian Border Guard about a year ago and about 25 percent of his force – this is what we think of as the Coast Guard - and the other 75 percent is the Border Guard -and it all falls under one agency.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: It begs the question, why don’t we operate that way?
Q: Yes, well a lot of people have been asking that. I think, as you know, the institutional inertia of Washington is just staggering.
CAPT Yatto: Right.
Q: Were you here that morning on 9-11?
CAPT Yatto: Actually I was in my office. It was interesting. I got a phone call from Captain Bill Evans who’s the head of the Clinic. He’s a dentist in charge of the clinic. He calls up prior to 0900 - I’m guessing it’s a quarter of nine. I can’t remember exactly when – and he said, Rick, he said, you have to go down and look at CNN. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. So I ran down the hall, out of my office down the hall to the Operations Center, and you’ve probably been down there already.
Q: No Sir.
CAPT Yatto: Okay, I’ll have to give you a tour when we get done talking.
Q: Great!
CAPT Yatto: And they had CNN on and there was a burning smoking hole inside of the World Trade Center. I looked and the weather was just like it was here; it was a nice sunny day, and I thought, geez, that’s odd. There was a military aircraft that crashed into the Empire State Building back during World War II but that was in IMC; Instrument Meteorological Conditions, and so I said, this is odd. I wonder if it was an inexperienced pilot maybe or maybe he had a heart attack, and I actually didn’t think it was a large plane. I looked on CNN and saw the hole inside and I thought it might have been small, like a [ Cessna ] 172 [ Skyhawk ] or something like that.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: It was tough looking to scale; trying to scale things.
Q: Sure.
CAPT Yatto: It really is a large building but just on the TV it looked like it might have been a small civilian aircraft; a single engine aircraft.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: And I was looking, listening to reports and saw a large twin engine Boeing aircraft. I thought it was a 737. I don’t think it was though. But it happened so quickly, it crashed into the second tower. But when I saw that while I was talking to other folks in the Operations Center I thought it was maybe a replay of the first impact.
Q: I thought the same thing when I saw it the first time.
CAPT Yatto: I thought it was, you know, they were just replaying the tape.
Q: Right, from a different angle.
CAPT Yatto: But then I looked at the bottom of the screen and it said live.
Q: Yes.
CAPT Yatto: And I said, this is not an accident now. So I thought about people being trapped above where the plane went into the building. Several years ago there was a hotel fire down in San Juan where people were trapped on the roof, couldn’t get off, and people died because they couldn’t get off the rooftop. So my first thought was we need to get a helicopter down there to try and take people off the roof, if in fact people try to get up on the rooftop.
Q: So even at that early stage you foresaw that it might be possible to, or that . . . ?
CAPT Yatto: Well those were just my thoughts.
Q: Right, but you saw that . . . you made that connection between San Juan and the World Trade Center that there might be people up there who are going to need to get picked up.
CAPT Yatto: That would be trapped and couldn’t get down. So I asked the ODO, the Operations Duty Officer, to call Boston; the Command Center, and get their take on it since they’re really our boss if you will. They’re the ones that generally . . . certainly we can watch ourselves or if we get a phone call or some communication from a Group or another Coast Guard unit we’d launch, but we normally get our directions from the Command Center up in Boston.
Q: But you have authority as CO [ Commanding Officer ] of the Air Station to launch in an emergency?
CAPT Yatto: Sure, and of course if we do that we’ll tell the District. We’ll tell the Command Center, hey, we just launched an H-60 on this case; this information.
Q: What kind of response did you get from the District?
CAPT Yatto: Well they said they were evaluating it.
Q: I think there was a lot of evaluation going on that morning.
CAPT Yatto: And I think - in their defense - they were just surprised and they probably weren’t thinking like I was about the hotel fire in San Juan.
Q: Right, sure.
CAPT Yatto: So I was talking to someone else on the side and then the ODO opened up and I said, well what was their answer? Do they want us to launch? And the ODO said, well they’re evaluating. I said, bullshit. I said, we’re going to launch right now. Just tell them we’re going to launch. I said, we can always recall it later on.
Q: Yes. Had the F-15s taken off by that point?
CAPT Yatto: No they hadn’t.
Q: Were you surprised when they did, or I guess you weren’t at that point. I was talking to Mr. Palfy and he said, I guess he was doing what he calls a ground turn that morning.
