Stuff You Should Know - What is the Civil Air Patrol?

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

The Civil Air Patrol is a civilian group of pilots and plane enthusiasts who do a lot of things, namely help out in search and rescue missions. But their history is a bit more colorful. Listen in today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Civil Air Patrol. I've got a different version of it. Okay. Civil Air Patrol, Civil Air Patrol, Civil Air Patrol, Civil Air Patrol, Civil Air Patrol, Civil Air Patrol, oh, oh. Do you remember when I used to put that in your head?

Yeah, it's like the good old days when you used to earworm me. I think this is the greatest earworm of all. It's pretty good, it's in my head now. Good. Civil Air, here. I like that version. Civil Air Patrol.

So, we're talking about the Civil Air Patrol, and we're gonna just say what it is right out of the gate. Okay, go ahead. Now, let's talk first about what I ate for breakfast. Okay. What'd you have? Did you have bacon? No, I didn't eat breakfast.

Okay. Civil Air Patrol is a non-profit group. It's a civilian group of, well, of plain enthusiasts, but they're much more than that. They have sort of a quasi-military hierarchy. They are under the control of the US Air Force, and what they do a lot these days is things like search and rescue.

We talked a little bit about them in our SAR episodes. But they have a very cool kind of rich and colorful history, and I'm trying to get John Roderick of the indie rock band, The Long Winters, My Pal, and from the podcast, well, he does a lot of podcasts. Which one should we say? Friendly Fire? Sure.

His war movie podcast. He was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, and I texted him and said, I'd love to get a quote from you on your experience. And he says, heck yeah. And then he never said anything. So if it comes in, we'll read it. If not, just know that John was a teenage member

of the Civil Air Patrol. Nice. Which you still can be. Yeah, you definitely still can be. It's still around. There's from what I saw, it's something like 60,000 strong today. Not bad?

No, not bad at all. And I get the impression it's a little bit like the Eagle Scouts of the Air, for like under 18 people. Yeah, the cadet program, it sounded very much like sort of Boy Scouts meets ROTC. Yeah, because there's a lot of emphasis on public service and being an upstanding person,

and just not stealing things. I think there's a big emphasis on that. Yeah, but also you get the feeling there's a little bit of like, you wanna go in the Air Force, right, son? Right, well, I think that is kind of either, if it's not a stated part of it, if it's, it's still like a definite function

of the Civil Air Patrol is it feeds into the actual Air Force cadet program. And you can actually benefit from being in the Civil Air Patrol, if you do plan to go into the Air Force, apparently you can enter the Air Force at a higher pay grade, if you have worked up to a certain rank

in the Civil Air Patrol. So, if you're interested in being a good citizen, if you like to fly, if you want to be in the Air Force, you could do a lot worse than joining the Civil Air Patrol, I'll tell you that. Yeah, if you wanna be a part of what they say is about 100 saves a year out in the wilderness,

or if you just wanna be a part of an organization that had a very cool origin, which we'll talk about right now. Okay, let's. Early on in aviation history, in like the 1920s and 30s, still in its infancy, but it was big enough to where people could like own a plane and they could buy their own personal plane

and get their pilot's license. Yeah, which is, that's really fast, if you think about it, I mean, the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1908. Yeah, I mean, a couple of decades later, people were like, I wanna own a plane and fly it. That's how everybody talked that mid-Atlantic accent. That's right.

Hey, Chuck, by the way, I wanna shout out, what I have come to think is one of the top three facts of stuff you should know of all time, that the Brits originally sounded like Americans and that the Brits lost their American accent rather than the other way around. Is that true? Yeah, don't you remember in our accent podcast?

When did they sound like Americans? It started up to about the 20s or 30s and then the BBC came along on the radio and they made a conscious decision to sound like Oxford types who had basically affected an accent in order to separate themselves and sound classier. So you're saying? And that's what the BBC adopted.

If there was audio recording from 1910, then a guy from Central London would sound like me right now. Basically, yeah. So they're getting it wrong in all those movies too then? Yes. But these are also the same movies where Nazis sound like British people on the BBC.

