Michigan is home to 43 United States Coast Guard Boat Stations, dotted up and down the coasts of the Great Lakes. While there are over 200 Coast Guard Boat Stations in the U.S., though, there are only 24 Coast Guard Air Stations, and just two of those are in Michigan. One of them is in Detroit. The other is right here in Traverse City.

It’s easy to forget about Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City – nestled, as it is, up Airport Access Road in an area rarely traveled by most locals. Then again, that might be the whole purpose of a Coast Guard station: You only know it’s there when you need it.

Nationwide, the Coast Guard operates approximately 210 aircraft across its various air stations. Three of those are based in Traverse City – a trio of orange-and-white Sikorsky MH-60T “Jayhawk” helicopters. But what does a year in the life look like for our local air station, and how many people require emergency assistance from the men and women stationed there? The Ticker touched base with LTJG (Lieutenant Junior Grade) Teddy Keenan – who serves as both a helicopter pilot and as public affairs officer for Air Station Traverse City – to get a sense of what 2022 looked like for the local branch of the U.S. Coast Guard.

First, some background details: Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City was established all the way back in 1946 and has an area of operations that spans all of Lake Michigan, all of Lake Superior, and most of Lake Huron. (Detroit’s air station covers Lake Erie and the southern parts of Lake Huron.) When an emergency call comes in, on-duty pilots have 30 minutes to get a helicopter in the air. Missions can include anything from rescuing swimmers or kayakers, to assisting people stranded on ice floes, to locating lost hikers out on Beaver Island, to providing medical evacuations for Mackinac Island residents who require medical attention in the winter.

This year, Keenan says Air Station Traverse City tallied 126 search and rescue missions in its service territory, including 11 lives saved and one life assisted. Plus, in addition to those saves, some of the local Air Station’s most crucial missions of the year actually took local Coast Guard pilots outside of their Great Lakes service radius entirely.

“Air Station Traverse City also responded to numerous natural disasters along the Gulf and East Coasts,” Keenan says. “Most notably was the Category 4 Hurricane Ian, where crew members from the Air Station were deployed and saved 11 lives and assisted 5 others.” Those numbers, Keenan explains, are not included in the Air Station’s overall stats for the year, but were a big part of 2022’s work.

Beyond the business of actually saving people’s lives, pilots at Air Station Traverse City also provide a variety of other services in and around the Great Lakes, such as assisting Aids to Navigation (ATON) teams. Per the Coast Guard website, ATON is essentially about making sure that nautical vessels have the maritime equivalent of “rules of the road.” By making sure “this network of signs, symbols, buoys, markers, lighthouses, and regulations is up to date and functioning properly,” the Coast Guard ensures that “recreational and commercial boaters can safely navigate the maritime environment.” According to Keenan, Air Station Traverse City pilots are often called in to assist the ATON teams from Two Rivers, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota, “to provide critical servicing of five lighthouses.”

“Due to the remote locations, shoal water, and hazardous weather, it can often be impossible for crews to reach these [lighthouses] by boat,” Keenan explains. “The Air Station transported these ATON teams and their gear to accomplish inspections and repairs, ensuring the continual safe passage of maritime vessels.”

Speaking of hazardous weather, Keenan says Air Station Traverse City is also responsible for “continuous patrol and monitoring of Great Lakes ice formations.” One of the Air Station’s most notable missions of recent years came in February 2021, when 66 ice fishermen found themselves stranded on an ice floe in Green Bay. That piece of ice had drifted nearly two miles from shore, and to make matters worse, a winter storm was rolling in. Coast Guard Air Station assisted numerous other Coast Guard branches and other emergency response teams in Wisconsin in the rescue effort.

While not every year has an ice floe emergency on that level, Keenan says Air Station Traverse City is doing “continuous patrol and monitoring of Great Lakes ice formation” during the cold months. That work, he says, involves monitoring ice in a wide range of locations – from local boat launch sites to the St. Mary’s River. Particularly important, Keenan tells The Ticker, is the support that local Coast Guard pilots provide to the Soo Locks – and to preserving the economic activity of the “more than 500 billion dollars of iron ore” that pass through that channel annually.

It's not all about flying missions, though – or even flying at all. One highlight of the year, Keenan says, was the opportunity for Air Station Traverse City to open its doors and ramps to more visitors than it’s had since before the pandemic. Once a month or more, the Air Station hosted community tours that brought in, collectively, “more than 500 members of the community, the vast majority being youth interested in the Coast Guard.” Keenan highlights those tours – which were largely impossible in the earlier stages of COVID – as crucial for “inspiring a younger generation with hands-on learning experiences” and helping to “bolster recruiting efforts.”

The biggest visiting opportunity of all came in July, when military aircraft – including the Blue Angels – flew in for the National Cherry Festival air show. Typically, Air Station Traverse City provides support for that event and also hosts an “open ramp,” which gives visitors a chance to come to the base, meet the pilots, see the aircraft up close, and more. That event has been on hold since 2019, due to the pandemic, but it came back with a vengeance this year, drawing in an estimated 10,000 people.

As a public affairs man, Keenan is fond of opportunities to share interesting tidbits about the Air Station with the public. Those details can include everything from facts about the design of the helicopters themselves (note that there’s only a clearance of two-and-a-quarter inches between the main rotor blade and the tail rotor) or about all the equipment the copters have to carry into the field (the searchlight for finding people in the dark, for instance, is powerful enough to “light stuff on fire within 10 feet”).

And then there’s the question of just how much it costs to launch a Jayhawk helicopter on a rescue mission.

“You don’t want to send a $25,000-an-hour helicopter out into the field unnecessarily,” Keenan laughs. “The beautiful thing about the Coast Guard is that, if you need to get rescued, the cost is always going to be zero. Your taxes pay for it. But every once in a while, someone calls in a complete hoax because they’re trying to get a helicopter launched. And they’ll charge you if you do that!”