Using Wallops for training may cost less, inspector says

Two months ago, a pilot involved in the Navy's search for a practice landing field took the unusual step of publicly criticizing his command's site selection process.

Cmdr. Matt Baker wrote a letter to four-star Adm. John Harvey Jr. - and sent copies to the media - alleging that the command failed to consider Wallops Island as a viable site for touch-and-go landing practice for Navy prop planes. Baker contended that by using the NASA facility at Wallops Island, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, instead of leasing space at a municipal airport in Emporia, the Navy could save $14 million over the next decade.

Harvey, head of the Navy's Fleet Forces Command, halted the site-selection process while an inspector general investigated Baker's complaint. The IG's 26-page report, obtained this week through a Freedom of Information Act request, did not substantiate any of Baker's specific claims, including an allegation that the command rigged the process in favor of Emporia. But the investigation did validate Baker's analysis that the Navy could save more than $1 million annually by using Wallops Flight Facility instead of Emporia for field carrier landing practice.

Last week, the Navy announced it had added Wallops as an alternative and will conduct environmental assessments on both sites. It hopes to have the crews of E-2C Hawkeyes and C-2 Greyhounds practicing at one of the locations by the summer of 2013.

Capt. Chris Sims, a Fleet Forces Command spokesman, said Baker's complaint wasn't the reason the Navy decided to study Wallops.

"We were already in written correspondence with Wallops at the time the Baker letter arrived," Sims said.

The investigation sparked by Baker's complaint lays out a timeline of the Navy's search for a landing field for Norfolk-based planes and crews, which currently use Fentress Auxiliary Landing Field in Chesapeake or head to Jacksonville, Fla., for weeks at a time to train.

In mid-2010, the Navy started looking at alternative training sites within 90 nautical miles of Norfolk. According to the investigation report, the deputy director at the NASA facility told Navy officials in July 2010 that carrier landing practice was "incompatible with Wallops mission and community relations."

The Navy proceeded with its search for a commercial lease, first focusing on Franklin and later, Emporia.

In June, within days of the Navy announcing it would study just one potential site - Emporia - Wallops officials told Harvey's command they were interested in being considered, too. They expressed that again in writing on July 15.

The investigation shows that the Navy reacted somewhat skeptically to the overture. In a letter to Wallops officials on Aug. 2, it noted the change in interest and requested that NASA's top administrator confirm the agency's interest to the chief of naval operations.

Ten days later, Harvey received the complaint from Baker, an F/A-18 pilot assigned to the command's shore readiness division.

Baker, who is about to retire from the Navy after 25 years, declined to comment Wednesday.

His August letter argued that using Emporia for training would cost the Navy $17 million more over a decade than it currently spends training local pilots. And because flight crews could switch into and out of planes at Wallops - something they can't do at Emporia, because its runway is only long enough for touch-and-go maneuvers - that option would require far fewer flight hours and less fuel, maintenance and wear and tear on the planes.

The final two pages of the IG report back up Baker's math, though its author notes the numbers "may have management interest but have no bearing on the conclusions of the investigation."

A chart lays out estimated annual costs of training flight crews in various locations: $1.4 million at the Navy's field in Florida; $2.5 million in Emporia (including the cost to lease the facility) and $874,000 at Wallops.

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com