I think what Mr. Wright doesn't realize is that ALL the air defense for the US is done by the Air National Guard even when the F-15s are flying with F-16s. If he had done any research he would have known it has been this way for some time! I'll stop short of the political criticisms he made... Ref: http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=160

While the ANG does Homeland (Air) Defense, disaster relief, and other "local missions" they are also deployed to AORs along-side their USAF Active Duty and Reserve counterparts to support combat operations. All of this while working on a fraction of the budget used for the USAF. We should also point out the ANG uses aircraft often considered "non-combat capable" or "difficult to maintain" by the USAF.

Don't get me wrong, the AD/Res does a fine job; but the ANG constantly does more (and wildly diverse) missions; typically with older equipment and less funding.

I prefer my state's brother/sisters protecting my family at night... Don't forget their families live with mine, just down the street, or in the next town; our children attend the same schools or play sports with each other. After all the ANG calls themselves - "Your Hometown Air Force."

Cheers to the "Total Force"

New Guard aids over isles

F-16 pilots patrol skies around Hawaii after 21 F-15s were grounded

By Robert Shikina

December 30, 2007

Six F-16 Fighting Falcons from the Minnesota Air National Guard have been protecting Hawaii skies since early November after the Air Force grounded hundreds of F-15s because of structural defects.

The Hawaii Air National Guard's 21 F-15s haven't flown since Nov. 3, a day after an F-15 crashed in Missouri. An Air Force investigation found a flaw in the metal rails that hold the fuselage together.

The mission of the Air National Guard is to respond to hijacked airlines, errant Cessnas and any unknown aircraft.

"It (the mission in Hawaii) is really not much different," said Col. Gerry Ostern, commander of Minnesota's 179th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron. "All the procedures are the same. All you're doing is flying over a lot more water than you're normally used to."

Nationwide, about 450 F-15s are not flying, causing a strain on the national defense network. Units that fly F-16s have been stepping in, with the Vermont Air National Guard covering the entire Northeast, the California Air National Guard covering the entire West Coast, the Illinois Air National Guard filling in over Louisiana, and the Minnesota Air National Guard in Hawaii.

While resources have been thinned, defense officials say air defense has not been compromised.

Ostern agreed. "It is a little bit of strain, but we have plenty of personnel and plenty of equipment to take care of both places," he said.

Brigadier Gen. Peter Pawling, commander of the 154th Wing, Hawaii Air National Guard, said the biggest impact on the Hawaii Air National Guard is the loss of training.

"They (Hawaii pilots) would much rather be flying," Pawling said. "It's going to take more work for them to get their combat skills retooled again. It's much easier to keep it on the edge than have to back up a little bit."

When the F-15s will be cleared to fly again is not clear, but Pawling is hoping that could be sometime this week.

In the meantime, the Hawaii Air National Guard members keep busy practicing on simulators and mechanics are busy with inspections of the planes. So far, the Hawaii Air National Guard has finished all the checks required, and 13 F-15s have passed the latest set of inspections. The remaining planes have been checked and are awaiting clearance.

Hawaii Air National Guard will begin replacing its fleet of F-15s with the next generation F-22 Raptors in late 2010, Pawling said.

For the 55 or so members of the Minnesota Air National Guard in Hawaii, their mission meant a sudden departure from family during the holiday season.

Lt. Col. Rob Roningen, commander of the 148th Expeditionary Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, Minnesota Air National Guard, found out in early December that he would be leaving his family and arrived in Hawaii Dec. 17.

"When you leave Minnesota in the winter it's definitely a challenge because you have to line up somebody to plow the snow," he said, adding that his hometown received 28 inches of snow last week. His two teenage sons have had to step up and shovel snow and do more then they're used to. "It's good for them," he said.

But Roningen can't say Hawaii has been tough duty.

Airman 1st Class Ben Butcher, a weapons loader with the 148th, also isn't raising many objections to his assignment here.

"I can't really complain about it. It got me out of cold Minnesota," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Source: http://starbulletin.com/2007/12/30/news/story09.html

Bayou Militia F-15 pilots among hundreds grounded

By The Associated Press | The Natchez Democrat

Published Sunday, December 30, 2007

BELLE CHASSE, La. (AP) — The F-15C Eagle fighter jets stationed near Belle Chasse appear free of the problems that caused one to break apart last month during a training exercise near St. Louis, Louisiana Air National Guard officials say.