CAPT Yatto: Sure.
Q: And he said they usually turn their afterburners off after they take off from the field to cut down on noise and so forth, but that morning they didn’t.
CAPT Yatto: They didn’t. I guess they got as close as 70 miles. That was what the newspaper reported. And that was alarming too - not to digress - but we’ve cut back on the number of military aircraft that support homeland security over the years.
Q: Sure.
CAPT Yatto: Over the past several years I’ve read in the paper where we had gone from 300 fighter aircraft down to 100 within the continental United States to support Homeland Security. In fact the [Massachusetts Air National Guard's] 102nd [ Fighter Wing ] was the only fighter base or squadron in the northeast that had an alert aircraft.
Q: And those are the guys here?
CAPT Yatto: Right, the 102nd. And what’s even more remarkable is they’re not active duty. They’re a National Guard component. Post 9-11, there’s an alert F-16 at Burlington. There’s also an alert F-16 at Atlantic City, and I believe they’re both Guard units.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: But the next base down the coast that had an alert aircraft was Langley [ Air Force Base ] and they launched towards the Pentagon.
Q: Yes. Well of course when the Russians went away we . . .
CAPT Yatto: Sure. In fact even the mission has evolved here over the years. Back during my first tour they had the F-106D Delta Dart that was an air-to-air interceptor, which their primary purpose was when the Russian [Tupolev TU-95] Bears; the four engine aircraft would fly over the Pole down to resupply Cuba, they would sometimes test our air defenses, and the 106s would launch out, basically intercept them and escort them down the coast until the next squadron down the coast picked up the Soviet aircraft and continued down to Cuba.
Q: As the . . . your helo crews are making their way down the Long Island Sound that morning . . .
CAPT Yatto: We actually launched two 60s.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: And again, the thought was that there might be people stranded on the rooftop.
Q: Sure.
CAPT Yatto: In fact I read in a Wall Street Journal article that they theorized about the potential of using helicopters. Two things; one was . . .
Q: This is after September 11th?
CAPT Yatto: Right.
Q: Yes.
CAPT Yatto: This was, I think, about three weeks later.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: There was an article in the Wall Street Journal and they said, first, the access to the rooftops was not possible because the doors were padlocked shut for security reasons.
Q: Oh God!
CAPT Yatto: So if anybody had gone up that final ladder on the rooftop they couldn’t have gotten out on the rooftop.
Q: So they would have been locked out. Oh my God!
CAPT Yatto: And secondly is, the thought was, was there was so much smoke.
Q: Unless they could have broken through the padlocks of course.
CAPT Yatto: Yes, there was so much smoke that it probably would have been difficult, very difficult, to even land or to hover over the rooftop.
Q: And that’s because of the air turbulence or the visibility, or everything?
CAPT Yatto: Visibility.
Q: Yes.
CAPT Yatto: But when I looked again before the Tower collapsed I think it would been possible from a certain angle to be slightly upwind. It didn’t look like there was a lot of wind that day but I think there was just enough to where there would have been a clear area on one corner of the rooftop.
Q: Well I think that, talking to the aircrews, I think that they’re all of a mind that if you could have just gotten one person that you had to go in and try.
CAPT Yatto: Sure, and they would have done that, and that’s the thing: people that don’t know how we operate. They say, you authorized that, and I said, well, I said, the Aircraft Commander makes a decision on the scene on whether or not they feel comfortable, whether or not they’re . . . they do a risk assessment if you will on-scene to determine . . . and we do that all the time when we do search and rescue. We do Medivacs off of fishing boats. You know the pilot will look at the boat, look at the rigging and decide; now what’s the best place to do the hoist to take the fishermen off.
Q: Well I guess in this situation it had to be going through your mind though that people didn’t know if there were 40, upwards of 40 or 50,000 people in those buildings and you’ve got a helo that maybe can take off, you know, six or eight at the most at a time.
CAPT Yatto: Sure, certainly. That was a big concern.
Q: How would you have prepared . . . well how can you prepare this other sea of humanity clamming to get off this sinking building in effect and only be able to take off a few at a time? It would have been almost chaos you would think.
CAPT Yatto: Well that would have been an issue and that was part of the reason to send two helicopters. I don’t know if anyone told you, the Panamanian registered cruise ship - I think it was the Sea Breeze- it was down off the Outer Banks.
