Jet Fires At School During Training

Jet Fires At School During Training
Associated Press
November 5, 2004

LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. - A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured.

The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School in southern New Jersey shortly after 11 p.m. Wednesday. The school is a few miles from a military firing range.

Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school heard what sounded like someone running across the roof.

Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.

The pilot of the single-seat jet was supposed to fire at a ground target on the firing range three and half miles from the school, said Col. Brian Webster, commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard, which is responsible for the range. He did not know what led to the school getting shot up.

The plane was 7,000 feet in the air when the shots were fired. The gun, an M61-A1 Vulcan cannon, is located in the plane's left wing. It fires 2-inch-long bullets that are made of lead and do not explode, said Webster.


"The National Guard takes this situation very seriously," said Lt. Col. Roberta Niedt, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. "The safety of our people and the surrounding communities are our foremost concern."

The jet that fired the rounds was assigned to the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, based at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The plane returned there after firing the shots, Webster said.

He would not identify the pilot or detail possible disciplinary measures.

Mike Dupuis, president of the township's Board of Education, said school workers are mindful that the firing range is nearby.

"Being so close to the range, that's always in the back of our minds. It is very scary. I have children in that school and relatives that work there," he said.

Schools in New Jersey were closed Thursday because of a teachers convention.

The 2,400-acre Warren Grove range, about 30 miles north of Atlantic City, has been used by the military since the end of World War II, long before the surrounding area was developed.

In 2002, an Air National Guard F-16 that had been practicing attacks at the range crashed along the Garden State Parkway. The plane's pilot ejected safely, and no one on the ground was hurt.

Errant practice bombs were blamed for forest fires that burned more than 11,000 acres of the Pine Barrens near the range in 1999 and more than 1,600 acres in 2002.

Ellie

Wrong button....

Yep....I live in Jersey.
I've taken to wearing a flak vest in the yard.

Duck & Cover !!!

Leave it up to the National Guard!:banana:

Weekend Warriors

aint no way any of my kids would be going to that school after that .geez

Hmmmm looks like it's back to the drawing board! Now tell me again where that range is?

Why is a school only a few miles away from a military firing range? WTF?

Senator Wants Guard Out of N.J. Skies

By WAYNE PARRY, Associated Press Writer

NEWARK, N.J. - Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record) called on a National Guard unit Friday to halt all training flights over New Jersey until it determines why an F-16 fighter pilot strafed a school with cannon fire during a night mission.


The New Jersey Democrat called the pilot's actions "totally incomprehensible" and demanded a "guarantee that nothing like this can ever happen again."


A spokesman for the pilot's District of Columbia Air National Guard unit did not immediately return calls. The jet came from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington.


The National Guard said it was trying to figure out why the pilot opened fire on the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School from 7,000 feet with 25 rounds from a wing-mounted M61-A1 Vulcan cannon. The pilot, who was not identified by the military, was supposed to be aiming at a target on a practice range 3 1/2 miles away.


Operations at the firing range have been halted while the incident is investigated.


At least eight of the 2-inch-long bullets penetrated classrooms, Police Chief Mark Siino said. The rounds also punctured the school's roof, knocked down ceiling tiles and scratched the pavement.


A custodian was the only employee in the section of the building that was hit; she was not hurt.


The school was closed Thursday and Friday because of a teachers convention.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...school_strafed

Ellie

Maybe the pilot had a grudge against the custodian and tried his luck. Who knows? Seen weirder @#%&. It's all a conspiracy I tell ya :)

Teaches the kids a new meaning and reason for "Duck and Cover".

http://marines.bizland.com/schoolhousewguns.jpg

Range Is Closed After Strafing
Philadelphia Inquirer
November 6, 2004

The Warren Grove target range in the Pine Barrens will remain closed until military investigators can learn why an F-16 pilot on a training mission Wednesday night mistakenly strafed a nearby intermediate school.

U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.) also called on the unit whose pilot fired on the school to suspend all training in New Jersey until the matter is resolved.

"The actions of the pilot - whether accidental or not - are totally incomprehensible," Lautenberg wrote to the unit's commanding general.

The 2,600-acre Warren Grove Gunnery Range, in operation since World War II, is one of two Air Force target ranges in the Northeast, and handles up to 3,000 sorties a year.

The New Jersey Air National Guard, which operates the range, closed it Thursday.

While many details of the shooting remain unanswered, officials said the District of Columbia Air National Guard pilot whose plane mistakenly fired on the school should have realized that his 20mm Vulcan cannon had discharged.

