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60,000 Hours And Climbing
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The 119th FW at Hector Airport, Fargo, North Dakota, established a new flight safety record on 14 May. The wing has now flown more than 60,000 accident-free F-16 fighter hours without the loss of an aircraft or pilot. The total covers a thirteen-year period dating from January 1990 and includes almost 39,000 flights by pilots from the North Dakota ANG. It is believed that no other ANG fighter unit has reached this level of continuous flight safety. The milestone flight was a two-versus-two tactical intercept training mission in established military operating airspace over central North Dakota and included one of three F-16 fighters that were scrambled from the wing’s alert detachment at Langley AFB, Virginia, on 11 September 2001 to secure the skies over Washington DC during the terrorist attacks against the United States. The events of that day have resulted in the unit increasing its operational tempo by more than forty percent. The last 10,000 hours of the unit’s safe hour total has come in just the last two years. The first 50,000 hours came over an eleven-year stretch. |
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