Q: I’ve seen that footage, yes, where they basically were threatening the rescue swimmer.
CAPT Yatto: The swimmer on the deck of the cruise ship and he had to kind of calm them down; reassure them. They had 28 Panamanians in the back of an H-60 helicopter along with the rescue swimmer and a flight mechanic, and I mean we could probably put ten to twelve in reasonably. But my thoughts were that even if there were, say, hundreds on the rooftop, first, no one would have thought that the building would have collapsed that quickly.
Q: Right, exactly, Yes.
CAPT Yatto: And we all know that it was the temperature that . . . structurally it was okay but the temperature just melted the steel; weakened the steel, and then it collapsed on itself. But there are plenty of areas nearby. There’s a helicopter landing pad; the Wall Street pad, which is on the East River on the southern tip of Manhattan, and that’s just probably a two-minute flight, not even, from the top of the World Trade Center.
Q: What were your feelings when they were diverted; when your crews were told to land and not to go in?
CAPT Yatto: Well by that time the towers had collapsed and I knew at that point . . . I think their usefulness . . . at least the mission changed from trying to pull people off the top of the roof to more of a logistics type of mission. I think that was the right call. I mean all they would have been doing was circling overhead, really not helping out any. I thought there might be a mission.
Q: Do you think they should have been - assuming that the building was still up - that they should have been allowed to proceed?
CAPT Yatto: I think they’d probably . . . if there were people on the rooftop and they could have gotten in they would have hovered over the rooftop to try and pick up people.
Q: Do you think it would be possible for . . . would it have been physically possible for them to pick people up out of the windows?
CAPT Yatto: That would have been tough.
Q: They’re upwind and let the basket sort of sway and sort of . . .
CAPT Yatto: That would have been tough. We do cliff rescue training.
Q: Do you?
CAPT Yatto: We send our flight crews out to Coast Guard Air Station Astoria where they have Advanced Rescue Swimmer Training and they practice things like cliff rescues, where you’ll send a rescue swimmer down on a harness and he can basically pick up another survivor. So it’s potentially feasible for that crew to have lowered a rescue swimmer down 50, 60, 80 feet down the side of that, you know, with the helicopter hovering over the rooftop to pick someone out of a window.
Q: I would think that that would be . . .
CAPT Yatto: It would be pretty interesting.
Q: . . . slightly unnerving for the rescue swimmer.
CAPT Yatto: We’ve had unique cases in the past. There was an H-3 down in the 8th Coast Guard District that pulled an individual out of a, basically a grain elevator.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: So the helicopter was hovering at the top of this tall structure and they lowered the cable down to pick someone up.
Q: What kind of communications were going on back and forth between you and the District that morning after the crews had been launched?
CAPT Yatto: I’ll say it was relatively quiet after we launched.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: And a lot of times the District will take a wait and see. You know they’ll issue the . . . if they determine there’s a need they’ll issue the order to launch and then they essentially wait for feedback from us a lot of the time.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: And when the crews get airborne they’re required to maintain a radio guard and they normally maintain that over HF; High Frequency radio with CAMSLANT [ Communications Area Master Station Atlantic Area ] as a communication station down in Chesapeake. In fact a lot of times CAMSLANT will maintain their radio guard and not . . . they’ll tell us that they have a radio guard for one of our aircraft and normally we don’t talk to them a whole lot more than that. So we also wait for the pilots or someone in the flight crew to report back. A lot of times it’ll be a landline once they land somewhere.
Q: Right, sure. Captain [ William R. ] Webster, is he your POC in the District?
CAPT Yatto: Yes, he’s the Chief of Operations, right.
Q: Do you foresee . . . well let me ask it in another way. Since in the last six months or so have you sat down with your crews, or have you sort of war gamed it or role played this kind of new urban environment we’re in where you have people pulling dirty bombs up to ports or blowing up buildings like this? In other words you’re going to be called upon, presumably it seems like from now on, to do strange rescues like this and you can’t really prepare for them but you have to be sort of aware that they’re a possibility. Have you talked about that with your crews?
