What’s going on at Pinecastle? The Navy explains

BEACON PHOTOS/PAT HATFIELD
Where old tanks go to die — Electronics specialist Don Heaton, left, and quality-assurance specialist Chris Townsend check out M-60 tanks, used during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The tanks wait their turn to be used as targets for jet-fighter runs at Pinecastle Range.

BEACON PHOTO/PAT HATFIELD
Mock urban complex — The mock urban complex used to practice surgical strikes.

By Pat Hatfield
BEACON STAFF WRITER

posted Oct 13, 2009 - 9:37:30am

The skies are clear. There are no storms in Central Florida, yet a rumbling like distant thunder comes across the St. Johns River from Lake County. Perhaps a couple of Navy fighter jets tear through the air overhead.

The rumbles are likely coming from the U.S. Navy Pinecastle Range in Lake County. Most West Volusians are at least vaguely aware of the range, but many know little about it.

The Navy considers it a prime asset for training tactical aircraft crews.

Pinecastle sits on 5,700 acres in the 380,000-acre Ocala National Forest, just south of State Road 40 and just west of State Road 19, in north-central Lake County.

Pinecastle Range has served the Navy since 1951. It got its name from the Pine Castle Army Air Field in Orlando, to which it was originally connected.

Pinecastle’s history goes back to World War II, when a larger chunk of land known as Lake Bryant Bombing and Gunnery Range overlapped the current site.

Permits from the National Forest Service allow the Navy to use the range in the middle of the forest.

A cadre of civilians employed by the Navy runs the range.

“We work closely with the Forestry Service,” electronics-operations specialist Don Heaton said. The Navy maintains and monitors a firebreak around the range to protect the forest.

What the Navy does at Pinecastle is give aircraft crews realistic practice in handling explosive weapons from start to finish — from loading a bomb on a plane on a carrier tossing up and down off the Florida coast, to flying in, pinpointing the target, and dropping the bomb. The crews get the opportunity to work together as a team, as well as proficiency training.

Aircraft also fly in from Navy and National Guard bases at Jacksonville and as far away as Beaufort, S.C.

It’s important to make the training as realistic as possible, for both skill and emotional conditioning, before the crews are deployed to war zones.

“We don’t want them to drop their first live bomb in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Heaton explained.

The Navy believes this training is critical. It saves lives in combat.

Operators in the Pinecastle control center can use electronic-warfare transmitters to send signals to the aircraft’s electronics, so the pilot’s equipment displays surface-to-air missiles locking onto the Navy fighter. It makes the whole experience of flying into enemy territory, dodging or firing at missiles and dropping bombs very realistic.

Bomb-drop scoring consoles in the control center use cameras to let the operator know in real time how well the aircraft crew did in hitting its targets.

The operator then notifies the pilot of the performance.

Range observers also monitor bombing runs from two towers, staying in contact with the aircraft and the Pinecastle operations center. Cameras mounted in the towers monitor all areas of the range.

Some targets give fighters practice in strafing runs.

In another section of the range, an “urban-complex target” mocked up to look like buildings in a city allows crews to practice surgical strikes.

One section of the range is used for surface-to-air missiles. The target is hexagonal. There’s also a mock runway.

Old, decommissioned military vehicles and armored personnel carriers are used for target practice.

Use of live bombs is confined to one area on the east side of the range. Bombs of up to 2,000 pounds can be dropped here.

As many as 7,000 inert bombs and 1,400 live bombs can be expended at the range per year. The average since 2002 has been 1,222 inert bombs and 453 live bombs per year.

The Pinecastle operations center also uses remote cameras to monitor practice runs at Lake George and Rodman Range, to the north.

The airspace around Pinecastle is restricted to military use. The Navy works closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, and issues notices, published by flight-service centers and newspapers, to let civilians know when the range will be in active use.

Read more about Pine-castle in the related article.

Several levels of safety zones around the range boundary protect adjacent lands from the possibility of an error resulting in a miss.

Most of the 5,700 acres is unused buffer area, where scrubby areas on the property provide perfect habitats for scrub jays.

The Navy works with the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to improve habitats for a variety of threatened and endangered species.

— pat@beacononlinenews.com

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