The Hills Are Alive!

C-130

Denver Post - Just in case I needed official confirmation that I dwell in Flyover Country, the U.S. Air Force has provided it in the form of the Low Altitude Tactical Navigation Area. It covers 60,699 square miles in New Mexico and Colorado, and it's for training flight crews based at Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, N.M. They'll be making five-hour nighttime practice runs at less than 1,000 feet above ground, sometimes as low as 300 feet. They'll be flying the C-130 Hercules, a big transport turbo-prop, and the CV-22 Osprey​, a sort of helicopter-airplane hybrid that does not have an exemplary safety record. Airplanes make noise, but the Air Force says courses will be staggered so that residents of the training zone - basically the southwestern quadrant of Colorado and a big chunk of New Mexico - will be awakened only two or three times a year. Even so, that has inspired some complaints from people who insist that they didn't move to the boondocks to get more turbo-prop noise. And those complaints have inspired the patriotic rejoinder that the airborne noises do not represent spooked cattle or snowslide triggers, but are "the sound of freedom."  That's an old trick, finding a virtuous name for an annoyance. I grew up around Greeley, which in those days sat near some of the largest cattle feedlots in the world. Given the right breeze on a summer day, the aroma could be overwhelming to visitors and newcomers - if you lived there, you got so used to it that you didn't notice. Their eyes might water and they could wheeze and complain, and we locals would say, "That's the smell of money." Nowadays, of course, I'm a wimp. If I'm within 10 miles downwind of a feedlot, my nose runs and I think about switching to free-range grass-fed beef or even vegetarianism. Read full story here: News New Mexico

The Hills Are Alive!