No Place to Land: Va. Communities Don’t Want Navy’s Proposed Practice Field, Jet Noise

By Bill Geroux, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

Sep. 4–SUSSEX Ever hungry for jobs and tax dollars, rural Sussex County embraces development projects other communities reject. Sussex is home to corporate hog farms, two state prisons and Virginia’s largest landfill.

But Sussex wants no part of the latest such project: a Navy airfield where F/A-18 Super Hornet jets from Virginia Beach would thunder in and out to simulate landing on aircraft carriers.

The outlying landing field would consist of little more than an airstrip, a tower and a fire station in the midst of 30,000 acres. It would bring few jobs and no tax revenue, just a steady diet of jets, day and night.

“We just couldn’t see any advantage to having this in our community,” said Rufus Tyler Sr., chairman of the Sussex Board of Supervisors, which voted unanimously last month to ask that the Navy look elsewhere.

The Navy has been looking, since 2001. Rear Adm. David O. Anderson, vice commander of the Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, said the Navy “has been taking a political beating” for its efforts to build the airfield in Washington County, N.C. In June, he said, the Navy approached the governors of Virginia and North Carolina to help find a spot for the field.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s office identified 10 potential sites in the rural eastern Virginia counties of Sussex, Surry, Southampton, Greensville and King and Queen. Within three weeks, the boards of supervisors in all five counties passed unanimous resolutions asking for their respective sites to be taken off the list.

Southampton’s supervisors were in such a hurry to vote they called a special meeting.

“We wanted to be clear that if the Navy is looking for the path of least resistance, it does not run through Southampton County,” said county Administrator Mike Johnson. He said the meeting attracted more than 600 people, “the largest crowd for a local issue I’ve seen in 22 years of local government.”

King and Queen Supervisor Doris H. Morris said opposition to the landing field among local residents was overwhelming.

But all 10 Virginia sites are still on the list, as is Fort Pickett near Blackstone, which U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., asked the Navy to reconsider after rejecting it the first time around. The Dinwiddie and Nottoway county boards of supervisors and Blackstone Town Council have registered their opposition to placing the landing field at Fort Pickett.

The list includes at least five sites in North Carolina, including the one in Washington County, which the Navy has not given up on.

The Navy expects to trim the list by Sept. 15.

Mark Anthony, who manages the airfield project for the Navy, said it may be possible to find an isolated site where the jets would intrude on few people. Some of the Virginia sites include large swaths of privately held timberland whose owners have been in contact with the Navy, he said.

But people living near the proposed Virginia sites are not all so optimistic. Some are angry at the state for offering up their property to potential seizure by the Navy, without first asking or even notifying them.

“I voted for Governor Kaine, but I’ll never vote for him for anything again,” said Nancy Cramer of Sussex, whose home stands on one of the sites. “I wanted to retire in my house, but I just have the feeling the Navy is going to end up taking it.”

The Navy, Anderson said, needs an outlying landing field because it is deploying more carrier-based jet squadrons on more irregular rotations than a decade ago. A new field would serve eight squadrons of Super Hornets based at Oceana Naval Air Station and two based at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station near Havelock, N.C.

Landing a jet on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, particularly at night, is considered one of the most difficult jobs in the Navy. A video of a night carrier landing appears on the state preparedness office Web site, www.ocp.virginia.gov.

A key pre-deployment training drill for pilots is the “touch and go,” which involves touching down the plane momentarily on an airfield painted to resemble a flight deck, then taking off to circle for the next touch. That noisy, day-and-night exercise is what the Navy wants to conduct at an outlying landing field.

Pilots from Oceana practice touch-and-go landings at Fentress Auxiliary Landing Field in nearby Chesapeake, generating a regular stream of noise complaints from the suburbs. Anderson said Fentress is too small to train all the squadrons preparing for deployment.

In addition, he said, ambient light from Virginia Beach and Chesapeake makes the skies over Oceana and Fentress too bright at night for aviators to simulate night carrier landings at sea. Some sites on the list in Virginia and North Carolina are so lightly populated that the night skies are as pitch-black as in the middle of the ocean.

Virginia got a scare in 2005 when the military base-closing commission threatened to move Oceana’s jet squadrons and the accompanying 14,000 jobs out of Virginia Beach because of encroachment of the runways by the suburbs. The threat fizzled, but state officials resolved afterward to work more closely with the Navy to protect the future of Oceana and other bases, said Steve Mondul, deputy assistant to the governor in the state Office of Commonwealth Preparedness.

When the Navy asked for help with the outlying landing field, Mondul said, the state ran a computer program to identify sites in eastern Virginia that fit the criteria, including low population density and flat topography. The computer chose the sites and the state passed them on to the Navy, he said.

Kaine “is not going to ram this down some potential location’s throat that doesn’t want it,” Mondul said. But he said the final word would not be the boards of supervisors “passing resolutions in large crowded rooms . . . in an election year.”

Officials in several of the Virginia counties said they were not sure what to expect. “We’re real concerned about this,” said Surry County Administrator Tyrone Franklin.

Doris Morris (no relation to the King and Queen supervisor), a member of the residents group that has stalled the landing field in Washington County, said she has received calls for advice from people in Virginia. Her advice was not to rely on the government process but to start marshaling political support in Congress.

She said Virginia Beach created the demand for the field by allowing its suburbs to spread out of control. She said no quiet, rural county in Virginia or North Carolina should have to pay for it. Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 625-1358 or wgeroux@timesdispatch.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

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