So it's all kinds of messed up. All right. I love that you just bring out a random fact from an old show is the fact of stuff you should know, all time history. But let's go back in time. Let's hop in the way back machine and go back to the Great War.

The Second World War. Okay. There were people in this country that loved their flying civilians and they saw the beginning of the war in the late 1930s when a European fascist basically said, nine, no more civilian flying, it's all shut down. And so the aviators over here,

civilian aviators were like, whoa, that's not cool. We like flying our planes. Maybe we should get organized and see if we can actually add value to the military as civilians because that was back when all Americans wanted to pitch in a little bit to help out the war effort. Right.

There was one guy in particular, a guy named Gil Robb Wilson, but he was not the only one. There's another dude named Milton Knight and both are credited with founding basically civilian Air Force auxiliary programs. Right. Hey, military, we're not military.

It's cool. But there's other stuff we can do to help you guys out. And let's also not forget that if we can use our collective clout to popularize flying and aviation and just get more Americans interested in it and showing that, hey, you can actually learn to fly. Come hang out with us and we'll show you how.

We'll be generating a pool of pre-trained pilots who can transfer over to the military if the US ends up going into World War II. Yeah, almost like a reserve unit even though it is not that. No, it's an auxiliary unit, which means it's an auxiliary. It's on the side.

It's in addition to, it's not like a reserve unit that can be called up to active duty military like the reserves. It's a civilian volunteer force. Right, so Gil Robb Wilson was working on this and kind of concurrently, there were some state-based aviation groups for civilian civil defense units

that were kind of cropping up here and there on the East Coast. And so he kind of saw the writing on the wall and wanted to make things official. So he developed a plan in 1941 for the Civil Air Patrol. Got some port, very importantly, got support from a gentleman named Fiorello LaGuardia. You don't put any mustard on LaGuardia?

No, it's just a cruddy airport. Okay, man, it is. I like LaGuardia. It's coming along, but it's still kind of cruddy. It's fine, none of the New York airports are great. Let's be honest. Have you ever seen the pictures of the abandoned TWA terminal at LaGuardia?

I don't know. From like the jet age of the 60s. Is it awesome? It's amazing. It's like a time capsule frozen in time. And I think they converted it into a hotel recently. But like somebody did a really good photo spread like back in 2012 or whatever.

Just look up TWA terminal. Maybe it's JFK and not LaGuardia. I think it is JFK. Either way, it's still worth checking out. I'll check it out. Okay. So LaGuardia, he was the director of the Office of Civilian Defense at the time.

He, of course, the airport was named after him. He was mayor of New York City at one point. He was an aviator in World War I. So it was really a big deal to get him on board. And they designed their little logo, which is a blue circle with a propeller, three propellers in a white triangle. And initially they were handled by,

because this was pre Air Force, before the Air Force was officially established after World War II. It was part of the U.S. Army Air Corps, or was the U.S. Army Air Corps. Which I think we made that distinction in the Tuskegee Airmen. Yeah, I think so.

If I remember correctly. So everyone kind of gets on board, and LaGuardia signs the Civil Air Corps, as it was known originally, into existence. On December 1st, 1941, and as you will note, that date was very relevant, because just six days later, is when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened.

And all of a sudden, we could use this help. Yeah, and I mean, remember, this is like a surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. So it was pretty prescient of Gil Robb Wilson, and Fiorello LaGuardia, to get this thing organized and together, because yeah, within a week,

they were like, oh okay, we probably can use you guys. The problem is that the Air Corps initially was like, what are we gonna do with these civilians, you know? Super gung-ho civilians, do I imagine? Right, exactly. Which is like, even worse to have to deal with than just regular old civilians who don't know what they're doing.

