But during those frantic days that followed, the country also needed planes for emergency services. Officials needed to be transported. Blood needed to be flown to New York.

And that, as it turns out, was the work of the Civil Air Patrol, a completely volunteer organization that most people have never heard of.

CAP volunteers are in the air during many emergencies.

They take to the skies during earthquakes to look for fallen power lines and damaged roadways. They search for downed planes and patrol the coast and borders. In fact, some 85 percent of federal inland search and rescue missions directed by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia are carried out by CAP volunteers.

According to Hewlett Packard employee Kevin McDowell, after 9-11 San Jose's CAP Senior Squadron 80 flew blood to Portland, from which it was then transported to New York. McDowell is the squadron's commanding officer.

And the program attracts volunteers of all ages and professions.

David Sidle, 19, a recent graduate of Monta Vista High School, is a CAP cadet second lieutenant who will soon be going into basic training in the Air Force to become a firefighter.

When the shuttle Columbia went down, Sidle was one of about two dozen California cadets who went to Nevada to search for debris. He found some metallic foil that was probably from the shuttle's skin.

Sidle first encountered CAP at the Moffett Field Air Show in 1999, where he saw CAP cadets at work. He soon joined Cadet Squadron 10 in Palo Alto.

As a student at Monta Vista, Sidle used skills he learned as a cadet to work with Marsha Hovey of the city of Cupertino's Office of Emergency Services and organize an emergency response team club at the high school.

Monta Vista's emergency team began by working to build awareness among the student body of emergency preparedness and of how to help support the school in the event of a disaster.

"We are listed with the city as a response team for searching, first aid, CPR and amateur radio help. If there is an incident we could staff the command center, run communications, triage and move teams out into the city to do whatever the city needed," Sidle says.

Sidle was recently in downtown San Jose assisting with an emergency response team at a rally that was protesting cuts to higher education.

"My training in CAP has been of great value in learning teamwork," he says.

Last fall, he earned his emergency medical technician license, and he is currently taking fire technician classes at Mission College.

Not all adult CAP volunteers are mission pilots. Many, like Sunnyvale resident Walter Wood, serve as support staff. Wood is the logistics officer for Squadron 80. He joined CAP in 1988, in Austin, Texas, at the suggestion of his wife, who had been a CAP cadet. "She thought it would be a less-expensive way to pursue my interest in flying," Wood says. "It was."

At the time, Wood was working for Lockheed on its advanced systems of remote control. Today he works in the semiconductor field and looks after Squadron 80's property, sometimes flying co-pilot as a scanner or observer.

"Most people have never heard about CAP," he says, "but we are in the air during emergencies."

CAP has been around for more than 60 years. It began on the East Coast as an outgrowth of the all-volunteer civilian air defense efforts during World War II. The first CAP volunteers began in 1941 by searching for German submarines that were sinking dozens of American ships. By war's end, the volunteer CAP Coast Patrol had flown 24 million miles, found 173 submarines, attacked 57, hit 10 and sunk two. In 1942 the CAP cadet program began, and within six months there were more than 200,000 young volunteers across the country. The program has grown considerably, both in size—today there are some 1,700 units nationwide—and in what the organization does, both in the air and on the ground.

"Today, our mission is to train continually while accomplishing local, state and national emergency and humanitarian missions," McDowell says.

Two days after 9-11, the California CAP Wing opened a hub at Oakland International Airport for airlifting blood products for the Red Cross that under normal circumstances would be moved by commercial transportation services. Over the next five days, while commercial aviation was grounded, CAP members from Oregon, Idaho and Nevada assisted California members in moving 176 boxes of blood products for the Red Cross.

Those working out of the Oakland hub had to find innovative ways to fit as many boxes as possible in each aircraft type used, because, although each box weighed 20 pounds, size, not weight, was the limiting factor for the number of boxes each CAP aircraft could transport.

By the time commercial aviation resumed, California CAP volunteers had flown more than 132 hours using 21 airplanes with 78 personnel for airlifting blood products and official passengers, according to McDowell.

Maj. Chuck Frank of Campbell, a business development manager with Intel, was commanding officer of Squadron 80 until recently when he volunteered to serve as deputy counter drug officer for CAP's Northern California Wing.

"We don't actually do the surveillance; our planes provide a platform for other law-enforcement agencies to do that," he says.

