Credit: Lockheed MartinTucked deep within Alaska’s rugged interior, next to a town named “North Pole,” Eielson AFB may seem an unlikely station for 54 Lockheed Martin F-35As. But the commander of the 354th Fighter Wing asserts the location is more central than it looks.
Indeed, the logic of Euclidean geometry places Eielson within a daylong flight, assisted by aerial refueling, of the biggest hot spots for the Indo-Pacific Command and European Command. On a great circle route, the Alaskan base is closer to Taiwan than Oahu by more than 300 nm. To reach Estonia across the Arctic Circle, Eileson’s future F-35As would have roughly the same ferry flight as Air National Guard F-35As flying from Burlington, Vermont, the next-closest U.S. F-35 base.
“A lot of people think Alaska is kind of stuck in the corner of the map. But as an airman lives, we’re actually in the middle of everything,” says Col. Benjamin Bishop, the 354th Wing’s commander.
Another advantage of Eielson’s location is its neighbors. Although a remote location, the base is less than 230 nm north of a Lockheed Martin F-22 squadron stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and adjacent to the home of the F-16-equipped 18th Aggressor Sqdn. and, not least, the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex, which is the largest U.S. instrumented training range for air combat. The U.S. Air Force declared the F-35A operational in 2016, but service officials are still learning how to optimize the aircraft’s capabilities, especially in joint operations with F-22s.
“I see the F-35 really maturing in the skies of Alaska,” Bishop says.
That maturation process is about to get started. In early April, Lockheed transferred ownership to the Air Force of the first F-35A bound for the newly reactivated 356th Fighter Sqdn. at Eielson. Despite administrative disruptions caused by the response to the novel coronavirus and resulting COVID-19 pandemic, Bishop still expects to complete the first F-35A delivery to Eielson on schedule in April. The 356th should receive ownership of its first three F-35As by the end of April.
The 356th was reactivated seven months ago with only two employees—the squadron commander and the deputy. Since then, the squadron has added eight trained pilots and a full complement of trainers and maintainers, Bishop says. About 1,200 active duty personnel will be added to the base when the 356th and a still-unnamed second squadron are at full strength, doubling the size of the Alaskan base’s current workforce.
The Air Force has been preparing for Eielson’s dramatic growth since the F-35A basing announcement in 2016. The $500 million expansion project is made more challenging by the base’s location, which is 1.42 deg. of latitude, or about 85 nm, further north of Norway’s Orland Main Air Station, another F-35A base.
Norway qualified a drag parachute to slow the F-35A on icy arctic runways in winter. The Polish Air Force adopted the same modification with its announced F-35A selection in January, but the U.S. Air Force decided the added weight of the drag parachute is unnecessary. The Air Force decision is helped by the fact that Eielson boasts the world’s second-longest runway, at 14,507 ft., which the base’s busy snowplows work to keep clear through the long Alaskan winter, Bishop says. The F-35A is rated to land and take off from surfaces with a Runway Condition Rating (RCR) of 7, only two steps up from a completely iced-over RCR-5 surface.
“We have a whole team of airmen that are really focused on that [snow-removal] mission alone, and it’s not just the runways. It’s the taxiways, too,” Bishop says.
The Air Force also had to make other adjustments to the F-35A’s standard survival gear. The 18th Aggressor Sqdn., for example, includes a sleeping bag rated for -40F in the survival seat pack of the F-16, designed to keep pilots warm overnight after an ejection until they can be reached by a rescue team. But the same sleeping bag does not fit inside the F-35A seat pack, so the base’s support staff has stuffed the pack instead with supplemental heating equipment.
For maintainers, the Arctic weather presents another challenge. The Army Corps of Engineers is constructing a 16-bay shelter for the F-35A on Eielson’s permafrost terrain, the first of several such structures to support the aircraft during the Alaskan winter.
The shelter “is not really for the aircraft,” Bishop says. “It is more for the maintainers. When it’s -40F, it’s really difficult to work outside for an extended period.”
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