An era ends at Hancock as F-16s make final flights
With their afterburners at full blast, two F-16 fighter jets from the Air National Guard’s 174th Fighter Wing zoomed low over Syracuse’s Hancock Field and then shot straight into the sky and out of sight Saturday afternoon, ending 62 years of manned fighter operations at the base.
“We’ve got three bags of gas, so we’re going to stay up a bit,” Col. Kevin Bradley, the fighter wing’s commander, said just before he climbed into his F-16 for the last time, as 1,500 Air Guard members and their families watched.
“It’s the end of an era but the start of a new one,” added Lt. Col. Dan Tester before he climbed aboard his F-16.
A few minutes later, Bradley and Tester fired up their engines and rolled down Hancock Airport’s main runway, Tester lifting off first and Bradley following seconds later, at 3:15 p.m. The two made three low passes, in close formation, over Hancock Field, the Air National Guard base on the south side of the airport.
On their third and final pass, the pilots pointed the jets’ noses skyward and zipped straight up until they disappeared from view, signaling the end of manned fighter operations that began at the base with the arrival of the P-47 on March 8, 1948.
As the F-16s left, guard members rolled an MQ-9 Reaper onto the tarmac that the jets had just left.
MQ-9 Reaper
The Reaper, a remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicle, is replacing the aging F-16s at the fighter wing. The Reaper is part of a growing trend in American air power toward remotely controlled planes that can perform many of the missions that manned planes can without putting pilots at risk.
Controlled via satellite and other communications by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away, the Reaper can loiter in the air for 30 hours without refueling, provide vital video surveillance for ground troops and deliver almost as much munitions as the F-16 can.
“It’s bittersweet,” Bradley said as he walked from a hanger to his F-16 for its final flight. “But all good things come to an end. We’re on a new mission. We’re ready.”
With each of the F-16s carrying three big external tanks for extra fuel, Bradley and Tester toured the skies of New York, flying over Niagara Falls, Long Island and Schenectady before landing them at the Fort Drum Army Base near Watertown.
From there, other pilots from the 174th will fly them Monday to their final resting place — an aircraft “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz.