In some cases, it turned out that it was actually, the Civil Air Patrol was really helpful, because one of the really overlooked things about World War II is that German U-boats, you know, like a variation of a submarine, but they just couldn't stay under quite as long. Yeah, they did little dives. They wreaked absolute havoc on the United States coasts

during World War II. Basically, within a month of Pearl Harbor, four to six weeks after Pearl Harbor, the first U.S. freighter, the city of Atlanta, was sunk by a U-boat off the coast of North Carolina. And that was the first of, I think, 397 ships that were either sunk or damaged by U-boats in six months off the coast of America.

Yeah, so at this point, the Civil Air Patrol has one wing, is what they called it, per state. I have no idea how many states there were. I think it was 48. Just kidding. And each one of those wings was divided into squadrons, and they were operating out of civilian airports mostly, but then in 1942, they started opening up

some dedicated Civil Air Patrol bases in certain states around the country. So all of a sudden, there are, in 1942, 40,000 people enrolled in the Civil Air Patrol. Yeah. And these German U-boats are doing damage off the coast, and all of a sudden they were like, well, listen, we weren't sure quite what to do with you guys.

You've been helping us out, you've been delivering some things, and even some personnel at times and munitions. But we think what, you know, we don't have the resources in our, what will soon be called the Air Force, to just patrol up and down the East Coast all the time. So that's where you're going to really be valuable to us, and that was really the first big kind of important use of the Civil Air Patrol in World War II.

Yeah, and it was effective too, because with U-boats, part of the doctrine of U-boat warfare sub-commanderness, was that if you saw a plane overhead, you dove, to get away from that plane, because they were very vulnerable from an aerial attack. So just seeing a Civil Air Patrol plane overhead meant that the sub had to break off from pursuit of whatever tanker or freighter or troop transport

it was about to sink, and dive and evade that plane. Just even an unarmed Civil Air Patrol plane, because they didn't know they were unarmed at the time. Exactly, exactly. So this actually started working out pretty well, but there was one incident in particular, off the coast of, right at Cape Canaveral, from what I understand, a U-boat got caught on a sandbar,

and was just laying there exposed, trying to get free for about 30 minutes in a Civil Air Patrol plane, was circling it, had spotted it, had called in for reinforcements, I think for an aerial strike from the Air Corps, for the sitting duck of a U-boat, and before the air strike could get there to blow the U-boat up, it got itself free and made its escape, got away. And this was enough, it was a frustrating enough event.

Can you imagine that pilot was just like, I want a bomb so bad. Well, in very short order, the Air Corps commander, what was his name? Henry Hap Arnold. Hap Arnold said, give them those bombs. And the Civil Air Patrol, not in any way a military organization, a civilian auxiliary group was given depth charges and bombs

to drop on U-boats from that point on for the rest of World War II. Yeah, so here's the deal with that. They had to bomb from very, very high up. They had to use improvised bomb sites, because they didn't just have this stuff lying around, and they needed this stuff for the real, I was about to say the real planes, for the military. So they weren't like, here's the best bomb sites we have.

So there's really no like, I think the Civil Air Patrol probably likes to claim that they actually bombed U-boats, but there aren't any official on-record bombings that were carried out by Civil Air Patrol that sank U-boats. It's been something you talked to. Germany was like, nah, never happened, didn't affect us. They said nine.

Civil Air Patrol was like, no, it's more like, yeah. Right. So it is in dispute in particular one sub that some Civil Air Patrol guys dropped depth charges over in New Jersey. And they said a geyser of oil and water erupted from the water, which would indicate that they had sunk this U-boat. But like you're saying, the Germans don't have any record of anything like that. No geyser, no oil.

They probably didn't. At the very least though, they did harass the German U-boats. Sure. And whether it was directly because of Civil Air Patrol patrols over the coastline or not by July, about six months after the first attack, German U-boats like pulled off of American coastal waters and stopped attacking. So it probably wasn't entirely coincidence. It probably wasn't entirely because of the Civil Air Patrol,

but they almost certainly played a prominent role in Germany's discontinuation of their sub attacks in American waters. Yeah. So here's what we'll do. We'll do a stat cliffhanger. Okay. We'll take a little break and come back with a little bit of statistical evidence to support your claims or right for this.

