THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 12, 1997 TAG: 9702120456
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM HOLDEN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 91 lines
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are expected today at Oceana Naval Air Station, where they will continue an inquiry into close encounters last week between National Guard F-16s and commercial aircraft off the East Coast.
The civilian inspectors will interview officials at the Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility-Virginia Capes, whose personnel had control of the fighters during the encounters.
The investigations are part of the NTSB's routine evaluations of near-misses and other reported incidents in the nation's skies.
``Part of the program is to interview the controllers, look at the radar tapes, and develop a clearer picture of what took place and why, and that might lead to whether we can make some safety recommendations that would be used to help improve the situation,'' said Paul Schlamm, an NTSB spokesman in Washington.
``They don't work on a schedule,'' he said ``They'll take as much time as they need.''
As government facilities go, the investigators' destination doesn't look like much. Adjacent to Oceana Boulevard, it consists of an unremarkable block of a building, two towers topped with dimpled domes, and an array of antennas on poles.
But inside is enough electronic equipment to monitor a whopping 94,000-square-mile chunk of airspace off the Eastern Seaboard. From Narragansett Bay, R.I., to Charleston, S.C., the powerful radar beams that sweep from the facility can track all traffic - civilian and military - and monitor ship and submarine movement up to 200 miles from shore.
Its air traffic controllers ride herd on the military's use of several offshore warning areas - blocks of sky over the Atlantic used for training and tests.
The facility's work goes largely unnoticed because very little goes wrong. Officials at the facility declined requests for interviews, preferring that the civilian investigation run its course first.
But retired Navy Capt. T.L. Zackowski, the former commanding officer of the facility, said its raison d'etre is safety.
``The main purpose was to prevent accidents,'' he said, ``not only with commercial aircraft that would be flying through, but also to keep some positive control over all the military air units along the coast - to keep them from running into each other.''
How the center exercised that control last week is likely the focus of the NTSB's visit.
A week ago, two F-16s attached to a New Jersey Air National Guard unit closed in on a Nations Air 727 as it flew through a warning area toward New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
One of the fighters got close enough that the commercial jet's collision-avoidance alarm sounded, prompting the pilot to take evasive action. The F-16s were under the Virginia Beach center's control at the time.
Two days later, four DC Air National Guard F-16s flew near an American Eagle turboprop en route from Raleigh-Durham to New York.
No evidence has been made public in either case that suggests any plane was in danger. But outcry over the Nations Air incident coincided with two other cases, one in New Mexico and another in Texas, in which military and civilian aircraft shared small slivers of the airways.
``The Nations Air thing was unusual,'' the NTSB's Schlamm said. ``Some of the others, like the ones in New Mexico, those were the type of things that show up in FAA pilot deviation reports which are logged and monitored by us.''
Such incidents are rare, despite the East Coast's heavy air traffic, because the Oceana facility is tied into both the Federal Aviation Administration's control and tracking systems and the Air Force's defense networks.
Controllers from each, Zackowski said, are talking to one another all the time.
The offshore warning areas - such as that in which the Nations Air plane was flying - are open to civilian traffic unless military controllers announce to the FAA they're being activated, or turned ``hot,'' he said.
``It was mutual control, really,'' Zackowski said of the warning areas. ``We'd have it when it was activated, they'd have it when it was not.
``Without a facility like this, you could get yourself in a lot of trouble,'' Zackowski said, ``particularly if you had (fighters) out in an area, and they were doing missile firings, and you had civilian aircraft flying by.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo by GARY C. KNAPP/File photo
Air traffic controllers at Oceana's Fleet Area Control and
Surveillance Facility-Virginia Capes ride herd on the military's use
of several blocks of sky over the Atlantic used for training and
tests.
KEYWORDS: MILITARY PLANE U.S. AIR FORCE U.S. NAVY