The current types and quantities of the United States Coast Guard's helicopters
The airplanes in the United States Coast Guard's fleet
Past and future United States Coast Guard aircraft
The Coast Guard's first seaplane and pilots
The origin of the Coast Guard's Helo Carrier story
April Fools jokes can be harmless fun, but they can also be potentially very dangerous misinformation. In 1957, the BBC show "Panorama" managed to convince some in the U.K. that spaghetti grew on trees through joke 'documentary' footage, and in 2016, the Coast Guard tried to fool Facebook into admiring its supposed new carrier.
"With the Coast Guard's latest budget approval, the Acquisition Department has gone full throttle! Check out the newest Coast Guard Cutter, the CGC Seaman Gublatz," Go Coast Guard posted on Facebook, accompanied by an image of a U.S. Coast Guard-branded carrier. There is no such carrier, but there's a curious wrinkle to this tale hidden away in Go Coast Guard's replies. "We actually did have the world's first helo-carrier, the USCGC Cobb. Like the Navy's Langley, it was ship converted to a flat-top," the account writes.
USCGC Cobb began life as the Governor Cobb, a 1906 Eastern Steamship Company creation The New York Times noted to be "the first turbine steamship ever built." It was recommissioned as the Coast Guard's, and the world's, first helo carrier in 1943, at 289 feet long and with a 38-by-63 feet netted landing deck added. Though it would serve in this capacity for only around two and a half years, owing to frequent maintenance needs, it's nonetheless evidence that the Coast Guard has indeed used a helo carrier, though not the one the April Fools joke has suggested which would still be smaller than a cruise ship.