We're going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. We have a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

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So you said they made a difference and the numbers kind of back it up. First of all, they were only supposed to do this for 90 days while they kind of got the real plan together for the military. They ended up doing this coastal patrol for 18 months. So that alone kind of says it was working. Yeah. Or at the very least, they weren't quick enough to get there, the real plan going. Right.

But here's the stats. 173 subs spotted and ostensibly radioed in, you know, they weren't just spotted and then forgotten about. Right there. Like, I don't feel like calling it in this time. 82 depth charge bomb attacks against those subs. Pretty impressive. Pretty impressive.

Let's say they're not actually bombing them out of the water. It's got to be disconcerting to have civilians up there dropping bombs on you. Sure. It's like the North Avenue regulars, but in the air. They, you know, there were mines out there. They found 17 floating mines and rescued 363 people and 91 ships that had trouble reported, which I don't think we mentioned like, America likes to think that like, oh, well, yeah, the fighting didn't happen over here in the United States.

But if you looked on the East Coast, like on the water, chances are you might have pulled a service person out of the water from one of these bombings. Yeah. Like it happened. There were people in the water that needed rescue and the civil air patrol was there. I read an account of a family that lived on the coast off of Hatteras. Apparently, Cape Hatteras, the waters off Hatteras were called torpedo junction. Oh, wow.

This happened so frequently. But they, like the windows would rattle in your house when a torpedo struck like a tanker or something, you know, eight miles away off the coast. Like it was, you just do not get raised with that in history. It's just not talked about. But it was a pretty big, for six months, it was a big problem for the United States. Yeah. And this was, there was a lot of bravery involved because these little planes, they were stretching

these pilots and their experience and these planes and their mechanical capabilities to the utmost degree to fly these things that far offshore to do these patrols. And they still did it. They flew 500, about 500,000 hours during the war combined and they were not getting rich doing it. They're reimbursed for fuel, but they were paid $8 a day, which even back then was not a lot of money. No, I calculate it's about $125 today.

It's not bad actually. Yeah. Come to think of it. If you're not doing anything else, you might as well. Yeah, I'd take it. Dropping bombs on Nazis, that's kind of fun. And getting $125 bucks for it. Right.

And then the N-30 pilots in the Civil Air Patrol died flying in accidents. And that's in addition to the ones on the coastal patrol. That's just total. I think there were 26 on the actual coastal patrol that died. I thought it was like 65. Now this is 26 deaths and they lost 90 planes. Gotcha. So like this was a really big deal.

I mean like it was saying like you and you, you know, you the guy who owns the TV rich pear shop and you the guy who owns the barber shop next door. Get in these planes and start dropping bombs on these you boats. Yeah. That was a big deal to do to civilians. And in 2014, Obama posthumously in a lot of cases awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest citizen honor that anybody in the U.S. can get to everyone who was in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, all 200,000 people.

And you know what fun fact that you're going to love? What? That barber dropped his scissors and ran out of the barber shop to go get in his plane halfway through a haircut and that's how the mullet was born. Nice. Was it Floyd? It was. Maybe Griffith was the first one with the mullet?

And I bet you didn't know that the mullet was born in the mid 1940s. I suspected as much. Business in the front, war in the rear. Right. Exactly. Man, when was the first mullet created? Do you know? I remember very, very distinctly the first time I heard that term.

I was on set of a TV commercial and this was many, many years after the mullet, but when I was in high school, it wasn't called a mullet. It was just sort of kind of the cool hairstyle for a little while. All right. It's called the burnout. But I remember when I heard the mullet, I was on set and one of my friends said, I said, who is this guy? Who's Lee?

And he said, I don't know why this stuck with me. He said, he is that wedge of grossness over there with the mullet head. I can see that sticking with you. That's pretty good. Yeah. Lee knows who he is. Poor Lee. What else did the Civil Air Patrol do though?

