35th Fighter Wing completes banner year

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Rachel Martinez
  • 35th Fighter Wing public affairs
MISAWA AIR BASE, Japan --  The close-out of fiscal year 2007 ended a banner year for the 35th Fighter Wing.

In 2007, the 35th FW completed their flying hour program, deployed two fighter squadrons and completed an Operational Readiness Inspection with an "Excellent" rating.

"Any year you can accomplish your flying hour program is a good year," said Col. Mark Altobelli, 35th Operations Group commander. "2007 was a good year."

What also made it a banner year was that the wing completed the program while supporting two Air and Space Expeditionary Force rotations. The AEF rotations tasked multiple jets and pilots as well as hundreds of maintainers to support a new mission.

"Our wing is a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) wing," explained Colonel Altobelli. "In Operation Iraqi Freedom we had a totally different mission. A new type of training needed to be accomplished. It's a pretty big task for a group to train pilots on a new mission."

The OIF mission consisted of close air support (CAS). The operations group began a spin-up program in August 2006 to prepare their pilots to deploy in January 2007. While training on a new mission, the wing still had to maintain its flying hour program and the SEAD mission at home.

The 35th Maintenance Group had its work cut out in preparation for the deployments as well.

"In order to prepare for the challenge ahead, we had to come up with a prep plan," said Col. Cedric George, 35th MXG commander. "We prepared 18 aircraft (for the deployment). We completed eight months worth of work in five short months."

Maintainers worked extended hours to help prepare aircraft, equipment, and people for back-to-back deployments.

While deployed in AEFs 5/6 and 7/8, the pilots, maintainers and jets performed superbly.

"We train how we, no kidding, fight," said Colonel George. "We had zero maintenance non-deliveries (while deployed). The Wild Weasel team performed brilliantly"

"We flew 2,800 sorties over a nine-month period in OIF," said Colonel Altobelli. "We flew 11,500 hours in OIF, on top of what we flew here."

More challenges arose with the return of the 14th Fighter Squadron from AEF 5/6. All the pilots needed to re-qualify on the home-station mission. The operations group introduced a number of new processes to get its pilots re-qualified. There are 16 different sortie types for each pilot to accomplish in order to re-qualify. The operations group used the flight simulator more this year, scheduling half of the sorties for the simulator. They also operated at a near surge rate for July and August in order to complete the flying hour program. One of the techniques they used in the surge operations was the hot pits.

"Hot pits are where we refuel while running the engine in order to take the time on the ground down from three hours to one," said Lt. Col. Kenneth Madura, 35th Operations Support Squadron commander.

The surge operations and re-qualification had to take place during the most demanding weather season at Misawa, and while the 13th Fighter Squadron and hundreds of maintainers were deployed in AEF 7/8. According to Colonel George, it was a delicate balancing act to ensure increased mission requirements were met without compromising maintenance discipline, specifically safety, technical data usage, and proper documentation.

"Communication, coordination, and compromise were critical to the success shared between the operations and maintenance groups. This is yet another example of the 35th Fighter Wing at its best

With the return of the 13th FS, their pilots will now need to re-qualify as well. In addition, the jets and equipment they brought back will need to be reconstituted. Reconstituting the jets involves a complete maintenance inspection

"We'll have to reconstitute - a 400-hour phase, a detailed inspection and overhaul of all major aircraft systems" said Colonel George. "When I saw all 12 jets returning together - that gave me an initial indication that the jets performed well down there. It is rare to see all 12 jets return home at the same time after flying hard for 240 consecutive days. We need to perform a detailed inspection on each jet to ensure that there haven't been any adverse effects on the jets while downrange."

In addition to reconstituting the jets, the maintenance group is busy preparing for detonation transfer assembly time change on the Misawa fleet - a procedure that must be done every 15 years. When a pilot must eject from the aircraft, it is the detonation cord that breaks the canopy away. If this detonation cord is not replaced every 15 years, you run the risk of it not working properly and the canopy not coming off.

The 35th Fighter Wing banner year would not be complete without the Operational Readiness Inspection held in March. The maintenance group received an unprecedented 'outstanding' rating on all phases of the inspection. The operations group also achieved a 99 percent mission effectiveness rate during the ORI.

"As I looked at the challenges before the group at the beginning of the year - if you told me how well we would have excelled, I don't know that I would have believed it. I'm extremely proud to be a part of this wing, and I'm extremely proud of our maintainers," Colonel George said.

Lessons learned this past year are being used to prepare for the year to come.

"If we are tasked to go into the AEF next year, we've set up our program to accomplish that," Colonel Altobelli said. "We've proven that you can take a SEAD wing and turn it into a CAS wing."

Before the next year ramps up, both groups are taking a much needed breather.

"You can't run at this pace and do what we've done without being tired," commented Colonel George. "We're going to take a breather then start a gradual and focused build up for our next tasking. We will be ready to 'Attack to Defend' when called upon!"