The Naval Air Station has nearly completed inspections ordered by the Air Force after the Nov. 2 incident. "We´ve found zero in New Orleans," said Col. Mike Lopinto, commander of Louisiana´s 159th Fighter Wing, which has 19 of the F-15s.

Idled F-15s sat on the nearby parking apron and in the Air Guard hangar, some with their cockpit canopies removed to allow inspection of the alloy for the sort of cracks blamed for the Missouri crash.

F-15s, the Air Force´s primary air-superiority weapon for more than 30 years, were grounded worldwide after the incident.

Lt. Col. Pete Stavros, who commands the 31 F-15 pilots in the 122nd Fighter Squadron, known as the "Bayou Militia," called the down time frustrating.

"The flying of the airplane is a quickly perishable skill," Stavros said Thursday in his office at the Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse. "To be good at that, you have to do it regularly."

Grounded pilots could take as long as six months to regain the proficiency they attain from constant practice at aerial combat, Air Force officials said.

One of the 159th Fighter Wing´s two missions, which is to have armed F-15s, pilots and ground crews on alert 24 hours a day, prepared to launch to protect states along the Gulf of Mexico and key oil industry facilities from an aerial attack.

Officials do not know when the Bayou Militia F-15s, with their distinctive purple, gold and green bands above "JZ" tail markings (for "Jazz"), will be cleared for take-off. The Air Force grounded the aging fighters "until further notice."

The F-15s assigned to Louisiana were among the 666 fighters worldwide that were grounded.

Although the Missouri investigation is not complete, engineers found that the cockpit broke off on a high-speed turn because that beams connecting the nose and cockpit had cracked. The pilot ejected safely.

The 224 newer F-15E Strike Fighters have been cleared and are flying. But 442 model A, B, C and D jets remain grounded worldwide for the painstaking checks, said Maj. Tom Crosson of the Air Force´s Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va.

Louisiana has a mix of A and C models and one B model, a two-seater.

By Thursday, Bayou Militia maintenance crews were about 75 percent done with the third round of inspections ordered for the A and C models, Lopinto said. "We have not found any significant problems with our airplanes," Lopinto said.

Cracks were found in the fuselages of nine jets in Japan, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri and Oregon, Crosson said.

The A and B models entered service in 1972, while the C models began flying in 1979, according to the Air Force.

The Bayou Militia — the first Air Guard unit to get F-15s in 1985 — is moving to C-model jets, which the Air Force planned to keep in service through 2025.

In the meantime, the Air Force wants to replace the F-15s with F-22 Raptors, each costing about $135 million.

In addition to the alert mission, the 159th — sent to Iraq five times to enforce no-fly zones after the 1991 Persian Gulf War — trains regularly for overseas deployment.

The wing´s 1,400 members have jobs ranging from security forces to medical personnel.

It also has members on active duty helping the New Orleans Police Department patrol the city.

For the 159th, the alert mission was largely a function of the Cold War until the Louisiana Air Guard was given other duties in 1994. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, pilots from Belle Chasse guarded the skies as President Bush, in Air Force One, traveled through Louisiana airspace for a stop at Barksdale Air Force Base near Bossier City.

With the exception of a brief period following Hurricane Katrina, the wing has done the alert mission nonstop. Since then, the wing has received two "outstanding" marks in no-notice inspections by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military organization charged with protecting the United States and Canada from aerial threats.

At Belle Chasse, Air Guard F-16 squadrons from Alabama and Illinois have filled in for the Bayou Militia since the F-15s were grounded.

Meanwhile, F-15 pilots are trying to retain their aerial combat proficiency through high-tech flight simulators. Two of them are in Belle Chasse and can be linked to simulators at other bases, Stavros said.

"It´s still not the same" as actual flying, though, he said.

———

Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.timespicayune.com

Source: http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/200 ... -grounded/

Defense Focus: F-15s' old-age crisis

Published: Dec. 31, 2007 at 8:00 AM

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The crisis afflicting the U.S. Air Force's F-15 domestic defense fleet is far wider, more serious and more deeply rooted than the American public seems to realize. It is rooted in more than 15 years of systematic neglect of U.S. air power by Republicans and Democrats alike.

