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January 16, 2009
Bound for the Negev
Move enhances air force's fighting capabilities.
RHONDA SPIVAK
This past August, I had an opportunity to visit an Israeli air force (IAF) base, along with families of pilots, at a special visiting day.
Given the current ongoing Israel Defence Forces military operations, I will not disclose the name and location of the base. The pilots I spoke with may well be flying planes over Gaza as part of Israel's military operation, designed to defend against Hamas' onslaught of rockets and weaken the Hamas "state of Gaza."
At the base, a senior pilot told me that the IAF transport base was being moved from Lod (alongside Ben-Gurion Airport) to a new base, Netavim, in the Negev, just east of Be'ersheva. The IAF transport wing in Lod was the launching site of historic missions by Israel, such as the 1976 raid on Entebbe, Uganda, and the 1991 Operation Solomon that airlifted some 14,500 Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia to Israel within 36 hours.
According to the senior pilot, one reason for moving the IAF transport wing was that, at Lod, the IAF had to share airspace with passenger planes landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, which was causing complications. A move to the Negev decreases the chances of air accidents and eliminates the friction between civil and military aviation over use of air space.
"The new base in Netavim will be the largest air force base in the Middle East [with a four-kilometre runway]. Netavim gives the transport fleet better infrastructure, deployment and operational flexibility," the pilot said.
In 2006, during the war in Lebanon, I learned from a military source that one of the concerns Israel had was that if there ever were a long-range missile that struck Ben-Gurion Airport, there was no other airstrip in the country that could properly function as a civilian airport.
"The new Netavim base is large enough that passenger flights could be re-routed to Netavim, if ever necessary," the senior pilot said.
The decision to move the IAF base to the south was initially made in 2002, as part of a multi-year plan to help settle the under-populated Negev. As one reserve pilot in his army green uniform said, "The idea behind putting the base here is that military families will move to the south to live closer to the base."
During my visit, I was able to see fighter pilots take off and land F-16 planes. I was shown Israeli-developed missiles that have EO\GPS guided guidance kits for converting air-droppable, unguided bombs into precision guided bombs. "A device is put on the plane that sends out lasers to guide the bomb," a young, blue-eyed fighter pilot explained.
Next, I was shown JDAM missiles and GBU-12 missiles and, when I asked for explanations of how they all worked, he smiled and said, "It will be easiest if you just look it up on the Internet."
At the base, a crowd of families gathered to witness a race between a group of fighter pilots and a technical crew to see who was fastest in loading a missile onto an F-16. The fighter pilots were the first to complete the task and declared victory, only to learn that they had forgotten one step in the process. The technical crew then was declared victorious. The atmosphere at the base was festive, with proud parents beaming and buying T-shirts and hats with air force emblems.
I remember one pilot noting that the new base in Netavim would be closer than Lod was to Gaza, where he thought the next war could erupt. The pilots I met suspected that they would be participating sooner or later in air strikes over Gaza. Everyone sensed that Hamas would not cease firing rockets into the south and smuggling weapons through tunnels and that, at some point, Israel would be forced to respond. I have seen the faces of these pilots in my mind's eye as I have been reading the news recently.
Rhonda Spivak is a freelance writer from Winnipeg and the editor of the Winnipeg Post and News.
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