THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 18, 1996 TAG: 9604180343
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
It's the kind of incident that gives City Council members nightmares.
A plane goes down while landing at Oceana Naval Air Station. But where?
The difference of a mile means the difference between crashing into an open field or Lynnhaven Mall, a golf course or an elementary school. A mile is the difference of a eye-blink when you're traveling at the speed of an F-14.
Compared to what might have been, Wednesday's crash at Oceana was another blessing.
The plane crashed in woods on the base's southwestern side where it is closest to London Bridge and Shipps Corner roads. The flight path took the jet over the northern end of Oceana above Virginia Beach Boulevard and Potter's Road. The nearest neighborhood, Magic Hollow, is approximately one-half mile from the crash site.
The two aviators managed to eject. Neither was seriously injured. A rescue worker suffered a fractured ankle while extricating one of the pilots from a tree.
Though the nation's 27th largest city has grown up around the naval air station, populated buildings surrounding the base have never been damaged.
Some of that is luck, most of it is the skill of Navy pilots, and a piece of it is due to Virginia Beach land use regulations.
The Navy lost most of its battles in the 1970s and early 1980s to limit land uses around the master jet base.
A divided City Council usually sided with private landowners in zoning decisions, saying if the Navy were really concerned about surrounding development, it would buy the air rights in its back yard.
But slowly, the city's leaders started to recognize the economic impact of the base and the possibility that the Navy might take its planes and personnel elsewhere.
Since the late 1980s, the city's leaders have worked with the Navy to develop land use restrictions around the base.
The Radisson Hotel next to the Pavilion was shortened to keep it out of the base's flight routes.
The city approved regulations in 1994 that imposed height restrictions for structures in the flight path, and different building materials for houses subject to noisy jet landings.
The Oceana West Industrial Park was built on the base's western edge to comply with the Navy's preferred use of land surrounding the base.
And, in perhaps the costliest example of cooperation between the city and the Navy, the City Council last year budgeted about $20 million to move the Seatack and Linkhorn elementary schools, built when the base was still an auxiliary field, out of the flight path.
``The base has endeavored to be a good neighbor to the City of Virginia Beach, and we, in turn, have tried to comply with all of the clear zones that are necessary to make Oceana a safe operating base,'' Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf said Wednesday.
Rep. Owen B. Pickett, D-2nd District, who helped Oceana survive last year's Base Realignment and Closure Commission, praised the pilot in Wednesday's crash for keeping the mishap out of populated areas near the base.
Oberndorf said there is no way to completely guarantee the public's safety.
``I know that Oceana goes to extraordinary ends to train these pilots,'' Oberndorf said. ``And 99.99 percent of the time the flights are routine without any cause for alarm.
``Unfortunately, whether it's an airplane, a train, a car or a bus, accidents do happen no matter how carefully we try to stop them.''
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT PLANE ACCIDENT MILITARY F-14 OCEANA by CNB