Phill Casaus: A quieter military mission? Kirtland officer says that will fly

May 21—Most of us look to the skies these days and pray we don't see a cantilevered smoke cloud on the horizon.

We've come to know what that means.

Our justifiable fear and obsession with fire has become so great that I'm reminded of a more innocent time a year ago, when Santa Fe was fixated on another and by comparison benign aerial object — the U.S. Air Force's loud and persistent (and persistently loud) C-130.

Surely, you remember. The mammoth four-prop plane that did a fair amount of training over our skies last spring, when our greatest worry was noise, not whether fire was going to come down the nearest mountain and destroy the homes of neighbors and friends.

For a two-week period in May 2021, my phone never stopped ringing. You'd have thought Santa Fe was under attack. To many, it was.

In the aftermath of the complaints and concern about the flyovers last year, Col. Mike Curry, commander of the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, dropped into the office last year to introduce himself and talk about the plane, the noise, the mission.

Which was nice of him, given that the flights in question — tracking them via internet software became a sport for many last May — actually originated out of Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, home of the 27th Special Operations Wing.

At the time, Curry suggested if there were ever other news to report on the C-130, he'd let me know.

This week, unprompted, he did.

Santa Fe, he said, can expect to see another version of the C-130 — there are many — in the future.

Please breathe.

As the Air Force modernizes its fleet of the C-130 airframe and Kirtland transitions to become the training home of the AC-130J, a key gunship in America's military arsenal, it's more likely the lumbering aircraft, like a kid from the 1950s, will be seen but not heard.

Curry said more modern versions of the plane are outfitted with engines that can let them fly at higher altitudes — high enough to make the droning hmmmmmmmm of '21 a thing of the past. AC-130Js have already made it to Cannon, and others will soon be headed to Albuquerque.

Curry is not the boss in Clovis, but knows well what the plane can do.

"Over Santa Fe, we can be outside the noise range," he said. "So, you can't hear 'em. You may see 'em during the day, but you can't hear 'em and they'll be able to practice all the things they need to — to be able ... to be in an urban environment and pick out a car through winding streets or be where there's a lot of cars together. ... You may see 'em, but you're probably not gonna hear 'em because they're so much higher."

The push and pull between military training and noise is nothing new; it's been going on here and elsewhere for what seems like forever. And there is noise, to be sure. This is many years ago, but I remember almost running off the road in Eastern New Mexico when a jet from most likely Cannon whooshed over me outside Fort Sumner. My eardrums banged for a day.

On the other hand, the military says preparation is usually the difference between success and disaster in combat situations. In a business where winning and surviving share the bottom line, there are no synthetics for training.

Why is Santa Fe an attractive place for crews to train? The city's combination of meandering streets and roads the width of angel hair pasta — plus busy and wide arterials you'd find in a bigger city — kill two birds with one stone. And for special ops units, which need to be ready for anything and everything, the training is critical, Curry said.

"If you want to find the most difficult place to fly, it's right here in Albuquerque, and you know, by virtue, Santa Fe as well," he said. "And why do I say it's hard? It's high altitude."

Curry, who flew the C-130 earlier in his career, said the mission of preparing crews will become even more important as the AC-130J moves to Kirtland. He happily and proudly outlined just why those planes fly — and why, even when the noise is annoying, it matters.

"When I talk to folks out in the community, what I like to say is you have to know that every person who is here is training for the most difficult missions our nation can ask us to do," he said. "Because if they weren't that difficult, we'd give them to someone else.

"That's what we train our folks to do. And my hope and what our goal is in training is that we make the training so hard that when they get to their actual mission ... they look back and they go, 'Yeah, you know what? That was challenging. But it wasn't as challenging as when we were in school at Kirtland.' "

Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.