They did some other weird things. Yeah. The thing during World War II that they're definitely remembered for was the bombing sororities and spotting U-boats, but they did plenty of other stuff. Basically, they did anything the Air Corps needed of them, which is things like we need to get this commander from St. Louis to Louisiana. Can you give them a ride? St. Louis to Baton Rouge.

They did that pretty much constantly. They ferried supplies around. They ferried people around. That was a huge part of the war effort here at home by the CAP. Here's a cool thing that they did that also sounds frightening. They would tow what's called target gliders for anti-aircraft guns. You're a plane, you're in your little single-engine plane. You're a civilian.

You were pulling behind you a glider that big guns on the ground are taking target practice at. Yeah. Hopefully with a really long tow line. I wonder how long that could be though. I don't know, but it almost seems mean spirited that assignment. I know. Who did that fall to?

The guy who drove the driving range golf ball pickup Volkswagen. Yeah. He'd be prepared for that kind of thing. That's exactly who did it. I'll bet you're right. That was a huge one. Apparently an equal amount to the danger of being shot out of the sky accidentally in that assignment was also accidentally looking into the searchlights that they used in these

training exercises because at least one pilot was blinded by them and crashed from being I guess disoriented afterward. Here's one final mission. In Texas, the civil air patrol was charged with culling the wolf population. Apparently it would reduce pressure on the cattle herds that these wolves were killing and they needed this beef to feed soldiers and citizens. They said, get up there in your planes and start shooting at wolves. Yeah.

At first when I was reading that, I thought they were saying they needed the wolf meat to feed the troops. I was like, what? Then I understood what it was saying. No. But yeah, they would shoot the wolves with handguns out of their planes. That's right. I think it said wolves instead of wolves.

Wolves. Wolfers. So, World War II comes and goes, civil air patrol proves it's metal and the Army Air Corps is dissolved and basically turned into the Air Force. The Air Force came after World War II. From what I understand, kind of a bit of like hot potato afterward to where no one really wanted the civil air patrol, right? It sounds like it.

Because one of these, a law that was basically passed, HR 5744, which is really significant to you if you're in the civil air patrol, it basically said, no, the civil air patrol isn't going anywhere. They're going to establish its existence under law, but we are never ever going to arm them again. That's just not going to happen. Let's just not speak of this anymore. Let's pretend it never happened, but no one's ever going to drop a bomb again with the civil

air patrol. And so, it doesn't seem like they were particularly sought after, but they ended up falling under the command of the Air Force after it was established and bounced around a little way a few places within the Air Force and then finally landed in the Air Combat Division. Yeah. You know, post-war, they really, really made their name and continue to make their name with search and rescue if you're lost in the woods or if there are natural disasters or big weather events, then the civil air patrol is likely to be involved.

There was a big earthquake in Alaska in 1964 where the Alaskan civil air patrol, and this was where Roderick was in the civil air patrol. In Alaska? Yeah. That's where he's from, but this was 64, so he would have been just a little kid then if not even alive yet, actually. So I don't think he was in that one. He may have just been a gleam.

But their civil air patrol's hangar and planes were all destroyed, so volunteers got it together, got 11 private planes, started flying supplies in there, and these were good pilots and these aircraft did things that military aircraft couldn't do a lot of times. Well, that's where the role of the civil air patrol in search and rescue really kind of became obvious, almost out of the gate, because they were doing search and air rescues during World War II as well. Just the fact that their planes weren't fighter jets was a huge advantage for them in search and rescue because you want to fly slower when you're looking for somebody.

So the fact that you have this group of tens of thousands of civilians who are either flying, flight instructors, learning to fly, have their own planes, partially funded by taxpayers for even more planes, that's a really great resource to be able to tap into when something happens and disaster strikes and you want to look for people. You just say, hey, can you guys go search for these people or go fly around this flood plane, see if there's anybody on any rooftops and then radio it in. That was a huge role and probably the most prominent role that civil air patrol still holds today is in search and rescue.