While patrolling the Mexican boarder last year, his CAP team spotted tourists who were stranded and directed rescuers to them, Frank recalls.

Rescuing can be tricky when it comes to downed planes.

All civilian and military aircraft are required to carry emergency locator transmitters. If an aircraft goes down, these transmitters are designed to begin signaling upon an impact greater than five times the force of gravity. Although the emergency signals are monitored by satellite, finding the transmitters when they activate becomes CAP's search and rescue task.

"I've been on search and rescue missions where the downed plane was demolished, but the pilot survived pretty much without injury, and others where the plane was intact but the pilot was killed by something hitting him inside the cockpit. You never know," Wood says.

Older model emergency locator transmitters have been known to activate with lesser impacts, and two years ago, McDowell took part in locating one, which is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The transmitter had fallen out of a plane being ferried by helicopter from a remote location where it had gone down.

Using their information, the following day, a ground search team found the yellow transmitter on a mountain slope.

McDowell commands the 29 senior CAP volunteers at Reid-Hillview airport. The squadron meets every Monday evening and conducts frequent training exercises. Although he does not have previous military experience, McDowell was a private pilot in the early 1990s.

"After a 10-year break from flying, I thought working in the Civil Air Patrol would be an excellent way to give back to the community and resume flying," he says.

As part of CAP's mission to educate the community, CAP volunteers talk to schools, city councils and interested groups.

The plane flown by CAP pilots in San Jose is a single-engine Cessna packed with radio gear.

"We can communicate on any frequency with all agencies throughout the state," Frank says.

In addition to the senior volunteers, San Jose has a separate cadet group, Squadron 36, commanded by Jerry Horne. The squadron is made up of young boy and girl volunteers from 12 to 18 years old. They participate in leadership training and assist at events like the Moffett Field Air Show in May. One well-known alumna is Air Force Capt. Kim Campbell.

"She kept her anti-tank aircraft from crashing after flying into an ambush over Baghdad, in the course of flying two dozen sorties over Iraq last year," McDowell says.

The cadet program attracted Willow Glen resident John Berger, a retired Navy chaplain who first volunteered with CAP 30 years ago as chaplain for a cadet squadron while he was stationed at Moffett Field.

"Part of the cadet program is lessons in moral leadership, and I was pleased to participate. After assignments at several other Naval bases, I retired in Willow Glen and joined Squadron 80 as their chaplain. We call it a ministry of presence. We are here if needed," Berger says. And he was needed for counseling when two CAP members died in an accident.

"I've admired CAP's work from their beginning in the 1940s. I've bonded with the members here, and we share a lot of fellowship. Even for the volunteers, the assignments can be stressful, so I'm here if anyone needs to talk to me. That's what you have a chaplain for," he says.

Berger is also chaplain for the USS Hornet, a WWII aircraft carrier permanently stationed at Pier 3 Alameda Point in Alameda.

Many CAP volunteers have no military experience, but the program does attract military veterans like San Jose resident George Rodrigues, who joined after a 50-year career that included active service, retiring from the Air Force Reserve and service in both the Air National Guard and California State Military Reserve.

Lt. Col. Don Towse, Squadron 80's emergency services officer, has been with CAP 43 years, flying more than 400 hours for the group. Towse is a WWII Navy veteran who joined CAP in 1961 when his son was a cadet. A retired geologist, Towse has seen responsibilities added to CAP's main mission of search and rescue.

CAP now works closely with the California Office of Emergency Services in times of natural disasters like fires and earthquakes.

Beginning last year, CAP became affiliated with the Citizen Corps, which is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to raise public awareness about appropriate actions to take regarding emergency preparedness, disaster response and volunteer service.

CAP supports Homeland Security by providing coastal patrol, air/ground observation, radio communications and relay, aerial reconnaissance, air-to-ground photography, radiological monitoring and disaster and damage assessment.

Civil Air Patrol was actually conceived in the late 1930s by aviation advocate Gill Robb Wilson, who foresaw aviation's role in war and general aviation's potential to supplement America's military operations. With the help of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the Civil Air Patrol was established on December 1, 1941, just days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Towse notes that the number of volunteers in the San Jose outfit has stayed about the same since he was their commanding officer in 1963, but "whenever we need help, people come in from other squadrons to lend a hand. There continues to be a great spirit of cooperation to complete our mission."