Plan to triple training Air Force airspace progressing

A plan to more than triple the airspace in which the U.S. Air Force can conduct training exercises with its Dakotas-based B-1 and B-52 bombers is progressing, and officials expect an environmental impact statement to be finalized by winter. The Powder River Training Complex, centered just northwest of where South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana meet, now spans about 8,300 square miles. The Air Force says the expanded area would help pilots practice bomb runs, defensive maneuvers and evasive actions used in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wants to add three "military operation areas" to create a fly space of about 27,500 square miles - an area larger in square miles than the state of West Virginia. The complex would encompass a portion of southwestern North Dakota and new parts of northwestern South Dakota and southeastern Montana. Montana's delegation has expressed concern about the effects on flight patterns of medical and other small aircraft. Ernie Clark, a retiree and flying instructor at Spearfish, said he questions the need for expanded training space when flight simulators and remote areas such as oceans are available. The big bombers flying so fast at low altitude are a hazard to smaller planes, he said. Buffalo rancher Larry Nelson said the light planes he and other ranchers fly at low altitudes to check fences and livestock or for predator hunting are no match for wing turbulence coming off the military planes. "If they're flying at 500 feet and I'm at 300 feet and they overfly me and I get caught in that turbulence it's wreck me," he said. Nelson said he also is concerned that chaff deployed during the training runs could contaminate wool on his sheep and that flares used in training could start fires in an area with natural gas and oil wells...more