Oceana jet's errant bomb sparks Florida forest fire

An Oceana-based Navy fighter jet is being blamed for setting a large fire Tuesday in a national forest in Florida after a bomb it dropped missed its target.

About 250 acres of woodland and swamp in the Ocala National Forest burned after the F/A-18 Super Hornet dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb that hit a mile from its target.

Officials at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station said the incident is under investigation.

The fighter was conducting routine training over the Pinecastle Impact Range, but the bomb fell far from its intended target, coming down east of where it should have hit.

The area where it hit is uninhabited and there were no structures nearby, the Navy said in a news release Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

Mike Drayton, a fire management officer with the U.S. Forest Service, told the Ocala Star Banner that the fire was contained. He said no structures were damaged and no one was hurt in the blaze.

He told the newspaper that the bomb blast sparked a fire that burned 257 acres east of Forest Service Road 595.

Drayton said crews from the Florida Division of Forestry and the St. Johns River Water Management District helped control the blaze.

The jet that dropped the bomb was from Strike Fighter Squadron 213, the "Fighting Blacklions," based in Virginia Beach. The unit is attached to the Norfolk-based carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

The name of the pilot was not immediately released.

According to the squadron's Web site, in 2004 it won the "BOOLA BOOLA" award for excellence in maintenance and employment of air-to-air ordnance.

In September 2005, the squadron deployed for a second time in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Its pilots flew more than 3,500 combat hours in 581 combat sorties, dropping more than 5,000 pounds of precision-guided ordnance over Iraq.

After the squadron's return in March 2006, it transitioned to the F/A-18F Super Hornet.

This is not the first incident of a Navy aircraft dropping bombs where they should not have.

On Oct. 30, 2007, a training bomb fell accidentally from a Navy plane in California on the same day one dropped near a busy road in Virginia Beach. Both incidents involved F/A-18 Hornets and an inert, 10-pound bomb called BDU-48.

The bomb releases only smoke on impact. In the Virginia Beach incident, it fell into a commercial area along London Bridge Road. No one was injured, and there was little damage. The plane was returning to Oceana from a North Carolina bombing range.

That same day a BDU-48 fell off a Hornet based at Lemoore Naval Air Station in California.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the Pinecastle range is the only place on the East Coast where the Navy can train with live munitions.  The Navy drops nearly 20,000 bombs a year at the site, a few hundred of which are live.

The Navy uses about 6,000 acres of the 382,000-acre national forest for target practice. It has done so for half a century under a special use permit from the U.S. Forest Service.