Yeah, and they don't just fly around and radio it down, although they certainly do that. They are very active in all parts of the search. They are many of them cross train and horseback riding and cross country skiing. Cross fit. Cross fit, of course. So they can kind of do it all. Now they have these what's called cell phone forensic teams and they can analyze cell phone tower pings and topo maps and it's become a much more sophisticated sort of search and

rescue largely because of the civil air patrol. Right, but ironically some of the stuff that some of the talents and expertise they've developed in this search and rescue area have nothing to do with planes and so they might assist in a search and rescue without ever taking to the air in some cases. Sure, but they still had their cool uniform. Sure, and they still march when they're told to. Should we take a break? Sure.

All right, we're going to take another break and talk about a little bit more about the evolution of the CAP. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. This is my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So like I said, Chuck, they were shuffled around after World War II and then, um, they're still under and, you know, kind of linked to the Air Force.

But they are definitely civilian, like all civilian. You can get into the Air Force and they do have this kind of quasi military structure. They have ranks and things like that. But the ranks that they have are strictly limited to the Civil Air Patrol. Like if you become, I think the highest you can become in the Civil Air Patrol is a major general that would not translate over to the Air Force. Like you wouldn't be able to move to the Air Force and be like, I'm a major general. You'd be like, no, let's reset things, shall we?

Up the latrine, Private. Right. But like I said, if you start to work your way up in the Civil Air Patrol, you can transfer over to the Air Force with some credit. Like it's not like it's just a complete waste of time if you want to go into the Air Force. But in, I think, 1975, they got their first non-military commander, first civilian commander. And that really kind of set the tone from what I understand for this kind of division between the military Air Force and the civilian volunteer Civil Air Patrol.

That really kind of forever divided that line. And you guys can have your ranks and your, you guys march all you want and call each other Sir and Salute, but you're civilian and an auxiliary. Yeah. And like you said, they're under the Air Force still. And ironically, the specific division of the Air Force they're under the direction of now is the Air Combat Command. Right.

Even though they cannot be used in combat, you're not going to get paid even $8 a day anymore. It is full volunteer at this point. In fact, you have to pay dues, membership dues every year. And you have to pay for your own uniform. And if you really want to go large, you can just buy fake epaulets and medals and... You really, I mean, I'm sure you can. You probably get made fun of or yelled at or whatever.

But it sounds like I'm making fun of Civil Air Patrol, or should I'm certainly not, because they're great. Well, they definitely are great. And the idea and the whole purpose is pretty great. But I def, from reading about like, you know, people who had been in it and some of their, when they were asked online, like, what did you, what was your experience? I get the impression that there is a, an element of blow hardness among some people in the Civil Air Patrol.

Whereas some are there to like learn to fly and for the love of flying and, or because they do want to go into the Air Force. There are people there who might abuse their rank or status in the Civil Air Patrol that you'd schmucks. There are schmucks there from what I understand here or there, although it doesn't seem to be systematic. There are schmucks everywhere. So like I said at the beginning, they are a nonprofit and there are a few people that

get paid a salary. Obviously, when you get to the administration, the national level, you're going to have to pay some people to run this thing. Sure. And the Air Force does pay expenses if they are asked to perform missions. So. Well, plus also, if you're on a mission and something happens to you, you are at that moment covered by the military's life insurance.

So your family is well cared for after that. Yeah. That's a very good point, actually. The member dues do pay for some planes, for some equipment, some fuel, hangar space, maintenance, stuff like that. Right now, there are about 530 single engine planes in the Civil Air Patrol in the United States. A lot of these are those, and I'm getting more and more into planes lately, the more

we've talked about these planes. You're getting so old here. I must be because I looked at Assessin 172 and I was like, how many does that seat? How much does that cost? Oh, really? Like, wow. Well, no, I can't afford to buy a plane. But I'm saying like having that thought, you've passed the threshold.

There's, you know, planes are cool. Let's go to a museum to see a plane. How much would it cost for me to buy this plane and fly it myself? That's the transition. Yeah. And the transition too is the thoughts of like, you know, when Emily and I are retired and Ruby lives somewhere, it sure would be nice to just hop in the Cessna and fly out and see her.

