Tag Archives: Vermont Air National Guard

Complaint Filed Against Vermont Guard

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What’s up with basing the military’s newest and most controversial fighter jet, the F-35  under operational control by a National Guard force that is, itself,  under scrutiny for corrupt behaviors?

Vermont Digger was recently taken to the woodshed for daring to investigate the Vermont National Guard with regard to systemic issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, corruption and substance abuse; but they are a prestigious regional news source and we are just a lowly blog site with no pretensions of influence; so we have have little to fear, and, arguably, an obligation to speak truth to power.

If anyone has paid attention to our postings, they will know that a number of GMD scribes have taken issue with the F-35 siting at Burlington airport.

Our questions were mainly about the safety of the densely populated urban area left at least statistically vulnerable to a disasterous crash by a minimally tested, nuclear-equipped war plane. More subtle issues of public safety, like health impacts from audio disturbance and unknown stress for aerial wildlife also concerned us. Then there was the extremely puzzling choice of Burlington over much more suitable (and willing) locations.

It appears that nothing will stop the fledgling war-dragons from descending on Burlington Airport now.  What the Guard wants, the Guard gets, and on this there simply is no political will for pushback.

With the recent scandal investigated in a series of articles by Digger’s Jasper Craven, there is even more reason to question the wisdom of the F-35 siting.  How is it prudent to hand over control of such a sensitive weapons system to a unit that has failed so recently and so conspicuously in the areas of discipline, honor and simple common sense?

Being a civilian, the conventional wisdom is that I am too ignorant even to raise questions; and I probably haven’t gotten the technical picture even half-right, from that point of view.  But if there is even a kernel of validity in the concerns that have been raised over the past few years about the siting and the process, we civilians have a right to be very worried by disciplinary failures in the Guard.

This is a rather long-winded way to segue into a complaint filed on January 4, 2019 by South Burlington attorney James Marc Leas with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  I will allow excerpts from Mr. Leas’ press release to take it from here, and will add the full text of Mr. Leas’ press release, the full complaint and links to Jasper Craven’s articles in the comments section below.

“The heavy drinking culture and severe alcohol-impairment is inseparable from the intermingling of the military jets with a densely populated civilian neighborhood,” said Leas. “Pilots cannot be expected to blast children with thousands of F-16 afterburner takeoffs each year, impairing their learning and permanently damaging their hearing, as described by the US Air Force in its 2013 Environmental Impact Statement, without negative impact on themselves,” he said. “What was revealed by VTDigger are state agency commanders and pilots awash in alcohol and operating dangerous equipment amidst the densely populated Chamberlin School neighborhood of South Burlington. A recipe for imperiling health, safety, learning, hearing, and honor.”

…Far from putting a stop to the misuse of alcohol, VTDigger reports that under the redesign of facilities for the F-35, commanders are doubling the size of the “Afterburner Club” room for alcohol abuse. Commanders and pilots appear to understand that as they increase harm to civilians, more space for alcohol abuse is needed.

Nor is the corruption limited to Guard commanders and pilots. The abuse originated in political and military leaders who pushed for routine use of the F-16 afterburner in 2008, “just in time to vastly boost ‘baseline’ noise levels to facilitate selection of the Vermont Air Guard for the F-35 in the scoping process that began in 2009,” said Leas.

The complaint notes that the culture of falsifying records mentioned in the VTDigger series is intimately related to the F-35 basing. The fourth in the VTDigger series of articles disclosed a “longstanding policy” in which Guard commanders did “a very deliberate cooking of the books.” In the VPR interview, Jasper Craven explained to VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb, “Senior officers of the Vermont Guard are also alleged to have cooked the books around their personnel numbers ‘to project an operational readiness, a sort of strength to the National Bureau, in order show that the Guard deserves continued support and the F-35.’”

…said Leas, “None of the VTDigger articles suggested wrongdoing by the enlisted women and men of the Guard–the bad apples are all at the top of the tree: the commanders, the pilots, the congressional delegation, the Burlington mayor, and the governor himself. All the bad apples must be removed and composted. The enlisted women and men in our Vermont National Guard, and the public, deserve a leadership and a culture devoted strictly to serving the people of Vermont, free of alcohol abuse, where sexual abuse, retaliation, and falsifying records has no part, and where impairing learning of children and damaging hearing are not permitted.”

