By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
The public has limited time to comment on a pending U.S. Air Force plan to open the skies over the Gila Wilderness — as well as airspace over millions more acres of southwestern New Mexico — to thousands of jet fighter training flights every year.
The Air Force is accepting comments until Jan. 31 on an environmental study assessing its plans. It proposes to allow F-16 fighters from Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo to fly over the Gila Wilderness as well as other New Mexico wilderness areas including the Aldo Leopold, the Apache Kid and the Withington.
Allyson Siwik is director of the Gila Conservation Coalition. Her group is a partner in the Peaceful Gila Skies coalition, groups opposing the Air Force proposal.
Siwik will discuss the Air Force proposal at the January meeting of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. Her talk starts at 5:30 p.m., Jan. 8, at Marble Brewery’s Northeast Heights location at 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE, in Albuquerque.
For years, Siwik’s organization has fought proposals to dam the Gila River or divert water from it for irrigation projects. In a significant victory for project opponents, the U.S. Department of Interior in December notified state authorities that it won’t release nearly $60 million in diversion project construction funds. Nonetheless, project proponents are continuing to push for it.
“I just think that it’s one more threat to the Gila,” Siwik said of the Air Force proposal. “This is the nation’s first wilderness area; the Gila River is the nation’s first wilderness river. These are the last of the last, from an ecological standpoint. From a historical standpoint, these places are iconic.”
Aldo Leopold, who founded the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, pushed for creation of the Gila Wilderness and Congress ultimately designated it in 1924.
A pioneering conservationist, Leopold spelled out in his writings a philosophy of how mankind should interact with the natural world.
“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient,” Leopold wrote in his book ‘A Sand County Almanac.’ “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
The Air Force draft environmental impact statement outlines three alternatives for the flights in addition to the “no-action” alternative.
The first alternative calls for expanding military operations over Eddy, Otero and Chaves counties, generally east of Artesia and Carlsbad, to provide training space for pilots within 120 miles of Holloman.
The other two alternatives propose expanding military training airspace over some 7 million acres west of White Sands Missile Range. In addition to flying over the Gila Wilderness, flights would cover the Rio Grande Valley and area population centers. Some areas would see F-16s, which can hit speeds of roughly 1,500 miles an hour, flying as low as 500 feet above the ground.
Siwik said the Air Force has stated that its existing airspace close to Holloman is adequate for training. However, it wants to access larger areas so it can train with new weapons systems without the need to coordinate with other military uses at White Sands Missile Range or with commercial air traffic.
“If they are able to get either Alternative Two or Alternative Three, it would be the largest contiguous block of military airspace in the Lower 48,” Siwik said. She said it would open an area stretching from Phoenix to the eastern side of New Mexico to military training flights.
“I think it’s an airspace grab, really,” Siwik said.
The Air Force training flights also would involve dropping flares and material called “chaff” from the planes. In combat, planes dump clouds of chaff, tiny glass fibers coated with metal, to confuse the tracking systems of enemy aircraft.
“They’re saying they will deploy 15,360 bundles a year, and within each bundle, there are 5 million fibers of chaff,” Siwik said. “That’s a lot of little pieces. They say, ‘oh, they just go into the environment and just blend into the soil, it’s just silica, it’s just glass.’”
Flares are another type of defensive measure that jets deploy to confuse opposing aircraft.
“Obviously, we’re worried about catastrophic wildfire and the fact that this area is just so vulnerable to wildfire,” Siwik said of dropping flares in the area.
Not all flares burn up in the sky as intended.
In early 2017, a 49-year-old woman in Ft. Thomas, Ariz., a small community in Graham County, near the New Mexico border, was critically burned when she picked up an unexploded Air Force flare that she found on the ground. The flare exploded as she was handling it and the resulting burns required her to be placed in a medically induced coma while she was treated for months at a burn center.
“Local governments are worried because the draft EIS says it would be up to local communities to fight the fires and they’re not going to reimburse people for the fires,” Siwik said. “The whole thing, there are just so many parts of it that really don’t make any sense for the Gila.”
All local governments in Grant County formally have opposed the Air Force plan, Siwik said. She said the governments of Silver City, Grant County and the Mining District communities have all gone on record opposing it.
Beyond the effect on local communities, Siwik said the Air Force proposal’s effect on wilderness is a paramount concern.
“The principle tenet of wilderness is these areas are supposed to be preserved, supposed to be untrammeled by man,” Siwik said. “You can’t even have a chainsaw or a bicycle in a wilderness area, but yet this proposal would allow F-16s to fly over these areas to train. So it might not be trammeled on the ground, but certainly trammeled in the air.”
Siwik said it’s critical that hunters, recreationists and others who care about the Gila Wilderness and other affected areas comment on the Air Force plan. She said people who hunt on horseback could be particularly affected by low-level jet flights.
“It just destroys the quality of the experience,” Siwik said. “And of course, we’re really concerned about wildlife. It spooks wildlife and outfitters are concerned because of pack horses and mules getting spooked and bucking people off. And of course that’s happened.”
Siwik said public comments should provide specifics, not just a generic statement of opposition. For example, she said hunters could comment about their personal experience of how hunts are affected by low-flying planes.
“If you’re out there for your elk tags, and you’re only there for a certain amount of time, and a plane goes over a herd and messes things up, that’s it,” she said.
If the Air Force gets access to fly over the Gila, Siwik said it’s unlikely ever to give it up.
“We don’t usually see the military operations areas going away, maybe they expand or change shape a little bit depending on the needs, but they don’t really go away once they get established,” she said. “So that’s the problem, and it’s hard. It’s not like this is in effect for 10 years, no, this is in effect forever, until they change it.
“If we let this go through, it’s not like there’s another shot at it, that’s it,” Siwik said.