Sure. That is like the oldest of old man talk. Yeah. But then I saw they're like $200,000. So I was like, okay, maybe not. You're like, maybe I can buy one of them houses with the fly up driveways like John Travolta. Yeah. I mean, Jude, he has his own passenger airliner.

Yeah. It's crazy. Well, he's also rather wealthy. That's true. So there are more than 4,000 planes though used in any given year. So I guess that's the official fleet that the Civil Air Patrol runs. The 530. That's the 530.

Right. But if you are a member of the Civil Air Patrol and you have your own plane, they'll be like, can you bring your plane along, we need to use it for the search and rescue. Right. And they don't just do SAR stuff. They work also with the Forestry Service and the DEA. They look out for forest fires. They conduct land surveys.

They started to do more and more flies over farms in Kentucky, if you know what I'm saying, to see what they're growing. Yeah. Yeah. They started in 1985. I think the Customs and Border Patrol said, hey, how would you guys like to look for marijuana plants to prevent marijuana cigarettes from being smoked by a magazine? Oh boy.

They were all over that. And yeah, they jumped on it. I read an article, this is so Civil Air Patrol, the idea of getting to prevent drugs from hitting the streets. I guess whoever was interviewed, I didn't catch who it was, but an official at the Civil Air Patrol in the higher up in the national organization. Major General? Probably.

Yeah. Said something like, they helped get a billion dollars worth of drugs, sure, which is of course like the manufacturer suggests a retail price of drugs off of the street in 2017, and that they were on track to hit about the same number in 2018. That's a lot of marijuana cigarettes. Yeah. I can't help. I probably shouldn't even just say this.

I got to hear it. We can edit it out later. Who was the standard ground guy in Florida? Oh, man, George Zimmerman. Yeah. Some of this sounds a little bit like that, like, hey, I'm not a copper in the military, but I'm going to play like I am. I want to bust drug dealers.

Well, that actually made me wonder, do they patrol the southern border? I think they do. Looking for it. I couldn't see anything that said they did. Well Ed said they did. They patrol the southern border in World War II looking for saboteurs entering. That's what triggered it. I'm like, well, wait a minute, that plus, you know, busting pot growers, do they look

for people crossing the border illegally and I didn't see anything about them being used for that. That might just be an off book use. It could be. Yeah, they don't report that, but it was hilarious. The guy interviewed maybe the major general who was talking about how they got a billion dollars. They helped with getting a billion dollars of drugs off the streets.

They were saying, we don't talk about that very much. We don't release press releases because we don't want to basically step on the DEA's operations or anything like that, but trust us, that's how much we get off of the streets. It was pretty cute. They also work in just general aerospace and flying education and advocacy. They do lectures and seminars. They put together training manuals online. Just trying to advance aviation and the knowledge and love of aviation.

And Chuck, I also saw in another article, some other stuff that they do, which is pretty interesting, that is much more tied to the military. So you remember they're under the combat division? Yeah. Well, the combat division puts them to pretty good use sometimes. If you are flying a drone under FAA regulations, that drone has to be escorted by a human in a plane over regular airspace, non-military airspace. And so to get out of the United States, a drone usually has to fly over non-military

airspace. And so one of the things that the civilian air patrol does is they escort drones, which means that that's something that the military doesn't have to do. And for just one base with the drone escorts they provided, this commander figured that they saved the military something like 400 grand a year by doing this grottis, basically. They also survey military training routes. So they basically fly over the routes that test pilots are going to fly to make sure that somebody hasn't put up power lines since the last time they used them.

They simulate flyers that have accidentally entered restricted airspace for intercept training, which has got to be kind of neat. And they're actually learning to fly drones themselves now too, which is probably a pretty in-demand skill if you're somebody going into the Air Force these days. I think it's adorable that they saved the military $400,000 a year. Well, that was just one base too. But yeah, he had enough self-awareness that he was saying like, yeah, I think he called it budget dust, but he said it, you know, it's still counts.

