Sky Wars Chamber : High-Tech Southland Facility Vies for Funds

In an immense steel vault bathed in eerie blue light and protected around the clock by armed guards, the Air Force’s latest fighter jet was being tricked into thinking it was in the heat of high-tech combat.

The F-16 Falcon sat motionless on a huge turntable at Edwards Air Force Base as computer technicians bombarded it with electronic signals mimicking enemy missiles and radar stations, simulating a flight over hostile territory.

The fake mission was being staged inside the Benefield Anechoic Facility, a computer-stuffed building where sophisticated electronic gear intended to help American military pilots outmaneuver future enemies is tested. The facility is the largest of its kind in the world.

Enclosing 4.6 million square feet of space, the Benefield chamber is big enough to hold virtually any U.S. military airplane, including the B-1 bomber. Planes are rolled in through one of the world’s biggest doors, a 250-ton steel device so bulky that it takes 40 minutes to close.

As Congress cuts funds for defense facilities nationwide, the Benefield complex is in the enviable position of undergoing a $200-million upgrade that began last year and is scheduled to last another seven years--the most expensive improvement of any U.S. military test facility.

But the chamber is also the focus of an ongoing tug-of-war in Washington over how to spend increasingly scarce military research funds. The Navy operates a similar chamber in Maryland, and members of Congress from California and Maryland have squabbled over which should get more federal dollars.

The Benefield chamber is a strange-looking place, with thousands of small, blue spikes protruding from nearly every square foot of its walls, floor and ceiling. With overhead spotlights barely piercing the gloom, a visitor might mistake it for some vast, heavy-metal concert hall.

Made of foam, the pyramid-like spikes absorb stray radar signals that bounce off aircraft during tests of electronic-warfare devices that allow military jets to detect, evade and jam enemy radar and missiles.

Although some testing must be done in flight, the Benefield facility allows engineers and computer scientists to work out some bugs on the ground, which is cheaper and safer. Also, precision measurements can be made repeatedly in the chamber, something very difficult to do in the air. And Edwards, about 100 miles northeast of Downtown Los Angeles, is the Air Force’s premier flight-test facility.

“We’re trying to get out of the fly-fix-fly syndrome,” said Mickey R. Brown, a retired Air Force captain and flight-test engineer who is the civilian chief of testing at the chamber, which employs about 70 people.

Sealed in steel, the facility is a “sterile” test environment, keeping out the multitude of radio, TV and radar signals that could strike a test aircraft flying over Edwards and nearby towns such as Palmdale and Lancaster.

The steel also prevents electronic signals emitted by classified military transmitters from leaking into the open air. While Air Force officials believe that the threat of espionage has diminished with the Soviet Union’s collapse, electronic-combat signals theoretically could be picked up by foreign satellites or spy ships.

The Air Force spent $82 million to build and equip the chamber, which opened in 1989. It is named for Tommie D. (Doug) Benefield, former chief test pilot for Rockwell International, which built the B-1, the first aircraft to be tested there. Benefield died in a B-1 crash in 1984.

With so much classified work going on in it, the chamber is protected 24 hours a day by armed guards. Engineers, scientists and technicians are issued ATM-style cards that allow them access only to rooms for which they have specific clearance.

So elaborate is the security system that if someone tries to use a card to get into a room for which he or she has no authorization, the name is automatically printed out in the guards’ control room. Air Force officials recently allowed a Times reporter and photographer to tour the chamber, but only on a day when no aircraft were in it.

But as defense downsizing continues, the Benefield facility has been caught in a struggle in Congress and the Pentagon over how to spend federal funds on electronic-warfare testing.

Its chief rival is the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Md., where the Navy has its own, smaller anechoic chamber.

Although many defense experts think the Air Force and Navy could get along with one chamber, the Pentagon--under congressional pressure--has issued a stream of confusing and contradictory reports about which chamber should be funded.

After a Pentagon-hired consultant in 1992 recommended developing Benefield as the “least-costly alternative,” Maryland representatives asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to review the report.

The inspector general said the report “contained critical flaws,” and urged that equipment be reallocated to both Benefield and Patuxent River from other locations. Later, a top Pentagon test official rejected the inspector general’s findings.

To date, none of the aircraft tested in the Benefield chamber have seen combat, Brown said. But that is likely to change the next time American jets are committed in wartime.

Technicians operating the threat emitters--three wall-mounted loudspeakers that beam signals at the aircraft--can select from a library of signals representing radar devices from other nations.

How the foreign signals are gathered is classified information, says Austin Page, Edwards’ intelligence director. New signals are delivered to the base each month, Brown says.

Much of what goes on in the chamber involves testing high-tech gear that lets American pilots jam enemy radar or electronically camouflage their locations--a tactic known as “spoofing.”

As military jets fly faster and air warfare becomes more high-tech, pilots must know quickly if their planes have been “painted” by hostile radar .

Once warned, a pilot can take evasive action.