CAPT Yatto: We’ve . . . not so much with our crews as we’ve sat down with Captain Mark [ G. ] Vanhaverbeke; the CO of Marine Safety Office Providence and Captain Jim Murray; the Commander of Group Wood’s Hole. I don’t know if you’ve talked to them yet or not. Actually we had one meeting in this room and talked about not only some of the potential types of missions that we’ll get called out on but also how we can share information.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: It seems to me that the Groups and the Marine Safety Offices are the ones that are bearing the brunt of the additional work. In Aviation we have . . . we’re basically funded for so many program flight hours per airframe. We get 800 per year for each [ HU-25 ] Falcon airframe and 700 per year for each H-60. So that, with four 60s and four Falcons, that comes out to 6,000 flight hours a year. So our pie; our world of work, hasn’t expanded. What’s happened is, is that the pie’s the same size but the slice of the pie has changed to where we . . . at one time we were doing LMR; Living Marine Resources and fisheries patrols. Now we’ve shifted to Homeland Defense Security Patrols. Our closed areas; fishing areas, we’ve actually modified those to include shipping routes, shipping channels for large merchant vessels 300 gross tons and higher that are coming into U.S. ports. We’ve kind of gone back towards the LMR mission now but we’re still looking and interested in large commercial vessels.
Q: It seemed like in the first few weeks or months it really hadn’t stopped. People are waiting for the other shoe to drop. First it was anthrax, and who knows where or when it’s going to be, but there’s that sense out there that something’s going to happen.
CAPT Yatto: Non-specific threats.
Q: Non-specific threats.
CAPT Yatto: Yes.
Q: How do you prep your people for things that they can’t see or can’t anticipate?
CAPT Yatto: Well I would say that what we perceive as the biggest threat is to the facility itself here, and what we’ve done is we’ve basically told people to be more aware; to be the eyes and ears. For example, on the backside of the hangar here we’re literally 50 feet from the edge of the MMR; the Massachusetts Military Reservation. In fact one thing we’ve found out post 9-11 when we started working a lot more closely with the surrounding police departments for Upper Capetown is that we actually have a 200 acre farm that’s owned by a Pakistani. (Laughter). And I mean he’s owned it for several years but he doesn’t farm it, so it raised some suspicions; what’s he doing with it right next to the base? And I think the visibility of the 102nd Fighter Wing was raised significantly. I mean everyone knows that they launched and they were the only military aircraft to launch on the World Trade Center.
Q: And to get close.
CAPT Yatto: Exactly, so we were concerned that . . .
Q: Well that brings up another point because I think that there was a . . . they got close, but there is a question as to what they would have done even had they gotten there.
CAPT Yatto: Oh yes, they did not have authority to . . . say, if they had arrived on-scene before a commercial jet . . . say that commercial jet was . . .
Q: It’s very unlikely they would have been able to stop it.
CAPT Yatto: . . . around West Point and heading down the Hudson, they wouldn’t have shot him down.
Q: And then about a month or so later there was that kid in Florida that flew into . . .
CAPT Yatto: Sure.
Q: . . . when there was a Coast Guard helicopter nearby.
CAPT Yatto: Exactly, yes, an H-60 that basically was trying to get his attention and . . .
Q: And he didn’t respond and they were in no position to really stop him.
CAPT Yatto: There’s not much they could have done. But I guess now there’s someone at a flag or general level within the Air Force that can give the order to shoot down civilian aircraft.
Q: I excerpted these from the Abstract of Operations. This is aircraft operations from September 10th through the 13th.
CAPT Yatto: Okay.
Q: This is where your normal operations were and you did the different missions on the 10th, then you see everything grounded on the 11th more or less.
CAPT Yatto: Well part of that was that . . . in fact we had a . . . during that period of time we had an H-60 Stand Visit from Mobile, and their pilots, flight mechanic and rescue swimmer would go around - they’ll spend two weeks flying. Every pilot goes through two flights; Stand-One and Stand-Two, Stand-One being a land-bounce in the field.
Q: And what does that stand for?
CAPT Yatto: Standardization.
Q: Okay.
CAPT Yatto: So once a year Mobile sends a team around to each H-60, H-65 and Falcon unit.
Q: Right, and that’s the standardized procedures throughout the Service?
CAPT Yatto: In fact we do it for the C-130 but it’s not based out of Mobile, but you’re exactly right. All of Aviation gets a standardization visit. It’s generally a two-week period during the year and we were right in the middle of that, and post-9-11 immediately after there were no flights, so that’s why you see a big drop.
Q: Yes. These support flights, these would be mostly training or are these maintenance flights?
