Welcome to the Civil Air Patrol 85th Anniversary Series. Each week leading up to CAP’s milestone anniversary on Dec. 1, we will be highlighting key operations and developments in the organization’s history, as depicted in this newly designed “Be a Part of the Story” historical timeline:
This is the seventh feature of the series based on this tile included in the timeline: “After Katrina: How One Storm Reshaped Civil Air Patrol’s Disaster Response.”
The Civil Air Patrol crew left Lake Charles, Louisiana, at first light and flew east toward a city most Americans were still seeing only on television. Hurricane Katrina had come ashore Aug. 29, 2005, and the levees protecting New Orleans had failed behind it. Because his Louisiana Wing unit sat on the far side of the state from the storm’s path, Col. Rock Palermo’s aircraft was able to slip in behind Katrina and be among the first fixed-wing aircraft in the operations area.
“Upon our arrival, the only other aircraft we saw were U.S. Coast Guard helicopters performing rooftop rescues and Army National Guard helicopters doing similar rescues on overpasses,” Palermo recalled in a 2015 interview with Civil Air Patrol VOLUNTEER magazine.
There was no air traffic control. Standard radios were down. Palermo’s crew talked plane to plane with Coast Guard and Guard pilots, kept their eyes outside the cockpit for collisions, and went to work finding the places where large numbers of people were stranded so the Guard helicopters knew where to land. Their Cessna was one of a handful in CAP’s fleet carrying a satellite-transmitted digital imaging system, so the crew photographed locations and sent the images to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge in near-real time.
First Lt. Scott Hunsaker, the crew’s photographer, now a CAP major and pilot, had family and work ties to the area and knew what it was supposed to look like. “The destruction was obvious and the scene was surreal,” he said in the same VOLUNTEER article. “I think the scope of the damage took a few minutes to sink in.”
A satellite image of Hurricane Katrina taken on Aug. 29, 2005, the day it hit the Gulf Coast, shows the massive size of the storm, which grew to a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico before it made landfall. (NOAA photo)
A Wake-Up Call
Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,833 people, caused a record $108 billion in damage, and left up to 300,000 homes destroyed or uninhabitable. Nearly 80% of New Orleans flooded.
“Katrina slapped the nation back into reality and said, ‘Hey look, it’s not just about terrorism. Nature still has a vote in what happens on this planet.’”
Ditch, director of CAP’s Operation Pulse Lift and the National Emergency Services Academy Mobile Training Team, spent 45 days in the disaster zone helping lead FEMA Disaster Medical Assistance Teams two years before he joined CAP.
Katrina also exposed how difficult it could be to mobilize help before a disaster and coordinate it once the response was underway.
Col. Mark Lahan, CAP’s interim director of operations, was serving in the U.S. Army in New Orleans during the storm. Before Katrina, he said, “you couldn’t pre-position for a disaster. You had to wait till it hit and the governor asked.”
The reforms that followed changed how agencies could prepare and coordinate for major disasters. “That changed a lot of how response is done across the country,” Lahan said. “Not just us, but everybody.”
First Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré briefs Civil Air Patrol Col. Rock Palermo, right, and others involved in the massive response to Hurricane Katrina. The disaster relief effort was officially called Joint Task Force Katrina and Honoré, now retired, served as commander. Palermo, then a member of the Louisiana Wing, led operations for some of the first CAP flights in New Orleans, but died in an aircraft accident in 2021. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
A Coming-of-Age for Civil Air Patrol
For CAP, Katrina was a coming-of-age. It marked the first time CAP units were fully integrated into a joint task force structure during a real-world contingency, serving in both Joint Task Force Katrina and Joint Task Force Rita.
Richard L. Anderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs and a former CAP national commander, said that was when the Air Force, FEMA, and state emergency managers “saw the value of Civil Air Patrol” and its fleet of Cessnas, which could fly from airfields that flooding had left barely usable.
The experience demonstrated something CAP would build on for the next two decades: a national volunteer force that quickly could bring aircraft, trained personnel, and specialized capabilities into a disaster zone and work alongside military and civilian agencies already there.
During Civil Air Patrol’s response to Katrina, CAP aircrews were asked to provide photos of a lot of critical infrastructure like this bridge along the Gulf Coast. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
This aerial image shows the devastation Katrina wrought to a neighborhood near the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The damage was extensive and widespread, from Bay St. Louis east to Pascagoula. (FEMA photo)
Laptops, Satellite Links, and Door-to-Door Checks
By any measure, Katrina was one of the largest responses in CAP’s history. More than 1,800 members from 17 wings logged more than 50,000 volunteer hours in air and ground search and rescue, aerial photography, transportation, and evacuation. Aircrews flew nearly 1,000 missions, according to the Air Force, and delivered more than 2,000 time-critical images of schools, hospitals, and other key facilities to emergency managers, often within minutes.
Some of that readiness came down to timing. “We [CAP] were lucky,” Lt. Col. Amos Plante of the Louisiana Wing told the VOLUNTEER in 2015. “Most of our planes were in the northern part of the state for emergency services training exercises. The complete fleet was still intact and available.”
The tools were cutting-edge for their day: satellite-linked laptops, a handful of aircraft with digital cameras that could transmit stills over the internet, and HF radios for when everything else failed. But much of the response was still built on the ground, after the fact, wing by wing.