The U.S. Air Force moved quickly to pull some 450 old McDonnell-Douglas F-15 fighter aircraft after one of them crashed in Missouri on Nov. 2. USAF investigators concluded that there were significant defects in the metal framework that held the body of the plane together. Because the problem was caused by excessive wear and tear on the fuselage of the plane over its decades of service, the USAF team warned this could cause "fleet-wide airworthiness problems." Even now, the entire grounded F-15 force has not been cleared for active duty, and it remains an open question if and when that will happen.

The Air Force is filling the gap by pressing its other old workhorse, the F-16 Falcon fleet, into increased duty. But that can only hasten the day when accumulated stress and wear problems become a serious issue for it, too. Meanwhile, the crisis is forcing the U.S. Air National Guard into emergency deployments that has forced the California Air National Guard, for example, to take over responsibility for air defense and interception duties over Oregon and Washington as well. The Vermont ANG has been forced to assume similar responsibilities over the northeastern United States.

After the huge increases in military and Air Force procurement and spending during the Reagan administration, the collapse of communism at the end of 1991 seemed to usher in a "peace dividend" for the rest of the 1990s. Defense spending, already slashed when President George Herbert Walker Bush was still in the White House, was cut even further by Democratic President Bill Clinton during his two terms of office.

The United States fought no major wars during the Clinton era, but the Air Force was involved especially in major logistics operations and bombing campaigns in the brief Kosovo conflict in 1998 and in maintaining the U.S.-brokered end of the conflict in Bosnia in 1995. Wear and tear on the aging USAF fleet, especially its transport aircraft, was already a serious consideration by the time of the 2000 presidential election campaign. Indeed, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney campaigned on the promise of restoring needed funding to the over-stretched Air Force.

The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in Congress approving unprecedented, gigantic budgets for the U.S. Department of Defense, but surprisingly little of this actually got to the aircraft the Air Force flies. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants poured hundreds of billions of dollars into ambitious , long-term super-high-tech programs like Future Combat Systems, the Space-Based Infra Red Spectrum program and the Future Intelligence Architecture. But they neglected the basic bread and butter of approving sufficient funding to keep the Air Force's aging heavy transport fleet and combat aircraft in top condition. Planned replacement aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Aircraft were developed more slowly than planned and proved to be extraordinarily expensive per unit.

Current Defense Secretary Robert Gates has more modest and focused goals. He slashed a lot of the funding from Rumsfeld's wilder programs, and he has sought to boost urgently needed maintenance funds for the existing USAF fleet. But the job is an enormous one. So many interceptors and fighter-bombers have now been in service for two or even three decades. And there are limits to the stress that airframes can accumulate.

Also, supersonic strike aircraft like the F-15 accumulate much more wear and tear than subsonic bombers like those magnificent old workhorses, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber and the legendary Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

The failure to differentiate between the much more rapid pace of wear and tear on supersonic combat aircraft like the F-15 and the highly successful continued upgrades on existing B-52 and C-130 airframes lulled congressional legislators, both Republican and Democrat, into taking the USAF's old F-15 and slightly younger F-16 fleet for granted.

Rumsfeld and his policymakers were so obsessed with their concept of "military transformation" that they paid no attention to the important job of just replacing the aging air fleet they inherited with affordable aircraft that could be produced on schedule in large production runs. The current F-15 crisis shows that the problems they ignored are now coming home to roost.

Source: http://www.upi.com/International_Securi ... isis/9844/

Engine guy,you hit the nail right on the head...Nice

.

I wish some of these KC-10 ARTs worked the 16. Most of them in NorCal watch Oprah or sitcoms all day and then have appointments when the jets come down code 3. And don't even try to get them to go to the line after like 1430 cause they will remind you every 10 minutes that they are ARTs and get off at 1600.

Our unit didn't make a big deal about it (no news coverage), but the 122FW Indiana ANG sent a couple jets to Fresno for alerts in California.

The jets were sent to support local training (trying to keep guys current), not for Alert.