Apparently not everyone is as eager to endorse the location of F-35 fighter jets at Burlington International Airport as were members of the legislature in May.  The Stop the F-35 Coalition is raising serious concerns about the environmental impact of F-35 flights, which it hopes will draw more scrutiny to the proposal.  

It has been argued that location of the F-35 jets in Burlington will upgrade our Vermont National Guard, as well as bring economic opportunities to the surrounding communities.  No doubt these enticements were the primary reasons why the Legislature hurried to support the proposal in May before even the Air Force’s own Environmental Impact Study had been released.

Beyond concerns regarding noise pollution from the jets, which are said by some to be substantially noisier than the deployed F-16 fighter, Jared Wood of Burlington suggests that tying Vermonter’s economic future to the F-35 may be just plain bad business:

“It’s a compromise that’s not going to make anybody happy,” he said.

Last month, the soaring price tag of the Lockheed Martin plane triggered a congressional breach for military procurement overruns – which in turn has prompted a corporate “restructuring” of the project.

I quickly leafed through various studies and documents available on the internet and find that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support Stop the F-35’s noise concerns.  So why not seek some more independent environmental impact analysis?  

An April 4 VPR broadcast on the topic featured Lt. Col. Chris Caputo, who dismissed a study of F-35 noise conducted at Elgin Airforce Base in Florida that provided much of the evidence regarding acoustical impact from the new fighter jets:

“You cannot compare the information in the Eglin EIS, to the current EIS going on right now. It’ll be based on the most, latest and greatest noise data conducted at Edwards Air Force Base – test data, dated April ’09 that has been publicly releasable.”

Caputo says the latest data show that the F-35 is n average 5 to 7 decibels louder than the F-16, but that many variables have to be taken into account in that measurement.

That got me to thinking about the “variables.”  I’m no scientist, but it occurs to me that the topography, geology and other factors, which are specific to the region over which the F-35’s are to be deployed, might have a critical relationship to how the decibel level might play out in that region.  

So I had a look at the general land features of Edwards Air Force Base which yielded the more benign test results favored by Caputo.  That Air Force Base is located on the edge of a great salt desert; hardly similar to the land features surrounding Burlington.  Then, too, neither Airforce base is in the civilian center of the busiest city of the state.

The decision as to where the F-35’s will be deployed is expected in 2011.  I sincerely hope that, should Burlington be selected, short-sighted economics and a vague discomfort at countermanding the desires of Vermont’s National Guard do not preclude some serious independent evaluation of all the environmental and other implications before deployment is accepted.