Reporting for Duty

The first of 16 high-tech radar planes landed on a Navy air strip here Tuesday, the start of what officials say will be a parade of military service members and their families moving into the region and fueling the economy over the next several months.

The E-2C Hawkeyes, seen by local military boosters as an encouraging boost for Point Mugu’s future, are being moved from San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station, which has been converted into a Marine base.

“We’re really looking forward to it,” said Cmdr. Mark Chicoine, commanding officer of the VAW 116 squadron--the “Sun Kings”--half of which arrived Tuesday. “Obviously, leaving San Diego, we had a lot of history down there. But we’re ready to start some new history here at Point Mugu. We’re home.”

The planes are not exactly the slickest, sexiest aircraft in the naval air fleet.

With pancake-shaped radar dishes on top, huge propellers and 40-foot wings that fold back for the tight squeeze aboard aircraft carriers, the E-2Cs, Navy officials concede, look odd.

“They’re not just ugly, they’re noisy,” quipped Cmdr. Jay T. Stocks, executive officer of the Sun Kings squadron, as he doled out earplugs before the planes’ arrival. “And they’re slow, too.”

Deadpanned Chicoine: “It’s actually the most beautiful plane in the inventory.”

But in the E-2Cs’ case, Navy officials are quick to add, slow is very effective. The planes reach a top speed of about 350 mph, less than half that of a jet fighter.

But the turbo props’ slow speed helps stabilize the radar dish--the eyes and ears of the group of jet fighters and attack planes the squadrons support.

Among the newest planes the Navy is flying, the E-2Cs essentially serve as flying air traffic control centers, their radar dishes charting air traffic and detecting enemy aircraft as far as 300 miles away.

Since being commissioned in 1967, the 16-plane air wing relocating to Point Mugu has seen action in Vietnam, Iran, the Persian Gulf and Somalia.

“There’s no Top Gun movies about us, but without us, they can’t do anything,” said Lt. Cmdr. John Choyce, an E-2C pilot.

The two planes that arrived Tuesday represent half of the VAW 116 squadron. Three other squadrons of four planes each will arrive through March, ultimately bringing about 2,500 military service members and their families to Ventura County.

For a time, it appeared the E-2Cs would go elsewhere, with the Navy deciding in 1996 to base the air wing at Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley.

But an intense lobbying push from a coalition of local military and civilian boosters of Point Mugu--including Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) and county Supervisor John Flynn--convinced the Navy otherwise.

The order to transfer the wing to Point Mugu was signed in early June, a boon for a base such as Mugu, which has survived a number of threatened closures in recent years.

“In all my years of county government, I’ve had a lot of good moments, but this is a great moment,” Flynn said Tuesday. “It means that Point Mugu will be around for a long time. It’s marvelous. It’s what we wanted. It just shows what can happen if you work as a team.”

A handful of officers’ families already have moved to Ventura County, with others expected to follow as they sell their homes in San Diego or find housing on base.

The waiting list for base housing at Point Mugu now includes 282 families, 114 of them from E-2C squadrons. In the long term, the Navy is exploring possible housing at the planned Cal State campus in Camarillo.

The Navy will not force anyone to move here, and some service members whose duty with the squadron is set to expire in a year or so may choose to keep their families in San Diego until then, Navy officials said.

The air wing will eventually take over hangar No. 34, which for two decades has been home to the VXE-6 squadron, a flight-support unit used in Antarctic scientific exploration.

Although the Navy’s “Operation Deep Freeze” was formally turned over to the Air Force and Air National Guard in March, the VXE-6 will continue providing limited air support to Antarctic scientists through spring.

For Capt. Tony Parisi, Point Mugu’s director of public works, watching the first two E-2Cs arrive Tuesday made for an exciting end to the hard work that went into bringing the squadrons here.

“We’ve worked hard over the last two years to really point out the advantages of Point Mugu, and then after the Navy made the decision, we worked on the planning to get ready for this,” Parisi said. “It feels really good to stand here and welcome them.”