"Given the type of gun, he probably heard it and felt it," said Army Maj. Sheldon Smith, a spokesman for the D.C. National Guard.

Officials have described the firing of about two dozen metal training slugs as inadvertent. About eight of the shots hit the roof of the Little Egg Harbor Township school around 9 p.m. Wednesday. Several janitors were working in the building, but no one was injured.

The pilot was flying one of two F-16 fighter jets on a practice strafing run to the target range, which is less than four miles from the school.

The pilot would have been required to arm the weapons system, then pull a trigger on the control stick to make the Gatling-type gun fire, experts said.


Made by General Dynamics, the Vulcan cannon employs six rotating barrels to achieve a rate of fire of 6,000 rounds per minute.

"You've got to pull the trigger to make that happen," said Charles W. Gittins, a former Marine pilot and attorney who represents military personnel accused of wrongdoing.

But investigators at the D.C. National Guard, which is handling the inquiry, have not ruled out mechanical failure. They have isolated the plane at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where the D.C. Air National Guard is stationed. Smith said a battery of tests on the plane will be conducted.

The military yesterday was impaneling a customary "accident investigation board" to explore the shooting, said Scott Woodham, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Washington.

"That's being done as we speak. They'll start right away," he said early yesterday afternoon. "They'll go through the whole A to Z, from takeoff to landing."

Military officials have not given a timetable for completing the investigation, but a congressional aide said such inquiries typically "can be measured in weeks."

Both Woodham and Smith said they had few new details to release yesterday. They have not disclosed the pilot's name or rank, but Smith described him as an "experienced" flyer.

Gittins, who represented an Air National Guard F-16 pilot who mistakenly bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan in 2002, said the D.C. pilot probably has been grounded.

"They don't want to put him in a position where he could make another mistake," he said.

The pilot could be charged with dereliction of duty if the investigation finds that he acted "negligently or willfully," Gittins said.

But, he said, the pilot may have simply fired too soon in his strafing dive. If the bullets were fired from too high an altitude, they could have traveled much farther than intended, he said. The plane was at 7,000 feet when it fired; its altitude for firing can be as low as 5,000 feet.

"The bullets can go really far afield," Gittins said.

Col. Brian Webster, the commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard, told the New York Times that the pilot was in a strafing dive and fired too soon. But he also said at a news conference that it was possible the shots were fired while the plane was climbing, and the bullets arced before striking the school.

Smith and Woodham said it was too early to determine whether the plane was diving or climbing when the burst was fired.

U.S. Rep. Jim Saxton (R., N.J.) also has asked for a briefing on the investigation, his spokesman said, but would wait to see a report before suggesting that any action be taken.

"It's pretty apparent at this time that it was an accident," said the spokesman, Jeff Sagnip Hollendonner. "We'll see what the report says."

The Little Egg Harbor Township Intermediate School in Ocean County, which serves 970 students from third to sixth grade, was closed most of this week because teachers were attending a conference in Atlantic City. School officials said engineers would check the building for structural damage, and repairs likely would be completed by Monday, when classes are scheduled to resume.

The Air Force has 32 training sites in the United States for aerial bombing and gunner training. Only Warren Grove and the Bollen Range at Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville, Lebanon County, Pa., are in the Northeast. The rest are spread among 18 states, mostly in the West, South and Midwest.

Gittins said practice bombs and bullets going astray is "not infrequent." As a navigator in a Marine fighter, he was involved in an incident when his plane pulled up as a bomb was being released at a Nevada range. The bomb landed on a farmer's ranch.

Warren Grove has had two incidents in the last several years in which stray practice bombs sparked forest fires in the Pine Barrens. And, on Oct. 13, an errant practice bomb missed the central Pennsylvania range and nearly hit a hiker.

Military expert John Pike, of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said most of the ranges were opened decades ago when the United States, in general, was a more rural place. He said the development of homes and commerce near some ranges has been a problem.

The military could require pilots to use only sites in more desolate areas of Texas or Arizona, but that could be a hardship for pilots in the East, Pike said. Any community that wants to close a range could lobby next year when the Pentagon considers possible base closures, he said.

Many residents near the Warren Grove range seemed untroubled by the errant strafing, calling it an isolated incident. And despite development in some communities there, the huge 1.1-million-acre Pine Barrens remains a mostly open expanse, Sagnip Hollendonner said.

"If you look at the aerials, you see nothing but the Atlantic Ocean and large sections of the Pine Barrens that are undevelopable," he said. "The Pine Barrens is not a high-growth area."

Ellie