Naval Jets Wear Out Welcome

FALLON, Nev. â€”  For folks in blue-skied central Nevada, the news seemed heaven sent: the U.S. Navy’s famed Top Gun school was relocating here from San Diego, bringing those young pilots and their thundering F-14 Tomcats featured in the film starring Tom Cruise.

The local newspaper editor proclaimed that the event dwarfed even the opening of the new Wal-Mart, saying the training school would help boost a struggling economy in the High Desert town of 23,000, an hour east of Reno.

Almost as important, locals relished the romance surrounding the fierce Top Gun sky fighters. There was even talk that a sequel to the 1986 film might finally help put Fallon on the cultural map.

Three years later, they admit the release of a “Top Gun� redux now seems unlikely. And at Fallon Naval Air Station, the Navy’s elite flying course isn’t even known as Top Gun anymore. Though it still trains the Navy’s top-shelf pilots, it’s now known as the “Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor� program.

Many locals still say the newest Navy flyboys are good for Fallon and its air base even without any slick Hollywood spin. Others aren’t so convinced.

“The reality is, we got none of the glamour and now we’re stuck with those jets and all of their Godforsaken racket,� said Grace Portorti, director of the Rural Alliance for Military Accountability, a Navy watchdog group. “I’d say we lost out big time.�

Navy Plans Are Cited

While Navy jets have flown over the Nevada desert at supersonic speeds for more than a decade, residents say the arrival of the more aggressive Top Gun pilots, coupled with Navy expansion plans, has further fueled their doubts about the military’s presence.

Nevadans cite Navy plans to add 127,000 acres to its training territory and extend its lease on one of four area bomb sites on terrain managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Worse, they say the Navy is unapologetic over its continued use of chaff--the fiberglass radar-evasion fibers that training jets have dropped over the desert for decades--a substance residents fear might be harming them.

Navy officials acknowledge that the thunder from their jets’ sonic booms is disquieting and that pilots are instructed to break the sound barrier only in areas away from population centers. But the noise, which officials say is harmless, unfortunately carries outside of areas mapped out by the Navy for such exercises, officials admit.

“The problem is that sound doesn’t stop at an artificial line on the map,� said base spokeswoman Anne McMillin.

Navy brass has also taken steps to stem the public complaints. They’ve fast-tracked payment of damage claims under $5,000, altered flight patterns to avoid several communities, and created a complaint hotline and citizen advisory board.

Fallon and nearby towns lie in the middle of the Navy’s sprawling, 5,500-square-mile supersonic test grounds. Like menacing mosquitoes, training jets often buzz directly over quivering residents, roaring just above the desert flatlands, piloted by men in their early 20s who notch nicknames such as “Piglet,� “Gump� and “Rooster� beneath their aircraft cockpits.

Locals say they’re tired of being harassed by the air jockeys, who push their Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets to speeds of 600 mph, often breaking the sound barrier as they drop live bombs at off-limits target sites that dot the desert. The resulting sonic booms shatter windows, move homes off their foundations, and send livestock and people running for cover.

Just months after their arrival, a pair of Top Gun pilots veered off course and rumbled over the tiny mining town of Austin, causing two sonic booms that blew out windows in 30 homes and businesses as well as the courthouse, cracking walls and sending elementary school children scurrying under their desks.

For years, even before the arrival of the Top Gunners, residents have fled their homes when stray Navy bombs started raging brush fires. The jets have strafed towers, narrowly missing utility workers, forcing wary drivers from Highway 50, the so-called Loneliest Road in America.

On Russ Stevenson’s home video of an encounter with a jet fighter at his saloon in rural Middlegate, a Navy pilot flies so low his plane fills the screen, causing a sonic boom that shattered every window in the bar.