CAPT Yatto: Let me see here. We don’t show training here so I would say that support would fall in the realm of training.
Q: Was it unusual - I just found out about it when I came onboard this morning - that you had a Canadian pilot . . .
CAPT Yatto: A Canadian exchange pilot.
Q: Yes, flying the first mission toward the World Trade Center that morning?
CAPT Yatto: Well that’s . . . I mean that’s not . . . that shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. We have Canadian military officers that work out at NORAD [ North American Aerospace Defense Command ] in Cheyenne Mountain.
Q: Right . I saw some of those fellows’ interviews. They were training to fly radar support; AWACS [ Airborne Warning and Control System ] planes.
CAPT Yatto: Sure.
Q: And when I interviewed one of them they said, we’re trained to do this. We just never thought that we’d be doing it over Nevada.
CAPT Yatto: Yes, in fact we have PAVE PAWS [ Precision Acquisition Vehicle Energy - Phased Array Warning System ], which is a radar site up at the north end of the base and they have a Canadian exchange officer on their team.
Q: Do you generally have an exchange officer here more or less?
CAPT Yatto: At the Station we do. I was stationed here back in the early ‘80s and we’ve always had a Canadian exchange pilot billet.
Q: Right. It’s a terrific story. As I say, this wasn’t really even on our screen until a couple of weeks ago and he was a fabulous interview.
CAPT Yatto: He’s good, Yes. Lieutenant Palfy, that’s good. There was a Canadian exchange C-130 billet I think in Clearwater, Florida. I think there’s one down there also.
Q: Do you take any lessons from this? It’s kind of apropos and appropriate that you’re going to Deep Water. Do you take any lessons from 9-11 with you to the Deep Water Project?
CAPT Yatto: I would say not specific to 9-11 but there are some challenges we have. For example; with communications, and part of Deep Water is not to just buying ships and airplanes but the communications and integrating all those platforms together so that you can communicate. I’ve been out on fisheries patrols where I can’t talk to the cutter on secure communications.
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: We’ve got a weak communications suite to begin with in the H-60 helicopter and then when you throw secure comms on top of that it degrades the performance of the comms suite even further to the point where I would say it’s a crap shoot. You know, 50 percent is - I’ll throw off the top of my head - 50 percent of the time we can’t talk to the cutter and that’s unsat.
Q: It’s staggering to me as coming from somebody more or less as an outsider to . . . the thing that was surprising to me was this split sort of dichotomy in the Service between the “M” [ Marine Safety ] people and the “O” [ Operations ] people.
CAPT Yatto: Yes.
Q: You have to realize that “M” people don’t have boats. A Captain of the Port doesn’t have a boat to get around his own port. He talks to the “O” people to get transportation.
CAPT Yatto: Well I think the [ Vice President ] Al Haig thing of who’s in charge really surfaced post 9-11 between “M” and “O”.
Q: Oh Yes.
CAPT Yatto: Who’s taken ownership?
Q: Right.
CAPT Yatto: And that was really evident when I went to . . . every fall we have an Aviation CO’s Conference and it’s normally close to Headquarters, and you go into the building and you get briefed. The Commandant talks and you get a brief from “M” and “O” and you really get the feeling that we’re evolving in this area of ports and harbors, but who’s taking it for action, the “M” community or the “O” community?
Q: Yes. When I was interviewing Admiral Allen that’s one of the things he said. He said, if they don’t take this chance to do something about that; to merge those two and to get them to work together, then we’ll never get this chance again.
CAPT Yatto: And even at the pointy end of the spear it, for example, we have Activities New York, which everything is under one umbrella; under one roof.
Q: Which they were probably lucky, at least the Coast Guard was lucky 9-11 happened in New York and not somewhere else where at least they had all of those operations under one roof.
CAPT Yatto: Group Long Island Sound has “M” incorporated within that Group. Yet you go to Boston and you have Group Boston and Marine Safety Office Boston. In fact there was an initiative to combine the MSO and the Group at Boston and I think that has kind of been pushed to the back burner due to 9-11, so.
Q: Right. Where do you see Aviation after this? Is this going to impact Search and Rescue in terms of just having to prepare for a whole new set of scenarios?
CAPT Yatto: Well I think we need to look a little more closely at where the threats are. For example, we’ve flown flights of opportunity. We don’t do specific . .
END OF INTERVIEW
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