Topic: Top Navy Officer: Fort Pickett Landing Site Too Far Away

Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
May 2, 2007
By Dale Eisman, The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK - Fort Pickett, the former Army base near Petersburg that Virginia officials are touting as a potential site for an auxiliary airstrip for Navy jets, is too far from the bases whose pilots would use it, the Navy's top officer suggested Tuesday.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chief of naval operations, said the service is "keeping our lenses as wide open as we possibly can" as it searches for a suitable location for the proposed outlying landing field, or OLF.
But Mullen said that Fort Pickett, west of Petersburg and about 100 miles from Virginia Beach, is outside the area that Navy and Marine Corps officials believe would be a suitable site for the OLF. "I'm hard-pressed to see a way to pull it back in," he added.
The services want the new field placed between Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach and the Marine Corps air station in Cherry Point, N.C., so that it would be convenient for use by pilots from both bases.
The Navy had settled on a site in Washington County, N.C., for the OLF but appears to be backing away from it in the face of fierce opposition from local residents and state political leaders. That prompted Virginia Sen. John Warner to push last month for a new look at Fort Pickett.
"I always appreciate his thoughts and his ideas," Mullen said of Warner on Tuesday. But the Navy leader, visiting with sailors at Norfolk Naval Station, gave no indication that he i s inclined to set new boundaries for potential OLF sites.
Mullen said developing the OLF is critical to the Navy's ability to give realistic training to East Coast-based pilots.
Commercial and residential development around Oceana and Fentress Field, an auxiliary strip in Chesapeake, forces pilots to follow different landing patterns than those they need to practice for aircraft carrier landings at sea, officials have said.