FARMINGTON – A hearing on a proposal by the Air National Guard to modify training flight operations conducted over Franklin County has been rescheduled.
Originally set for August 13, the public hearing will now be held on August 27, at 6 p.m., at the University of Maine at Farmington. That hearing will be an opportunity for people to make comments on a recently-completed draft version of an Environmental Impact Study.
That EIS will be made available to the public on August 2, at the MDOT website, found here. The comments recorded at the public hearing become part of the EIS, and are included within that document’s final draft. Additionally, written comments can submitted for several weeks following the August 2 publishing of the draft.
The ANG wants to lower the minimum altitude throughout most of Condor 1 and Condor 2, a military operation area which consists of parts of Franklin County as well as parts of Piscataquis, Somerset and Oxford County, and Coos County in New Hampshire.
Currently, pilots must stay 7,000 feet above the earth throughout much of Condor 1 and Condor 2. The exception to this rule is in the so-called “flight corridors,” which make up roughly 53 percent of the area. In these flight corridors, F-15 and F-16 jets are allowed to fly as low as 500 feet off the ground. These corridors are one-way only and pilots are not allowed to conduct interception-related maneuvers within those corridors.
The change would let pilots conducting low-flight interception training to go as low as 500 feet throughout the MOA, for up to 10 minutes at a time.
The hearing, a required step in the EIS process, will take place on Aug. 27, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Lincoln Auditorium at UMF. The final EIS is anticipated sometime this fall, possibly in October.
