The U.S. Coast Guard has awarded a nearly $69 million contract to design and build new hangars and “associated facilities” at Air Station Barbers Point.
According to a news release from the Coast Guard, the contract includes the construction of “two fully enclosed hangars to provide weather-protected facilities for repairing, servicing, and sheltering HC-130J aircraft assigned to the air station. Additional facilities will include an aviation materials office, aircraft maintenance shops, office space for air station personnel, a locker room, and load cages near the hangars.”
The award went to Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., which is headquartered in Maryland and considered one of the largest employee-owned construction and general contracting companies in the country.
According to data from the Hawaii Defense Economy project, Whiting-Turner has netted $78 million in construction contracts in Hawaii since 2021, working for both the Army and Coast Guard. The Barbers Point contract would be its largest in the islands to date.
Currently, the seaside base’s hangar facility can only partially enclose one HC-130J aircraft, leaving the station’s four aircraft exposed to corrosion from the salt air. The Coast Guard said that construction is scheduled to begin in 2026 and is expected to be completed by early 2028.
The service said that the new hangars will provide “long-term protection, improve maintenance capabilities, and support critical heavy air transport missions and long-range maritime surveillance patrols across the 12.2-million-square-mile Oceania District.”
The HC-130J Super Hercules replaced the older HC-130H, which had flown out of Barbers Point since 1984. The first of the new J model aircraft arrived at Barbers Point in June 2021, with the transition being completed a year later. The new planes are faster, more fuel-efficient and able to carry more weight.
But among the most important changes was upgraded cameras and sensors and the ability to transmit what they’re seeing in real time.
When the last of the H model planes was retired in Hawaii, Lt. Kevin Carmichael told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser “(Before), we’d have to come back, land, burn everything onto a DVD and print it out. Now we can actually push the imagery straight from the airplane through data link stuff, which is getting us into the modern century and also helps planners back at home.”
In the Pacific, the aircraft have been used for search and rescue operations, fishery monitoring patrols and tracking activity by the Chinese and Russian navies around Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific island territories.
They also routinely respond to requests by authorities and mariners from other Pacific island nations, many of which don’t have coast guards of their own and have limited emergency resources. A Barbers Point air crew flew to the island nation of Vanuatu in 2023 to help with search and rescue and delivering aid after Tropical Cyclone Lola, a Category 4 storm, swept through the South Pacific island chain inflicting significant damage.
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