Among the most demanding tasks in aviation is landing a fighter jet on a moonless night on the moving, pitching deck of an aircraft carrier at sea. Touching down just a few yards short or to the left or right can have fatal consequences. It’s a task that Navy pilots spend countless hours training for by making repeated practice landings at land bases.

It’s the quality and safety of these training opportunities that lie at the heart of the ongoing debate about the location of the Navy’s main East Coast fighter base and a proposed, controversial auxiliary landing field in Washington County, N.C. Recent action by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission only makes the situation going forward less certain.

NAS Oceana

Naval Air Station Oceana, in Virginia Beach, Va. is the Navy’s East Coast master jet base, the airfield upon which most of the planes that fly from the aircraft carriers operating out of the East Coast are based. Nearly 200 fighter jets are based there, and they make more than 300,000 takeoffs and landings a year at Oceana and Fentress Field, a practice field in the nearby city of Chesapeake. Virginia Beach is also a rapidly growing community with a population of more than 400,000 and Virginia’s largest city.

The combination of those factors is the crux of the problem. Development has encroached upon Oceana and Fentress. It is degrading the quality of training available while creating serious safety concerns.

The old military adage is that you should train like you fight, which doesn’t happen out of Oceana. Pilots begin landing approaches at a higher altitude and descend more steeply into Oceana and Fentress than they would at sea. It’s also not particularly dark at night. Noise concerns limit when and where Navy planes can fly.

Nearly one-third of Virginia Beach is exposed to average noise levels that exceed federal recommendations. Thousands of people live, work, and shop in potential crash zones near the ends of Oceana’s four runways. Virginia Beach has been generally unwilling to reign in develop near Oceana.

Despite all this, the Navy did not recommend that its fighter jets move out of Oceana in this year’s base closing round. Rather, the Navy’s preferred solution is to build a new outlying landing facility—a landing strip for its jets to practice landings—in rural Washington County, N.C. to take some of the pressure off Oceana. In a similar vein, two Navy F/A-18E/F Super Hornet squadrons would be based at Cherry Point, not Oceana.

The Navy also noted in its BRAC recommendations that it did not recommend closing additional air stations this year as insurance against additional future encroachment at Oceana. It has also started to consider building a replacement for Oceana, though such a move would not happen until far into the future.

The BRAC acts

In July, the base closing commission, on its motion, decided to review the situation at Oceana. It came away convinced that something had to be done.

“The reality of life for Oceana is as you fly the landing pattern at whatever height you are, you are flying over buildings, schools, churches, and shopping centers” said Commissioner James Hill, a retired Army four-star general, during the commission’s final deliberations in August.

“In good conscience, many of us up here have said we’ve got to do something about that because when the plane augurs into Lynnwood Mall I want to have at least had my say on this subject,” he said.

“Oceana is not the long-term future master jet base for the Navy,” said former Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner. “The Navy has said that. It’s obvious as you look at the future of the Navy that it will not be.”

Skinner said many commissioners also thought “that we owe one last chance to the people of Virginia to get their act together” before moving the fighters off the base.

The commission voted to keep the F/A-18 squadrons at Oceana only if certain stringent conditions were met by Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and the Commonwealth of Virginia by March 31, 2006. These include agreeing to spend $15 million a year to buy out property in the highest accident potential area and enacting restrictions on future development near the airfields.

Should Virginia Beach and the rest not meet the conditions, the planes would move to Cecil Field outside Jacksonville, Fla. Cecil Field is a former Navy F/A-18 base that closed in 1999. Florida offered to give the field back to the Navy; the BRAC staff determined the facility was a viable option.

Now what?

The simplest, though not necessarily the most likely, path forward would be for Virginia Beach to be unwilling or unable to meet BRAC’s demands. In that case, the Navy’s F/A-18s will move back to Cecil Field, and Cherry Point likely won’t get the anticipated two F/A-18 Super Hornet squadrons. With the need to mitigate Oceana’s encroachment gone, the Navy’s requirement for the Washington County OLF would be greatly reduced. It would be likely, though not certain, that the Navy then would not proceed with the OLF.

A move to Cecil Field and future force cuts could also let the Navy and Marines consolidate their East Coast fighter squadrons at two bases instead of three through a future BRAC round. The likely odd-man out would be Marine Corp Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina, the smallest of the three facilities. It also had a lower military value in 2005 than Cherry Point.

Should Virginia Beach decide to comply with the commission’s demands, the situation going forward is unclear. While Oceana would be the answer for the moment, the BRAC also required the secretary of defense to undertake an immediate review of Cecil Field and other possible sites and recommend a long-term solution. Until the study is complete, including a projected time frame and cost, it’s impossible to determine what the next step is and whether the Washington County OLF will still be needed by the Navy.

Michael Lowrey is a contributing editor for Carolina Journal.