Yeager Airport

YEAGER A I RPORT Idaho to do this training. And we thought, ‘What if we could utilize these coal mine sites, and use Yeager as a base of operations for the aircraft?’ And that’s been really successful; we’ve had multiple Marine Corps detachments coming here over the last year. They’re going out to the coal mine sites and they’re getting valuable training without having to fly out to Arizona. And it’s a great thing for our economy. When a detachment of Marines comes here, 30 or 40 of them are getting per diem and staying at our hotels. “In addition, Capital Jet Center started ‘hot fueling’ military aircraft about a year-and-a-half ago. This is common practice in the Marines and the Navy; you refuel the aircraft with the engine still on. There’s a handful of civilian airport in the east coast that do it and we got trained by the Navy, and then the Marine Corps came in and did some training with our line service techs. So, we hot-fuel Army, Navy, and Marines. And that saves them a lot of time because they don’t have to shut down the aircraft. So, if they’re going out to a coal mine site and doing landings, they come back to Yeager and hot-fuel, which takes ten minutes versus an hour if they have to shut down and restart. Last May, we actually helped plan a Marine Corps infantry exercise at one of the coal mine sites. It was pretty interesting. They dropped off 125 Marines out in the woods, the aircraft came into Yeager, they hot-fueled, went back to North Carolina, came back four days later, picked up all the Marines, and hot- fueled again on the way back to North Carolina. And all that’s going to expand greatly in the next few years.” The Airport also made their military guest feel right at home. “This past summer, we dedicated an office space to Woody Williams, who is a West Virginia native in the military, and the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from World War II,” says Tracewell. “We had an office building that wasn’t being used for anything. We did some renovations to it and dedicated to him. It’s the Woody Williams Flight Operations