Navy planes prepare final departure from air base

BRUNSWICK, Maine (AP) | The rumble of Navy patrol aircraft flying overhead will soon be a thing of the past as the remaining P-3 Orions depart from Brunswick Naval Air Station.

While much of the nation prepares for Thanksgiving, air crews from VP-26 are prepping to ship out for a six-month deployment to El Salvador, Italy and the Horn of Africa. After that, they’ll rejoin the rest of Brunswick aircraft that have relocated to Florida’s Jacksonville Naval Air Station.

Cmdr. Mike Parker, commanding officer of VP-26, begins the final wave of departures on Sunday, marking a milestone in the closing of the last active-duty military air base in New England.

“It’s a heartbreaking situation to leave the base knowing that no P-3 is going to return to this base,” said Cmdr. Parker. His massive three-bay hangar was filled with equipment being loaded on pallets and sailors getting heavy gear ready to be shipped out starting next week.

Come January, with the aircraft long gone, the twin, 8,000-foot runways will be closed and the snow plows will be idled, allowing snow to pile up on the long expanses. The fuel tank farm will be drained. Through the year, there’ll be a gradual drawdown of personnel until the base closes for good by May 2011.

Activity on the sprawling coastal base 20 miles northeast of Portland has been winding down over the past year since the first P-3 Orion squadron departed.

Once there were 4,000 sailors, but the number has dwindled to roughly 500. After VP-26 and its 350 personnel leave, only a skeleton crew will remain.

“It’s definitely a ghost town,” Cmdr. John Coray, chief staff officer for Patrol Wing 5, said after finding himself alone in the gym during a workout.

Situated on 3,200 acres, Brunswick Naval Air Station opened during World War II to train British and Canadian pilots. After the war, the base was deactivated for a time before the U.S. Navy moved in.

Since then, maritime patrol aircraft including the P-3 Orions, which first flew in the early 1960s, have operated from the base.

They use four turboprop engines that sip fuel, allowing them to fly for 12-hour stretches either over the deep blue ocean hunting enemy submarines, or over land where they’ve flown missions over Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The base saw its heyday during the Cold War, when the Navy had patrol aircraft stationed at the four corners of the continental U.S. to interdict Soviet subs.

The decision to shutter Brunswick Naval Air Station was made in the final round of closings by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission in 2005.

The Navy initially wanted to mothball the base, keeping alive the possibility of future activation, but that would’ve meant an uncertain future in which the community would be unable to redevelop the property. So commissioners decided to shutter the base altogether.

Studies have put the economic impact on the local economy at $187 million. But there’s a social impact as well. Base personnel and spouses served as teachers, Sunday School volunteers and Little League coaches. Their children used to fill 20 to 30 percent of the desks in local schools.

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