Flights Thrill Crowds, Help Train Pilots

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Beaufort (SC) Gazette
October 25, 2007 By Dan Hilliard
To keep their flight qualifications current, pilots at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort have to spend 140 hours in the air per year. That amounts to about one training flight every three days, and sometimes it even means flying over a high school football game.
If a school or civic organization is willing to go through the paperwork necessary to request a flyby, most pilots are happy to buzz a stadium on their way home from a training mission, said air station Operations Officer Maj. Clay Berardi.
Before a football game Oct. 19 at Whitewater High School in Fayetteville, Ga., two Marine pilots screeched over the field.
Assistant Principal Mike Vena said he requested the flyby to honor local veterans who had just returned from Iraq.
"You can announce their names and do all sorts of other things," he said, "but there's nothing like a flyover. I still had people in my office the following Saturday telling me they had goosebumps when the jets came flying over."
Certain flights, like the Veterans Day flybys scheduled for Nov. 12 in Beaufort and Bluffton and on Hilton Head Island, are a priority for Corps leadership, Berardi said. Sporting events usually are up to the pilot to decide.
Air station pilots already have flown more than 16 flybys this year, he said.
The quick flybys aren't as simple as they look, however.
Often tired from 100- to 250-mile flights simulating air-to-air combat and tank bombings, pilots have to become extra alert as soon as they begin dropping altitude.
"Every flyby is different," said Berardi. "If you told me to fly by your front steps at 13 hundred tomorrow, I'd be there plus or minus a second, no problem. But you've probably seen on TV where the national anthem ends and the airplanes fly over 20 seconds later. That timing is tricky, because your ground speed varies with your altitude."
A flyby basically mimics a low-altitude tactical bombing run, said Berardi.
That means every flyby receives the same kind of attention, both from ground crews and the pilots themselves, that a real-world situation demands, he said.
"The mechanics of it are identical. Except we don't simulate dropping bombs on stadiums," he said.
"That would be uncool. We don't even carry ordnance when we do those things."
Small aircraft, tall buildings and no-fly zones further complicate flying close to the ground, Berardi said.
Airports generally own a column of airspace around their runways, he said.
When fighter jets dip close to the ground, those no-fly zones become giant invisible obstacles that can drastically alter a pilot's flight plan.
"Down low, you have to wonder -- is this someone's airspace?" he said. "It's like the difference between side streets and highways."
The flights are as expensive as they are difficult.
Although detailed information on F/A-18 jet fuel's cost and costs per-hour of flight have been deemed classified, a jet easily can burn through 1,200 gallons in a single, hourlong flight, Berardi said.
Still, the goodwill generated by flybys more than offsets the costs, Berardi said.
"In my opinion, it's our duty to do that," he said. "For all the noise we make over the skies of Beaufort, we owe it to them to incorporate flybys into our training missions."
 
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