Qualla: Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City

Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USCG, Public domain. A Coast Guard pilot once described the call as the kind you remember for the rest of your career: a fishing boat going down in the Gulf Stream, two hundred miles offshore in heavy weather, the only platform that could reach them an HC-130J Hercules climbing out of Elizabeth City. The Hercules dropped a survival pump. The crew kept the boat afloat long enough for an MH-60T Jayhawk - also from Elizabeth City - to reach them and pull every person off the deck. That is the daily geometry of Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: long-range Hercules and medium-range Jayhawks operating together across an ocean's worth of empty water, from Greenland to the Azores to the Caribbean.

Image: USCG | Public domain

Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: Commissioned 1940

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Public domain. On August 15, 1940, Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City stood up with four officers, fifty-two enlisted men, and ten aircraft - three Hall PH-2 seaplanes, four Fairchild J2K landplanes, and three Grumman J2F Duck amphibians. The site had been picked in 1938 by Coast Guard plan...

Image: U.S. Navy | Public domain

Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: Sister Station at Weeksville

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Public domain. Two miles southeast, Naval Air Station Weeksville operated lighter-than-air airships from 1941 to 1957 - the great wartime blimps that lumbered out over the convoy lanes hunting submarines from above. During the war, Elizabeth City was under Navy control, flying search and rescue...

Image: U.S. Navy | Public domain

Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: Hercules and Jayhawk

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Felce (Airwolfhound), CC BY-SA 2.0. Today the airfield operates five HC-130J Hercules and four MH-60T Jayhawk helicopters. The Hercules is a four-engine turboprop with a 3,000-mile range and a search radar that can map a ship in a storm at fifty miles; the Jayhawk is a long-range twin-turbine helicopter with hoist ...

Image: Tim Felce (Airwolfhound) | CC BY-SA 2.0

Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City: On Screen, In Life

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Public domain. In 2006, the station stood in for Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, Alaska, in the Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner film The Guardian. The crew that helped make that movie work was the same crew that, between takes, was launching real rescues into real ocean. In 2018 an Elizabeth C...

Image: U.S. Navy | Public domain