Still the Right Stuff : Edwards Air Force Base Defies Downsizing Trend, Expects High-Flying Future

As the budget ax falls on military posts across the nation, this vast aerospace stronghold--once a stomping ground for “Right Stuff” test pilots, now a landing ground for space shuttles--remains a prosperous contradiction.

In an era of defense downsizing, its $457-million budget is substantially fatter this year than last. Its 15,000 employees bustle confidently among hangars, offices and classrooms. Dozens of sleek military jets take off and land each day, as they have for years.

Twenty-five years after one of its most famous alumni--former NASA test pilot Neil Armstrong--became the first human to set foot on the moon, Edwards has not only dodged the budget bullet, it is undergoing a construction boom.

Many observers believe the base’s assets--a legendary aircraft testing center, excellent flying weather and long, forgiving runways in the Mojave Desert--have immunized it against ongoing budget cuts that have ravaged much of California’s once-thriving military-industrial establishment.

In addition, some think that President Clinton, whose reelection strategy is tied to winning California in 1996, may go out of his way to spare Edwards and other California posts in the next round of base-closure decisions next year.

But others worry that continued pressure to reduce defense spending--and a politically charged rivalry with the Navy’s Patuxent River flight test center in Maryland--may eventually siphon dollars from Edwards.

Edwards officials say the base actually will benefit from the defense build-down, as other installations are closed or reduced and their aircraft-testing functions are shifted to Edwards.

“Edwards will inherit some other flight test activities as other bases back East close,” said Bob Johnstone, the base’s planning chief. “I think you’ll see testing gravitate toward the southwestern United States . . . and Edwards will be at the hub of those test ranges.”

One such “inheritance” took place this spring when a 950-member air wing was transferred to Edwards from Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at a cost of $42 million.

The 4950th Test Wing and its 26 aircraft were moved despite opposition by Congress members from Ohio, including U.S. Sen. John Glenn, a former astronaut. The wing’s arrival at Edwards marked the biggest single addition to the base in decades.

Edwards was able to absorb the Ohio wing in part because it was constructing an $11.9-million office building to house its own 412th Test Wing staff. The two wings share the 90,000-square-foot building, finished a year ago.

Meanwhile, the base expects to receive about $50 million to computerize a huge high-tech chamber where aircraft electronic warfare systems can be tested without outside electrical interference or fear of satellite snooping.

Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), who represents the Edwards area, said that appropriation is the result of a behind-the-scenes struggle between him and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), whose district includes the Patuxent River base.

Thomas said Hoyer wanted federal money to enlarge a similar but smaller chamber at Patuxent River that already is computerized. Thomas said he argued that the money should be spent to computerize the Edwards chamber, already the world’s largest.

“I won that one,” Thomas said. “Those kind of battles are going on very quietly.”

A Hoyer spokesman said he was unaware of any tiff between Hoyer and Thomas, and that Hoyer has secured $30 million for the Patuxent River chamber.

Jack Connell, an ex-Navy test pilot who heads a Ridgecrest-based group that wants the Pentagon to beef up Edwards and other Southern California bases, said he is aware of discussions within the military to transfer to Edwards some activities performed at Patuxent River and at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.

Connell said he is optimistic about Edwards’ future, in part because California’s delegation in Congress--both Republicans and Democrats--seems to be pulling together more to protect local bases from further cuts.

In an illustration of how hardball politics can affect military installations, Connell said California legislators recently discovered that a number of aides to congressional members from Maryland and Florida were scheduled last week to tour Edwards and the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, about 60 miles away.

The purpose of the inspection, he said, was to sniff out any waste or duplication at the California bases that could be used as ammunition against any proposals to dismantle the East Coast bases.

When Southern California congressional representatives learned of the trip, they demanded to be part of it--prompting the East Coast staffers to cancel, he said. His account was confirmed by an aide to Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), who represents part of Edwards.

But Connell’s view of the possible bounty awaiting Edwards is not universally held.

Dave Wilcox, a Los Angeles-based consultant who helps local communities adjust economically to base shutdowns, said the Pentagon is unlikely to want to break up Patuxent River--the Navy’s own flight test center.

“Pax River is very unique and the Navy is very jealous of it,” he said.

Hoyer’s spokesman, Jesse Jacobs, said the Maryland congressman is unlikely to allow Patuxent River to be dismantled without a fight. “Steny is not prepared to let any part of Pax River go,” Jacobs said. “He has not worked harder on any issue than base closure.”

Wilcox said that despite a third round of base cutbacks scheduled next year, he believes Edwards and other California bases are unlikely to suffer. With the President pegging his reelection hopes on winning in California, he will not be eager to inflict more economic setbacks on the state, Wilcox said.