“Back in the day, CAP was really responding after the event.” said John W. Desmarais Sr., a former CAP director of operations.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a helicopter conducts rescue operations on a partially submerged interstate in New Orleans. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
Following Katrina, tens of thousands of people were evacuated to other parts of the country. Here, Civil Air Patrol adult members and cadets manned gurneys for evacuees, many of whom had to be treated for medical emergencies. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
From Reacting to Pre-Positioning
Katrina’s lessons did not stay in New Orleans. Five years later, the Gulf tested CAP again, this time with oil instead of water. After the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, 2010, 150 CAP members flew 54 aircraft for 120 days, logging 1,010 sorties and 2,387 flight hours. Crews photographed the shoreline daily, tracking containment booms, cleanup crews, and oil sheen. Col. James M. Rushing, then Southeast Region commander, called it CAP’s largest mission since World War II.
The Gulf missions reflected a deeper change. Desmarais said the 2004 hurricane season had already pushed CAP toward “a more forward-leaning posture,” and the years of relationship-building with FEMA and state agencies that followed kept it there. Today, he said, “CAP is one of the first calls even before landfall in many areas. We are engaged more often and really are brought in for valuable missions, not just to handle the leftover work.”
The biggest shift, in his view, was structural. CAP moved from 52 loosely connected wings “to one interoperable organization deploying as a team system that can backfill itself.”
The post-Katrina shift toward pre-positioning helped make that possible. When FEMA expects a major storm, it can use surge funding to task CAP under Title 10 to move people, aircraft, and vehicles into place before landfall.
“We can already be set up, ready to go, and then we can start doing the operations right away.”
That is a fundamental difference from the CAP that flew into New Orleans in 2005. Rather than waiting for a disaster to unfold and then assembling a response, CAP increasingly can be in a position before it happens.
During Civil Air Patrol’s response to Katrina, CAP aircrews also provided photos of oil refineries and storage areas along the Gulf Coast. CAP’s hyperspectral imaging system helped supply the need in the region long after the hurricane had passed. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
Eyes from Everywhere
The handful of satellite-linked cameras that flew over New Orleans has grown into what may be CAP’s most important disaster tool: not just imagery, but the ability to turn that imagery into actional information.
When Kilauea erupted on Hawaii’s Big Island in 2018, Hawaii Wing crews flying out of Hilo reported ash plume heights and photographed lava flows for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and Hawaii County Civil Defense. Today CAP aircraft carry a two-camera pod that covers huge areas in a single mission, with every image tied to GPS. “We fly back and forth, and we can cover huge areas for damage assessment now, where that would have taken weeks to do on the ground,” Lahan said.
The CAP Geospatial Program, founded in 2019, takes that imagery further. Trained members, including cadets, assess damage remotely from home computers for FEMA, sometimes before responders reach the scene. After the August 2023 wildfires on Maui, the team assessed roughly 2,000 homes and businesses in Lahaina and Kula and found more than 1,800 damaged or destroyed. The damage map the team helped FEMA build ended up in the president’s hands.
The contrast with 2005 is striking. During Katrina, a small number of aircraft could transmit individual images to emergency managers within minutes. Today, CAP can collect imagery over vast areas, tie it to precise locations and have trained members analyze the damage remotely.
Drones have added another layer. On Oct. 4, 2022, imagery from a CAP small, uncrewed aircraft systems team from the Missouri Wing led rescuers to a person trapped in a boat in a Florida mangrove swamp after Hurricane Ian. FEMA credited CAP with the save, saying the victim would not have been found anytime soon without the imagery.
Starlink is next, Lahan said, letting crews stream full-motion video to FEMA or a state emergency operations center “regardless of what the communications situation on the ground is.”
This aerial photo taken by a CAP aircrew in the days following Katrina shows beach erosion near Mobile, Alabama. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
The Next Katrina
Even though the 2026 hurricane season has ended, Anderson has no doubt another storm on Katrina’s scale is coming.
“Disasters of that magnitude are infrequent, but nonetheless, periodically, the nation will experience these sorts of natural disasters. They will continue.”
What CAP will bring to that storm, he said, is much more than what it brought to the Gulf Coast in 2005: the ability to pull help from across the country at once. In major disasters, Anderson said, “We can deploy multiple Civil Air Patrol units, or even multiple Civil Air Patrol wings, which was done during Katrina.” When floods cut a community off and the cell towers go dark, CAP can still send in radio-equipped teams that become “literally the only communications in and out of those communities,” he said.
The tools will keep changing. Desmarais expects artificial intelligence to help decide what imagery to collect and to speed up its analysis, and CAP to “soon truly get to near-real-time dissemination.”
“Technology always progresses in exponential ways,” Anderson said. “These advanced technologies eventually migrate their way into organizations like Civil Air Patrol.”
“We’re going to use more tools … to allow the work to get done more quickly and at less risk,” Lahan predicted, “but there’s still going to have to be people out there doing the work.”
Twenty-one years after Palermo’s crew flew into an uncontrolled sky over a drowning city, CAP is a different organization. Its aircraft are more capable; its communications are more resilient; its imagery can be analyzed from thousands of miles away; and its teams can be positioned before disaster strikes.
However, the essential knowledge on such disasters has remained the same. “The lessons of Katrina,” Anderson said, “have been incorporated into current-day operations.”
Dozens of CAP members, like this unidentified cadet, spent hundreds of hours canvassing neighborhoods that had been hit hard by the hurricane. (Source: CAP National Headquarters)
Be a Part of the Story
In Civil Air Patrol’s disaster relief and emergency services operations, adult and youth members may help with search missions, communications, taking photos, or transportation of relief supplies.
With more than 1,400 local units nationwide, there’s a CAP opportunity near you.
To learn more about membership and find your local unit, visit this “how to join” page.