 

Right in character: F-35 fails latest test

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Look up in the sky! It is a bird or even superman —  but not an F-35. The troubled new jet fighter scheduled to be deployed to Burlington International Airport in 2019 continued right in character — performing poorly.f35csmp1

“The Air Force attempted two alert launch procedures during the Mountain Home deployment, where multiple F-35A aircraft were preflighted and prepared for a rapid launch, but only one of the six aircraft was able to complete the alert launch sequence and successfully takeoff,” the Pentagon’s top weapons tester disclosed in written testimony to Congress on 26 April.

Under development for 15 years the F-35 program has set records burning through $400 billion of our tax dollars. Currently the cost per aircraft is estimated to be of $412 million. And after all that time and money, the results of the recent deployment test are probably the last thing supporters of deployment to Vermont –notably Senators Leahy and Sanders, Rep. Peter Welch, Gov. Shumlin, and Mayor Miro Weinberger — want to hear.

Glitches that required system and/or aircraft shutdown and restarts that prevented launches were blamed on “immature software.”

For now at least, the F-35 is a fully mature employment program for some defense contractors. Currently these aircraft at one base require 60-90 industry tech reps per squadron. And in Senate testimony just last week Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said the program needs about 2,600 people to oversee it at a cost of $70 million per year. One Senator said he had numbers indicating it was nearly 3,000 people and $300 million a year.

Now, seven years since its first flight hour, the F-35 has reached the 50,000 flight hours mark.  Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, F-35 Joint Program Executive Officer: “The next 50,000 hours will be achieved much quicker as we double the size of the F-35 fleet worldwide in the next three years alone.”

The 50,000 flight hours are comprised of two categories: System Development and Demonstration flights (SDD)  test hours (12,050) and Operational flying hours (37,950).  Therefore, the total for Operational flight hours is only 37,950 hours-about a quarter less than the total flight hours of 50,000.

When he was defending the safety of deployment to Vermont in 2013, Lt. Col. Chris Caputo said the new fighter would have 750,000 flight hours before it comes to Burlington in 2019. A lot more F-35’s will have to be flying  and an awful lot of Operational flight time (700,000) will have to be logged in three years if the Vermont Air Guard is  to receive a plane that meets that goal.

Another question for the brass hats — and the F-35 cheerleaders –how realistic (or affordable) is reaching that goal in three years considering all the “glitches” and “bugs” haunting the aircraft?

A GMD bonus fun-fact:

Lockheed Martin was the biggest federal contract in 2014, Lockheed’s Pentagon contracts alone are worth more than the federal government provides in grants to the state governments of North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Wyoming, Montana, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Idaho, and Alaska combined.

Ground Hog Day: De-Bugging the F-35

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It seems the F-35 fighter; aka the most expensive weapons system ever, hasn’t been in the news too often lately. And most of the news out that is out there is awful, according to reports in early February. If or when the jet fighters do fly on a regular basis, at some point in the future some will be used by the Vermont Air National Guard and based at the Burlington airport. This is over objections from residents in nearby towns over possible noise levels during take-off and landings — so, here’s a heads up for Vermonters. f-35model

If you care to read more details, that can be done here. But these three descriptive headlines provide a more than adequate, quick summary: The Version That the Marines Are Using Is Very Buggy;  ALIS [Autonomic Logistics Information System] Is Still Terrible, Perhaps Even Getting Worse; and my favorite,  Lockouts, Confusion, etc.

From Lockouts,Confusion,etc.:

  • The F-35 fails to detect if it’s been flying too fast or what effect that might have. “The Integrated Exceedance Management System, designed to assess and report whether the aircraft exceeded limitations during flight, failed to function properly.”
  • The plane “randomly prevented user logins into ALIS.
  • The plane doesn’t know how broken parts are: “The maintenance action severity code functionality…designed to automatically assign severity codes to work orders as maintenance personnel create them—did not work correctly.”
  • The plane’s crews need to phone Lockheed Martin tech support because the plane can’t handle the data it needs to process in order to run missions. “Managing data loads associated with mission planning required extensive contractor support.”

I think it was on Ground Hog Day that the Pentagon’s office of testing’s recent evaluations made their way into the news. So if the report sees its shadow and tax money is allowed to flow on and on, there will likely be six more months of testing for the most expensive weapons system ever. One does wonder how many crashes and injured or killed pilots will it take to ground this hog.