Holloman AFB plan to expand F16-training airspace is a no-go with the public

by Kathleen Sloan | April 26, 2020
5 min read
Holloman Air Force Base wants to double its air space for training F16 pilots, while admitting what they have is sufficient. The number of sorties or training flights is in question, but 11,600 a year minimum are certain.  

As required by the National Environmental Policy Act, Holloman prepared a Draft Environmental Impact Statement and is currently collecting public comment on the document. 

They held an open house for the first half hour with charts and representatives standing by at Truth or Consequences City Commission Chambers, Dec. 3. It was effective in keeping knowledge siloed among small groups instead of building knowledge in a question-and-answer exchange. 

Then they showed a half-hour video. No significant impact from the expansion of the training grounds would be the result, the video concluded. There was no question-and-answer period afterward. 

Then they took public comment. Each person was allowed three minutes at the mic. The room was almost filled to capacity, among which 20 people spoke. 

The contrast between Holloman’s and the public’s assessment of the environmental impact was night and day. No member of the public was in favor of the three expansion alternatives presented, although one person said they chose Alternative 1 after giving negative comment. The rest stated “no action” should be taken, a required alternative for all Draft Environmental Impact Statements under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Holloman’s video stated the subsonic flights and sonic booms at night and during the day were well under hearing-loss volume. “Minimal disturbance” is predicted to humans, wildlife and domestic animals living in cities, the Rio Grande Valley and Gila National Forest, as the flight heights will minimize impact. 

Several people refuted the Air Force’s claim it will stick to high-overhead flights in sensitive areas, especially over the Gila.  They had seen jets flying below them while in the forest, some said. 

Sierra County Commission Chairman Jim Paxon described how his horse “blew up” when a jet “went straight up” from below, while he was riding a valley rim. He was doing a circuit during his 30-year tenure with the U.S. Forest Service. He was thrown, the horse fell and rolled down the valley wall, both surviving although badly hurt. 

Paxon, along with several others who testified, said Holloman’s response was “it was a rogue pilot” and not one of theirs. One person pointed out no one is tracking the rogue pilots. 

Diana Tittle said the environmental impact statement didn’t reveal “the inevitability of crashes,” a danger to civilians and animals resulting in possible forest fires. Tittle said the military takes risks civilians shouldn’t have to bear with them. Her father was an experienced military pilot who died while testing an experimental aircraft when she was 16. “He knew the risks and he loved to fly.” 

Nevertheless, Tittle said, experienced pilots crash while flying F16s—3.43 times per 1,000 flight hours. The most recent crashes were Dec. 2, originating out of Tucson’s Airforce Base, and Oct. 29, originating out of Holloman. These will be training flights, Tittle said, making the likelihood of crashes greater. 

Part of the training will include releasing “chaff,” tiny particles made up of aluminum and silica glass, which forms a cloud around the jet making it invisible to radar. In addition, flares will be dropped “to route the airspace,” Holloman’s video said, claiming “chaff and flares are not toxic.” They will be released at 2,000 feet, the video said, creating no fire or pollution hazard.  

Carole Miller, a founder of Peaceful Skies Coalition and a member of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, said flares and chaff were dangerous and refuted the notion they weren’t pollutants.  A cow died in Magdelena, she said, after ingesting part of a flare. In addition, there are “cumulative effects” of flares and chaff debris coating water and land. “Like Teflon,” she said, “they don’t break down in the environment.” 

Ron Keller, a retired Air Force and National Guard pilot and current member of the New Mexico Pilot Association, said “Dropping flares over the forest is bad. In the Gila, 100,000 acres would burn before you could get at it,” and “It’s not worth the risk.”

As “a Radar guru,” Keller said “mid-air collisions” will be more likely around the Gila because of no visibility around mountains. He also disagreed with the DEIS assessment private airports won’t be affected, naming three using the airspace Holloman wants to take over. 

Allyson Siwik, a founder of the Gila Resources Information Project, pointed out the environmental impact statement gives minimums for sorties, 10,300 originating out of Holloman and an estimated 1,300 “transient aircraft or more outside of Holloman.” 

“In reality there is no limit to the number of sorties,” Siwik said. 

Expanding the training airspace by 7-million or 9-million acres, indicated in the various alternatives, “will encourage more training,” Siwik said, with more students probably coming from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and Luke Air Force Base, both in Arizona, which fly F35 jets, which are louder. 

Siwik, along with most of the people who spoke, pointed out this area depends on tourism, retirees and outdoor recreation to sustain its economy. Peace and quiet and relative isolation attract those sectors. The effect of jets flying day and night on the economy was not evaluated in the DEIS, she said.  

Max Yeh said the Holloman proposal was a prime example of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning that the military-industrial complex would dominate the county if not checked. 

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together,” Eisenhower said in his presidential farewell speech. 

The Holloman environmental impact statement was written “on the behalf of the military complex,” Yeh said. 

The F16 is outmoded, its life extended beyond its 2017 deadline because it’s “a valuable commodity,” Yeh said. The U.S. sells F16s to foreign countries and it makes General Dynamics richer, Yeh said, with the military training foreign pilots to sweeten the sales package. 

The military-industrial complex’s motives are not in line with the public good, Yeh pointed out. Turkey was sold F16s and is using them “against American allies in Syria.” 

Reverting to Eisenhower’s advice, Yeh said the military complex must give “a clear demonstration of what is necessary and not what is comfortable and convenient” before the public gives it to them. Since Holloman’s airspace is adequate, “no action,” he said, should be the chosen alternative. 

The public has until Jan. 31, 2020 to submit written comment on Holloman Airforce Base’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement.
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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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