Federal outlays for Edwards’ famed Flight Test Center--which represent most of the base’s budget--have grown steadily since 1992, despite deep cuts at other military bases. From a fiscal 1992 appropriation of $363 million, the budget jumped to $407 million in 1993 and $457 million this year.

Besides ideal flying conditions and enormous dry lake runways, Edwards boasts a reputation as the Air Force’s premier aircraft test facility. Its well-known test pilot school has supplied more skilled fliers for the U.S. astronaut corps--more than 70 out of 214--than any other source.

All three members of the Apollo 11 moon landing crew were associated with Edwards. Armstrong was a NASA test pilot there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Michael Collins graduated from the test pilot school in 1960. And Buzz Aldrin became commandant of the school in 1971.

At the centerpiece Flight Test Center, cheat-the-devil test pilots immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” pushed experimental jets and rocket planes to their limits--and sometimes beyond--in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

It is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Where Armstrong restarted the engines on a flamed-out X-15 just before it hit the ground. Where a space shuttle first landed in 1981.

Zooming to the edge of space in high-performance aircraft, test pilots at Edwards laid many of the scientific foundations for the space program. The base’s Rogers Dry Lake--a 44-square-mile swath of hard-packed desert that forms an immense natural runway--is a national historic landmark.

But flying experimental planes is dangerous work. Since the late 1940s, about 55 military and civilian pilots have been killed at Edwards. Whenever a colleague would plow into the Earth at high speed, pilots would sardonically say he had “drilled a hole” or “augured in.”

Until the mid-1950s, pilots often retreated after a day at the base to the Happy Bottom Riding Club, a raucous bar run by Florence (Pancho) Barnes, a former Hollywood stunt pilot, gunrunner and rum smuggler known for her foul mouth and fondness for good times.

At Pancho’s, young pilots boozed, brawled and argued endlessly about who was the fastest, toughest, hottest. There were stag parties, fist fights and drunken forays into the desert to hunt bear and deer.

“It was our clubhouse and playroom, and if all the hours were ever totaled, I reckon I spent more time at her place than I did in a cockpit over those years,” wrote Yeager in a 1985 autobiography. “And I was flying about five different airplanes daily.”

Today, the base may be best known as a landing site for the space shuttle, whose arrivals attract tens of thousands of spectators.

Although testing at Edwards once involved newly invented aircraft such as exotic jet and rocket planes, it revolves today mostly around standard planes that have been modified with new avionics and other high-tech gear.

Johnstone, the base’s planning chief, said he expects Edwards to lose about 700 employees by next summer as testing on the Air Force’s new C-17 cargo plane winds down. However, he hopes employment levels will rise again in 1997 or 1998, when the F-22 fighter is expected to undergo shakedown flights.

Meanwhile, base officials continue to battle massive toxic waste problems, cracking runways and encroachment by home builders in Lancaster and Palmdale.

Edwards already has spent $68 million cleaning up leaked fuel and toxic solvents, and the bill could soar as high as $400 million, said Bob Wood, the base’s environmental restoration manager.

Workers last week dug up the 200th of more than 500 underground storage tanks, many of which were buried years ago and have leaked. Base spokesman Dennis Shoffner said toxic material seeped into a shallow water table beneath Edwards, but none of its drinking water wells--which draw from 400 feet deep or deeper--have been contaminated.

Wood said the cleanup may be complicated by the desert tortoise, a federally protected species that roams the area. The cleanup may be suspended in areas where it would disturb tortoise habitat, he said.

The base also faces cracks that keep growing in its lake bed runways. The worst one, which slices across a runway used only rarely for landings, is now half a mile long and five feet wide.

The cracks are the result of a sinking of the lake bed caused by pumping from an underground aquifer the base shares with Lancaster and Palmdale. In an effort to minimize the settling, the base recently tapped into the State Water Project for drinking water and redesigned its sewage plant to recycle water, Shoffner said.

Another nettlesome problem is continuing home construction under the base’s flight corridors. Base officials worry that if too many people move in, noise complaints could force the base to change flying routes or even shut down.

Edwards officials have worked closely with local planners to limit growth on the base’s flanks. Officials in Lancaster and Los Angeles, Kern and San Bernardino counties recently drafted rules to limit builders to one home per 2 1/2 acres, said Johnstone, in a two-mile-wide buffer zone around the base.

“We’re not going to after the fact make changes for them because they chose to live there,” said Thomas, the congressman. “Frankly, the base is more important than any individual homeowner . . . or group of homeowners.”

But Johnstone said population growth is a problem that will not disappear.

“The first thing that closes a base is encroachment,” he said.