Air Force uses Fort Riley landing strip for training

FORT RILEY -- Air Force medical personnel and pilots conducted emergency deployment readiness exercises from a C-17 Globemaster III on the Savage Field landing strip at the Douthit Range Complex June 25 on Fort Riley.

The C-17 was operated by pilots of the 3rd Airlift Squadron, 436th Airlift Wing, from Dover Air Force Base who came to Fort Riley to practice a series of assault landings and take-offs. The joint training exercise also included Air Mobility Command's Global Reach medical assessment team and about 20 personnel for an aeromedical evacuation team from the 514th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, 512th Reserve Air Mobility Wing from McGuire Air Force Base.

Sgt. Ronald Hogge, 2nd General Support Aviation Battalion, 1st Aviation Regiment, 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, was part of the team handling air traffic control operations for the C-17's landing and expressed excitement for prospects of future joint Army-Air Force training operations.

"This is the first time I've heard of the C-17 actually landing out here, so it'll offer new training abilities for the Air Force and any other sister organizations to do training and strengthen the United States Army as a whole," Hogge said. "The more people that come together, the more diverse the training will be."

Prior to arrival at Savage Field, the C-17 picked up personnel at McGuire Air Force base and travelled to Dyess Air Force Base to conduct static load training. Capt. Matthew Zahler, air mobility liaison officer to 1st Inf. Div., said he hopes in the future all training, including the static load training, will be conducted at Fort Riley.

"As the EDREs come up from these different units then we can actually have them come out to the austere environment, so we could load them up over at Marshall Army Airfield or Manhattan and then, part of the EDRE, is getting off, setting up and then reaching back and setting up comms back at home station," Zahler said. "If we can do that all at Fort Riley rather taking them half way across the country, that would be a whole lot easier and a whole lot cheaper."

Zahler said the EDRE was planned in two weeks' time and this was the first C-17 to ever land at Savage Field. The entire training operation was scheduled and arranged through communications between Zahler and the 3rd Airlift Squadron.

Lt. Col. Niraj Govil, Global Reach laydown team, exited the C-17 upon landing with a small team to evaluate the area, determine the best location for a bare base and establish communications back to Dover.

Govil said GRL is typically attached to a Contingency Response Group and sent out to determine the best location to establish a hospital in an austere environment. The team generally consists of four personnel in different specialties, such as public health, flight surgeon, bio hazards and an independent duty medical technician. He further explained he had been a part of a GRL team previously after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and was pleased with the exercises at Fort Riley.

"We'd like to do more of it, so we're talking to people here about maybe doing more, like a week at a time, actually setting up a bare base and being medical support for that," Govil said.

Lt. Col. Douglas Riley, 436th Aerospace Medicine Squadron and lead for the GRL team, was previously stationed at Fort Riley in 2000 when he was in the Army and said he was glad to be back. He said he hoped future operations at Fort Riley would bring together both Air Force and 1st Infantry Division units to strengthen the U.S. military forces.

"The reason for joint activities and understanding to work together is that we can longer work separate because we are all very much dependent on one another," Riley said. "You can't have one operate without the other, there's three major services between the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, so if you have a stool with three legs and one is not the appropriate length, the stool will fall over. It's not different with the military. If we can't function together appropriately, then we will have a gap and we want to try to avoid those gaps."

Savage Field and other Fort Riley facilities offer environments and challenges ideal for training operations that other installations cannot provide or simulate, Zahler said, making Fort Riley an excellent place to train and continue joint operations.

"What we have here that they don't have at the big Air Force bases is this nice big, open field to simulate what you would have in the desert or any kind of emergencies that we might have in the United States that they might get called on for," Zahler said. "In the future, we would hope that that would expand to include our medevac we have here at Fort Riley and then we can have a whole field hospital set-up as the end goal."

Riley said he was pleased with the exercise at Fort Riley and the ease in arranging the EDRE.

"I think this is probably the beginning of a very good relationship between the Air Force and the Army when it comes to the workings here at Fort Riley," he said.