“A sonic boom is like an earthquake and a tornado rolled into one powerful jolt,� says the Vietnam veteran. “First the lamps shake and then it hits. It rattles your bones and your teeth. Your head sinks into your shoulders, looking for cover. People fall off stools. Then the windows implode and the glass starts flying.�

Stevenson doesn’t buy the Navy’s explanations for the noise. “The Navy calls it the sound of freedom,� he says. “Well, I wish somebody would tell them that we’re not the enemy. We’re not their human targets.�

The Navy has its defenders in Fallon, where the base provides more jobs than any other business. “It’s not too much to ask to give our airmen a place to train to make the world a safer place,� said Fallon resident John Stotz. “These pilots are heroes and locals should realize that. A little noise is not going to kill them.�

Officials say the 38,000 sorties flown each year from Fallon involve more pilots than just the newcomer Top Guns. Each year, about 3,500 pilots, from novices to veterans looking for a brush-up course, train at the base’s dozen flight schools. The monthlong sessions offer training for everything that flies off the deck of an aircraft carrier--from helicopters to jet fighters.

As a result, the base’s neighbors repeatedly encounter new pilots who don’t know the rules. Navy officials often require wayward pilots to offer public apologies. Repeat offenders face disciplinary action.

“Pilots with problems are called before an aviator board and can lose their wings,� said Capt. Dave “Roy� Rogers, the base commander. “We take this seriously.�

Long-Term Health Effects

Fallon physician Richard Bargen, who has compiled his research into a book called “Airspace Blues,� claims that the heart-stopping booms from Navy jets causes stress that could lead to other long-term health effects.

Bargen, who has testified before Congress on military land issues, suggests that a class-action lawsuit may be the way for rural Nevadans and others to force the Navy to take responsibility for health and property damages caused by low-altitude, high speed fly-bys.

“The evidence suggests you can’t legally subject people to this,� he said, “just like you can’t subject them to excessive noise in the workplace.�

More troubling, Nevadans say, is the routine use of chaff. Locals are convinced the stuff is dangerous. “I’ve been chaffed and it’s not fun,� said resident Melissa Smith. “You can’t see the stuff, but suddenly you start itching. It’s like rolling around naked in your attic on top of all that fiberglass.�

Fredda Stevenson says there’s often so much chaff floating in the air near her Middlegate saloon that she has received calls from the nearby weather station asking if it’s raining there. “The chaff is so thick it looks like rain on their radar,� she says. “And we’re breathing this stuff, compliments of the United States Navy.�

Calls to the base, she says, have brought little satisfaction.

“They’ve told me that if I don’t like it, I can leave,� Stevenson said. “I tell them ‘I like it here fine. I just don’t like having the Navy here.’ �

The Navy, which acknowledges chaff drops from 15,000 training flights a year, says the health risks are minimal. A 1998 General Accounting Office report concluded that the health effects of chaff on humans and animals remains unknown.

While the Navy says it’s trying to be a better neighbor, officials make no excuses for the spiritedness of its recruits.

“There’s a certain arrogance required for this job,� said McMillin. “It takes an aggressive personality to strap on a $35-million aircraft and drop bombs. It takes a warrior. But do our pilots go out there and look for people on horseback so they can fly 50 feet over their heads? No, I hope to God not.�

Residents counter that the Navy wants to call the shots across central Nevada, citing its attempt to add 200 square miles to its test grounds and buffer areas around bombing ranges.

McMillin says the additional land is needed because pilots are forced to train over territory managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The Navy flies over 6.5 million acres of land in Nevada, but owns only 108,000 acres of that. In comparison, she said, Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas owns all 3.2 million acres over which its pilots train.

Navy officials want to build several new electronic warfare sites on public land. Satellite dishes, called threat-emitters, would be used to challenge pilots, sending signals that alert trainees that they’re being tracked by radar, and causing jets to fly low, evasive maneuvers, activists say.

The Pentagon also wants to extend the lease on one of four bomb test sites on BLM turf--a no man’s land called Bravo 20. The lease ends in 2001, and Nevada politicians are fighting a request to extend it by 25 years instead of the standard 15, saying that the state’s population is growing too fast for that kind of commitment.

Many Nevadans in towns across the desert feel that they have no voice to protest Navy actions. While they get none of the military’s boost to business enjoyed by merchants in Fallon, they still live with noise and chaff.

Navy officials say they came to Nevada because of the sparsely populated desert. Residents counter that while their numbers may be few, their rights should be no less observed.

“People feel like Navy guinea pigs,� said Portorti. “The Navy wouldn’t get away with the nonsense it pulls out here with city folks. That’s why people here feel expendable, like they’ve been written off by the Navy.