Budget dust. I love that. Half a million bucks is budget dust. Yeah, it is. Then they have their cadet program. We mentioned earlier about cadets. This is if you are under the age of 18, you can still be in their cadet program. Once you're over 18, you don't have to do this until you're 21, but you can at 18 turn

into what's called a senior, which I thought was interesting that a senior could be like 19. Right. I can actually, I found out why because that seems kind of weird, doesn't it? What did they're called seniors? Well that, so if you enter and you're over 18, you have to be considered a senior. But if you enter the civilian air patrol before you're 18, you can wait to become a senior until you're 21.

And the reason why is because- Because you get hammered when you get that rank. Right. You just keep putting it off. It's called delayed gratification. You can get your training to get your pilot's license through the civilian air patrol for basically like half price of what you would pay a flight school. And it's such a great deal that flight schools complain to the government and say this is

unfair competition. So there's a rule with the civilian air patrol that if you enter the civilian air patrol, over the age of 18, you are automatically considered a senior and you do not qualify for instruction to get your pilot's license. If you start before then and you start getting your pilot's license, you can delay being considered a senior until you're 21. So you have an extra couple of years to complete your training to get your pilot's license at half price.

Not a bad deal. That's the reason why you can delay being a senior until you're 21. Hey. Sounds like quite a deal. Yeah, it is. Half price. And like we mentioned earlier, just to kind of put a cap on it, the cadets, it is a bit like Boy Scouts meets ROTC.

They get to actually get in planes. If you're a kid, you got to be 12 years old. But if you are interested in flying and getting your license or going into the Air Force, you can train and you can get yourself up in the ranking system through the years and you can get seat time in planes and get flying experience. Learn to fly drones. That's a big one. Yeah.

So I think it's like a pretty cool program for kids to get into. Yeah. And if drug dealers just make you so mad you can't even see straight, that's another thing you can do. That's right. Get rid of them. You got anything else? Got nothing else.

John Roderick never responded. So I'm just going to go with his one statement, which was, I am a proud veteran of the Civil Air Patrol. Well, thanks for almost nothing, John Roderick. Great story. If you want to know more about the Civil Air Patrol, well then go join the Civil Air Patrol. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. This is from a fellow Toledoan, Josh.

Oh, yes. Hey, guys. I'm a Spanish teacher and a second language acquisition nerd. In a recent episode, you guys mentioned that you're not fluent in the second language until you dream in that language. Chuck, I remember I said I had heard that before. As romantic and poetic as this sounds, it's totally made up, which is what I figured. Also later in the episode, you mentioned that someone who learns a second language as an

adult will never reach the fluency of a native speaker. This is true sort of. It depends on your definition of fluency, though. Speakers of English is the second language who have been in an English-speaking country for years or even decades will still have an accent, make mistakes in word order, or have trouble with the vocabulary. In the end, I argue that fluency is overrated and what we should focus on is proficiency. Being hyper-focused on becoming, quote, fluent, end quote, leads people to be paralyzed when

speaking. And they'll spend years studying a language but never be confident in their abilities to ever use it. Side note, even though this dream thing is a myth, I totally still celebrate with my students when they come in and tell me about having dreams in Spanish. Even if it's not true, it's still fun when kids feel confident. And I'd lead them to believe it is true. Looking forward to future podcast guys, Lisa in Toledo, Ohio.

Hi Josh, go Rockets. Hi Lisa, go Rockets and go Mudhents and go Falcons. What are the Rockets? Toledo Rockets, the University of Toledo. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because, you know, Toledo's so well known for its space program. Yeah.

I don't know why they're called the Rockets now that I think about it, I'm ashamed. Who knows? Well, thanks a lot Lisa and if you want to be cool like Lisa or like me and say you're from Toledo, whether you are or not, it's fine. We probably won't check up on it. You can get in touch with us myriad ways. You can go onto our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links or you can send us an email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.